Couture gives you control over your dynamics, and particularly attacks.

Raw Efficiency. Increase or decrease dynamics. Get a usable result, now.

Fully Volume-independent. Keep the freedom to change input gain when needed. Including the Saturation stage.

Laser-sharp. Couture’s 2-bands, half-spectral, RMS, program-dependent detector finds each and every transient. No internal thresholds.

Couture is very versatile:

• Make individual drum tracks a lot more dynamic and punchy
• Remove the “click” out of a kick drum sample
• Make a whole bus more or less dynamic in a single click
• Give glue to a mix with light compression and saturation.
• Use a subtle saturation that preserve dynamics.
• Deess the very start of notes for vocals.
• Give life to inane lead synths.

Combined dynamics and saturation

There is often some overlap in usage cases between saturation and dynamics. Both can be used to control peaks. Some transients prefer saturation, others prefer dynamics.

Couture comes with both Transient and Saturation sections to make related decisions at the same time. For example for a drum track you can increase dynamics and smash it later with distortion.

Full volume-independence

Transient Shaping is traditionally volume-independent. We extended the Saturation stage to be volume-independent, too

When using Couture you keep the freedom to change input gain afterwards. This avoids some gain-staging dependencies in your signal chain, that may backfire later in the mixing stage.

Compression versus Transient Shaping?

Our vision is that transient control could perhaps be something satisfying.;

In general terms, a compressor is somewhat longer to tune and its parameters change volume: attack, release, ratio, threshold… they change output gain while you tune them.

Essentially, the Transient section of Couture has only 3 parameters and they have semantic meaning:

• Sharpen: add or remove dynamics in one click, how “sharp” the signal is
• Speed: time scale of captured transients
• Front vs Back of the captured note.

When turned to Front, the Sharpen knob acts like the Attack knob on a regular Transient Shaper. When turned to Front, the Sharpen knob acts more like the Sustain knob on a regular Transient Shaper.

To improve predictability, we made Couture’s behavior 100% program-dependent. Couture catches transients very accurately by design.