If you spend any time on YouTube exploring gear with fellow music nerds, especially anything Eurorack-based, you’ve likely come across Andrew Huang and his trademark high-five intro. As a big fan, it’s great to see Andrew’s business blossoming into a product menagerie, with Eurorack modules and books spreading his name across the music nerd universe. Now he’s added a collaboration with Baby Audio to release a software plugin for all DAWs.
Baby Audio Transit is a plugin designed to maintain movement between various sections of your music, using different audio processes to develop dynamic aural excitement and keep ennui at bay. As the name suggests, it’s a plugin you can use to create transitions.
Transitions For The Masses
Transitions are a core part of electronic music’s structure. Producers are well-versed in creating multiple automation lanes over multiple tracks to shape the sound and design something that draws the ear, and its owner, into the next section of the music. Transit is a multi-effect that aims to consolidate all those automation lanes into one plugin, simplifying and speeding up the often tedious process of creating a good transition.
Transit is a collection of 18 effects that can be used in any combination in 7 slots. These are controlled by a macro knob that manages the movement of the transition. The effects range from standard filters, delays, and reverb to slightly edgier pump, multiband compression, and stereo space effects. Each of these effects is high quality and can be used on its own if you just want a specific effect on a track. But the magic happens when you assign the selection of effects to the macro section. You can determine when, how much, and in what direction the effects will move as you adjust the macro knob. You can be very granular in assigning specific parameters of each effect to the macro knob (such as the resonance of the filter) by simply clicking the yellow circle next to the parameter label.
Learning Curve, Randomization and Automation
The learning curve might seem a bit steep if you’re just starting out in production, as there are several levels to the plugin that you need to understand. I recommend flipping through the hundreds of excellent built-in presets, listening to what they do to your music, and trying to figure out how these creators achieved their results. There’s a wide scope of sonic manipulation here, and you’ll likely find something that fits nicely and gives you ideas to build upon.
If you’re still feeling stuck after perusing the presets, the randomization button can be a source of inspiration. Clicking the little dice will eventually turn up something interesting that you can then shape to fit your track. If you like one of the modules but not others, you can lock the randomization on those modules and keep randomizing the rest.
When it comes to automation, you only need to automate the one macro knob, instead of a myriad. It definitely cuts down on time spent hunting for the one part of the transition that doesn’t work and tweaking that automation lane repeatedly. There’s an automation feature that will trigger the macro to start on the next bar, and you can choose the length up to 16 bars for those slow, steady builds.
More Than This
After feedback from beta testers, Baby Audio included more options to use the plugin beyond just transition effects. This is a good move, in my opinion, as it greatly expands the use cases for the plugin and, consequently, the different genres of music that will find it useful. Engaging Sequencer Loop mode turns the whole plugin process into an LFO-style loop that allows the effect to modulate (as gently or intensely as you like using the dry/wet fader) on the source material. This provides many more options for using the plugin creatively.
Conclusion
Baby Audio Transit is a cool plugin that will definitely save electronic music producers a lot of time coming up with drops, rises, builds, falls, etc., that will add some delicious ear candy to their tracks. It’s an interesting plugin for producers in other genres as well, particularly with the addition of the motion looper, to create modulating textures over the audio in your musi
One thing I noticed was that it had a noticeable effect on the CPU even of my Silicon Mac, so that’s something to bear in mind when using it on a track.
It is fairly genre-specific, or at least will be hugely more useful in the electronic music world than others, so I would recommend trialing it to see if it works for you before purchasing.
For more on Baby Audio Transit, visit: https://babyaud.io/transit.
Check also our previous Baby Audio features, such as Crystalline and TAIP.
Pricing and Availability
Transit is available for $99.
It comes as VST, VST3, AU, AAX (64-bit) on all major DAWs within Apple (including Apple Silicon) and Windows platforms.
