Mixing with Satin - blend?

[present]

Tried adding Satin to every channel of a mix and I love what it's doing but would like to back it off a bit on the transients. The track is electronic and I want to keep the drums snappy. Even on 30ips they seem to be getting a bit smudged!

How would you approach this? Is just it about going for higher tape speed and tweaking settings? Could I add a 'mix' control in Ableton and dial it in at 50%, or would this be a bad idea? (I'm thinking it might mess with phase or transients even more)

[j wazza]

try both of those things and see, but you could also try using an envelope follower to let the transients through, or try a different tape plugin for drums when satin smudges the transients too much

[sascha]

My proposal would be
- Use a relatively high ips setting (30ips is a good setting for minimum smear)
- Use low-to-medium input gain, stay below 0dBFS (or even -3dBFS) for the peaks to stay mostly intact
- Set circuit headroom to maximum (so that you're not rounding off transients too much in the emulated eq circuits)

I would not recommend mixing in the overall process. Satin uses internal oversampling (2X - 8X, depending on project sample rate), and there are many (many) internal filters affecting the signals' phase response. Like with every nonlinear device, level- matching is important. But still, it's in the nature of things; you can't have unaffected transients on any tape-like processor.

[present]

Ace, thanks both! Sashca I'll give this a go.