Pump Shaper
Shape the sidechain pump that makes trance breathe. Set how deep and how fast your pads and bass duck under the kick, hear it on a loop, then take the curve into your synth or DAW.
Pump curve
Sounds to load your MIDI into
Supersaw Essentials: 25 free trance presets for Vital, the free synth. Leads, plucks, pads and gated stabs, voiced for every tool on this site.
What the pump does
In trance, almost everything ducks out of the way when the kick hits, then swells back before the next one. Done with a compressor keyed from the kick, it's called sidechaining; done with an LFO or volume shaper, you get the same thing with exact control. Either way, it makes room for the kick and gives pads and basslines that breathing, pumping movement.
Depth is how far the volume drops. Attack is how quickly it gets there (keep it short), Hold keeps it down while the kick's punch passes, and Release is how long it takes to come back. Curve sets the shape of the way back: snappy comes back fast and stays up, smooth swells in slowly for a more obvious pump.
What's in the download
A Vital LFO (.vitallfo): drag it onto one of Vital's LFOs, set the LFO to sync at the rate you chose, and assign it to the volume with a negative amount. The amount sets the depth. There's also a "gain" version for synths and plugins that want the curve the other way up.
MIDI volume automation: four bars of CC11 (expression) that any synth or DAW can follow. Loop it under your pad or bass.
A ghost kick: a MIDI kick on every beat to trigger a sidechain compressor from a muted track, so the pump keeps going in breakdowns when the real kick drops out. The settings sheet gives attack and release times to match this curve.
Questions
Compressor or volume shaper: which is better?
A shaper (an LFO or a plugin like LFOTool or Kickstart) gives the same curve every time and never reacts to the level of your track, which most trance producers prefer for pads and bass. A compressor keyed from the kick sounds more natural on groups and busses. This page gives you settings for both.
How deep should the pump be?
For the bass, deep and short: it just needs to clear the kick. For pads and supersaws, deeper and longer if you want the pump to be heard, lighter if you only want space for the kick. Start with the presets and use Bypass to compare.
What rate should I use?
1/4 follows a four-to-the-floor kick. 1/8 pumps on the offbeats too, for a busier, bouncier feel. 1/2 and one bar suit breakdowns and half-time sections.