Eventide

Founded half a century ago as an ofshoot of
Sound Exchange studios in New York,
Eventide are probably best known for their long-
running Harmonizer product line. Although still
in the business of hardware, the company has
kept up with modern, in-the-box trends too, with
a range of plugins featuring recreations of
classic Eventide hardware, alongside entirely
new creations such as Physion. This was the irst
airing of the company’s Structural Efects
technology, in which transient and tonal
components of a signal are separated and
processed independently. This same tech is at
the heart of Eventide’s latest plugin release, the
potent and fascinating SplitEQ.
Split personality
On the surface, SplitEQ is a fairly straightforward
equaliser, with six multi-mode EQ bands
bracketed by high-pass and low-pass ilter
bands. The regular bands ofer a choice of peak,
notch, band-pass, high shelving, low shelving,
and tilt shelving modes, while all eight bands
can have their cutof slope adjusted from a
gentle 6dB/octave all the way up to a near brick-
wall 96dB/octave.
As a basic EQ recipe this is all very familiar,
and indeed SplitEQ works very well in this role:
its tilt shelving and lexible slopes go beyond
what most EQs have to ofer, and the Q
characteristics of the main bands sweeps from a
delectably wide, smooth and gentle curve all the
E v e n t i d e
SplitEQ $179
Agonising over whether to give that snare a 1kHz boost for snappiness, or
a 1kHz cut to take away the boxiness? Why not do both?
“It opens up a whole
new dimension in
EQing, with a new layer
of sound tweaking”
STRUCTURAL SPLIT
Fine-tune the separation
of transient and
tonal components
EQ CONTROLS
Set up EQ using the control panel
or curve handles (not shown)
EQ Scale
Global scaling of
the transient and
tonal EQ curves
SLOPE
Each band has
a wide range
of slope settings
available
GLOBAL
PANNING
Set the master
pan position of
transient and
tonal components
OUTPUT MIX
Balance the output
level of transient and
tonal components
EQ CURVES
The transient
EQ curve is
green, the tonal
curve is blue
SOLO BUTTONS
Comprehensive soloing of
bands, transients and
tonals helps with setup
BAND CURVES
Individual band curves are
shown, using same green
and blue colouring
BYPASS
Bypass the entire
plugin, or just
bypass the
EQ section
SPECTRUM ANALYSER
View spectrum of transient, tonal,
both or combined signals
way to an intensely focused and steep spike. But
this is not just a conventional equaliser. Like its
stablemate Physion, SplitEQ decomposes the
incoming signal into transient and tonal
components, and processes each individually.
This opens up a whole new dimension in the art
of EQing – it also creates a whole new layer of
sound tweaking to get lost in.
The decomposition happens in the Structural
Split module, the irst stage in SplitEQ. A
selection box listing diferent types of source –
full mix, guitar, snare drum, etc – is used to set
the transient detection algorithm’s coarse
parameters, which can then be ine-tuned with
the separation, decay and smooth controls so it
fully matches the audio you wish to process.
Helpful here is the ability to solo the transient or
tonal components so you can hear the results of
the split, and you can also lock the settings so
they are unafected by loading diferent presets
into the plugin.
74 / COMPUTER MUSIC / March 2022
> reviews / eventide spliteq
CMU305.rev_eventide_splitEQ.indd 74CMU305.rev_eventide_splitEQ.indd 74 10/01/2022 07:1310/01/2022 07:13