Eventide is in on the holiday gift game, too, with a giveaway through New Year’s Eve of one-knob signal separation fixers for low-end thump and high-end air.
The Structural Split technology from Eventide is an intriguing way to work. The basic idea here is to split tonal and transient components and work with them at once to make adjustments with less damage. (For DeBoom, their clever phrase is “more thud, less mud.”) The best way to think of this is that you’re handling transient and sustain sections separately, combining transient detection with multi-band adjustments. It’s great for correction and making room as you mix; it’s a way of adjusting spectral shaping to the sophisticated way you hear since your brain can process those different elements easily.
And yes, just to disclose that this is iLok copy protection, though the software is running smoothly again on PC and Mac after some recent bumps with new OSes (Sequoia) and hardware architectures (AMD).
Giving these two one-knob affairs away is a brilliant idea as a calling card since it lets you easily try out a little taste of this process without being overwhelmed. I wouldn’t buy these – you should just buy their more advanced siblings if you’re into it. But for free? That’s a must.
And sometimes, one-knob adjusters are nice to keep around anyway for quick what-if scenarios. I have SplitEQ already, and this is still handy.
If you are impressed, you should test drive the complete versions of SplitEQ (you can guess what that is from the name) and Physion (multi-effects.) Each has a 14-day free trial so you can see if it’s for you. Matt Houghton wrote a tidy SplitEQ review for Sound on Sound, and Larry Crane covered Physion in depth for TapeOp. It’s especially nice that these are not AI-driven – it’s more a case of adapting a clever studio technique to an accessible, visual UI in software. Larry’s insight in the TapeOp review is the process of “Split-Spectrum Compression” which came up in a 1998 interview with Dan Rathbun. (That’s TapeOp issue ten!)
And yeah, in case I haven’t made this clear already, this is not just multiband compression but rather a crossover multiband with different processes applied to each. I only wish in addition to the knob, they’d added a visual to make that a little more clear. But it’s a cool process.
You can grab them both or individually if you prefer:
Eventide Split Essentials Giveaway