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?

˃ Founded half a century ago as an offshoot of Sound Exchange studios in New York, Eventide are probably best known for their longrunning 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 first airing of the company’s Structural Effects 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 filter bands. The regular bands offer a choice of peak, notch, band-pass, high shelving, low shelving, and tilt shelving modes, while all eight bands can have their cutoff slope adjusted from a gentle 6dB/octave all the way up to a near brickwall 96dB/octave.