Eventide and Signal Processing

[loophead]

So I started coming to Muffs a few years after my tenure with Eventide. Although my avatar deal states 2011 I've been here since 2007. Not posting lost my place in line a few times and with the server change over etc. Mostly 'lurk mode'.

After that weird thread in the euro forum I figured I'd start on here in General where folks want to ask or talk about Eventide gear processing and stuff.

I started work with Eventide on the DSP4000 and ended at the H8000. I was one of a small group who help create the 4000/4500 series, the Orville/7000, the Eclipse and the H8000/7600 series. I did part of the Legacy plugin but had no involvement in the other softs or the stomps (aside from arguing to build them for many years...).

I helped drive the dsp engineers to code/build needed modules I used create the vast Eventide preset library. I was very involved in driving the general design of the Orville (and therefore the H8000) and the Eclipse.

We were a small group in a small company up against a couple of big players in the market.
I think we faired well in developing very musical tools/toys which are much loved by those who own and use them.

One of the major differences with other gear is that as most products gave the user a dozen or so algorithms and a few hundred tweaks (presets) almost every preset, in the larger eventide racks, IS a completely unique structure. And there are well over a thousand of them in the box (let alone those lost to time or never put in a public build). Because the Eventides are an open architecture others attempted to cannibalize. Some well others not so well. At this point with the state of the market much of that is found in softs. I see so many of my ideas put into the market in so many forms.

If thats my legacy, ok. I've added my voice to the stream and I hope they bear more fruit.

Although I owned the majority please note that I was not the only preset designer who's work is in those boxes ! Some of us even hear at muffs ! Chris Muir (Eardrill) and Andrew Schlesinger are here. A note for those of you who love the 'Blackhole' algorithm one of the most talked about of Eventide presets was Andrews work !

Studying these structures will give you a huge understanding of signal processing. Alot of which you can apply to life with a modular.

After my tenure at Eventide I went completely software for a time but after chasing the OS and loosing some really good softs which were abandoned I went back to 100% hardware. Haven't used the computer for music past tracking and librarian duties.

I dream of patching and am lusting for Serge or Buchla not sure which way I will end up going.
At this time I have no modular. I've got a Waldorf XT (30) and a Q-Rack (32). Cirklon sequencer and a pair of H8000's. One for the synths one for the Gutar/Stick. Plus the obligatory midi patchbay, Firewire interface, monitors etc.
I mostly make noise in surround.

So here is a thread we can talk Eventides, processing etc. without it weirding out (I hope).

As I no longer work for them please dont ask me what they are doing - going to do. I dont know.

sdg

[mamonu]

well the eventide space rocks

i hope i gather enough money at some point to get a H8000....

i would get lost in the Vsig editor for months thats for sure

[Matos]

the h8000 has been a wet dream of mine forever. never thought i could afford one, but it seems i've spend much more on the eurocrack than i ever could in eventide love. glad your here, hope you post some interesting eventide samples, or use it as an example to teach how to create magical sounds. i'm sure you have loads of wisdom to share.

[dadek]

at one point in the nineties, i had two H3000's and a H3500. I still have the H3500, a DSP4000 with a hand machine cut for the card. the dude at westla music wanted me to wait 'cause they did have any presets yet, also have an H8000. i have them patched in to a soundsculpture switchblade for routing.

i still have and use the presets i made with the modfactory. talk about a pain, i needed to plot that stuff out on paper to keep track of what i was doing...

welcome, eventide hardware forever.

[Minimoog56]

My front end of the 200e/MU sysstems is processed throughthe Eclips and the backend through a space. These are deep units but i rarely get beyond the presets. Nice enhancements - especially the diatonic harmonizing. New Jersey engineering at its best.

[tIB]

H3000 D/SE here, love it to bits - an amazing sounding thingy indeed. I should really spend more time getting stuck into designing my own effects from the scratch algos; I almost always find a preset and tweak from there.

[skipperdean]

i'm gonna open up vsigfile once i get some cat food, i Love my DSP 7000.

[loophead]

i'm gonna open up vsigfile once i get some cat food, i Love my DSP 7000.

Cool. Its good to see folks in Vsig. Very powerful but a learning curve. Once your past that all doors open.

I actually prefer doing it in text form versus graphics. Makes more sense to me especially if you give modules a good naming scheme.
Anyone else here use Vsig ?

I lost a hard drive a while back and lost years of work. But one area I was investigating was synth stuff.

Anyone ever try to roll some ?

I had a mini Jomox Neuronium set up and blew out a speaker.
Good idea to put a limiter if your experimenting and not sure where stuff is leading.

Some easy areas for investigation might be something like a dual Serge Res Eq. With midi control of the bands might be cool.

[dadek]

i love me some 'black hole' as much as the rest, but 'canyon' in the 3000 series. i've never got anything that sounded/responded like it. that's the one reason my 3500 will never leave.

[twincities]

the space and timefactor are two of my favorite digital boxes. one day i hope to be able to get one of the nicer full size units.

[robotmakers]

Add me to the long list of Eventide fans. I use an Instant Phaser, Instant Flanger, Eclipse, Pitchfactor, Modfactor, Timefactor and Space, and even the H3000 Factory VST.

I actually saw one of Robert Fripp's last performances, and counted a number of H8000's in his rack, which really formed the nucleus of his instrument. Outstanding soundscapes.

Best wishes and thanks,
Roger

[loophead]

i love me some 'black hole' as much as the rest, but 'canyon' in the 3000 series. i've never got anything that sounded/responded like it. that's the one reason my 3500 will never leave.

Canyon is great. Isn't it in the 4000 and the 8000 in some form ?

Throw a 'dither' module after it and then compare to your 3500.
Thing about the 3500 is the curtis chips. This little trick will make the newer units sound much closer...


Took a quick look - I'm thinking 'Chorus Canyon' and 'Flange Canyon'.
Dont have a 3000/3500 so cant look at the alg.

[loophead]

Add me to the long list of Eventide fans. I use an Instant Phaser, Instant Flanger, Eclipse, Pitchfactor, Modfactor, Timefactor and Space, and even the H3000 Factory VST.

I actually saw one of Robert Fripp's last performances, and counted a number of H8000's in his rack, which really formed the nucleus of his instrument. Outstanding soundscapes.

Best wishes and thanks,
Roger

Yeah Robert.
My favorite guitarist and teacher.
I was in the third Crafty course with him and Trey Gunn back in '85.
Did a good deal of work with them over the years.

Robert's looping was very much based on the 'learn function' of the 2290's and I was never able to get the engineers time to develop a slightly smarter delay module to accomplish that. I attempted some tricks which are scattered in the looping banks, but not the same.

Was not until his 2290s would just not work any longer that he took the jump to the 8000's... just after I left... so was not in a position to really do much.

I'd love to know what he is doing in there with more clarity. No doubt I could give him some stuff.

[dadek]

Canyon is great. Isn't it in the 4000 and the 8000 in some form ?

Took a quick look - I'm thinking 'Chorus Canyon' and 'Flange Canyon'.
Dont have a 3000/3500 so cant look at the alg.

love those, but it's closer to 'echospace of god' with the pre-delays reacting to the input level. off hand, i believe it used the 'c' diffusion.

...curtis chips, really interesting, did not know that. thanks for all the info.

[dogoftears]

dude echospace-of-god is soooooo good--
http://soundcloud.com/dcoffset/aether-feather

[kuxaan-sum]

H3000 D/SE here too (Although I started having problems with it and was sure it was the molex connector ) but I mainly use my Space and Pitchfactor.

The 3000 is my favorite rack unit.
So many things to explore with different responsiveness between synths, vocals and guitar.

[loophead]

'Echospace of god' ok

By the way another brilliant preset from Andrew ! His shit rocks !

I'll have to hunt down the 3000 preset and take a look at both.

sdg

[dadek]

my looping rack is at my work studio, but i seem to recall there were three different diffusion blocks, a, b, and c.

question about the curtis chips, are they only on the 3500? there are a couple of awesome compressors in the mod factory presets that i always thought sounded better on the 3500. weird.

[loophead]

In all the 3000's.
The curtis chips were at the converters i think. One of the reasons for the 'beefiness' imparted in the 3000 series which guitarists among others adored.

There are 2 available diffusion modules in the Vsig units. Diffusion and Diffchorus (which adds smooth modulation capability). I think your thinking of the Reverbs of which there are A through D (different number of internal delays).

A bit of trivia. The H3000 was the first effects unit to have full midi capability.

[dadek]

There are 2 available diffusion modules in the Vsig units. Diffusion and Diffchorus (which adds smooth modulation capability). I think your thinking of the Reverbs of which there are A through D (different number of internal delays).

this is what i was talking about, the reverb diffs are different than the 4000 and up. ?

[loophead]

Yeah. The 4000's and up grew from the mod factory of the 3000. But very different hardware so even if implemented the same or similar sounds different. There are tricks like the unused 'dither' in line at the end of an algorithm, filtering, eq etc to get much closer to the 3000's sound. I did some of that for folks but never in the library I think.

I was never one to fetishize another piece of hardware. One of the main reasons the guitar stuff is laid out more like a Serge than say an Axe-Fx which really catered to the guitar player crowd who wanted labels which matched their rig or dream rig. All the 'amp sim' stuff. We did not want to open that particular can of worms...

All that kind stuff is in there though. I am a guitarist. You just need to re-map labels and think through the process. If you use your ears you will get there. So if you think through the preamp/poweramp stuff and look at the guitar presets its all there. I mean a 'slew' is mathematically what happens when you go into a tube. Filtering dynamics etc.

They do need to be tweaked to your guitar. I've experimented with several different pickups over the years and each time need to re tweak my stuff.

Wow what a meandering and long winded bastard I am.

[shreddoggie]

Heya Loophead - so great to have you here and thanks for this thread.

I think my need / quest is similar to that of others so asking for your $0.02 might be a useful excursion...

For me - we live in an age of many musical devices which have no character or poor character. Too much of this and the entire timbral quality of ones recorded art suffers. For instance: I record on the computer, a fabulous multi-track device with non-linear editing etc etc., The DAW can even be decent sounding via good preamps, converters, sample rate etc. HOWEVER, start using a lot of plugins and it soon becomes mashed potatoes, mushy and all the same. This IMO is similar to the effect one might get by recording uninteresting instrumental timbres, using cheap pres, poor converters etc... For this reason I try to track instruments with the most character I can get my mitts on, and use analog domain devices with the most vibe available. I then have pretty distinct tracks ITB and do not proceed to ruin them with a bunch of all-same-sounding plugins.

Clearly hardware gets its character from all sorts of things besides algorithms - so, long preamble leads to this question:

Given all the Eventide boxes you are intimately familiar with, whats your take on the this-sounds-great-and-like-nothing-else factor? Which ones do you love? Which ones are less interesting? Why?

By way of example I know Lexicon really well. IMO the PCM41/42 and (Super) Prime Time delays are very special, analog modulation of digital delay lines with decent noise specs - the vibe and hands on qualities can not be duplicated ITB (so far) ...

Which Eventide devices do this for you? More info like "Curtis chips at the converters in H3000 = beefy = guitarists love" type info please

[crystal hell pool]

saving up for a eventide space box now. i loved the design of those space station boxes. would be cool if someone made something like that again

[cbm]

This can only be Scott! Welcome.

(Scott made my teething with vsig as painless as possible, and even suffered through some ranting I did when my beta Orville hardware failed on stage. It was beta hardware; what kind of idiot gigs with beta hardware? My kind, I guess. He managed to calm me down and took care of me.)

[loophead]

I began my dsp career by being (for a short time) in a band with Gary Hall who was at that time the applications engineer at Lexicon. Outside work I was involved with became the PCM 42. First real 'long' digital delay. Then we took the 42's and moded them for 20 second of looping time. Yeah for Frippertronics.

I sat down with Gary one evening and he had me play guitar into this new box the 'super prime time' and he tweaked away while I played. He said to me. Wow man I've never heard anyone ever react/interact with a box like that before ! Well I guess thats what I innately do. To me the boxes/stomps whatever are always an extension of the guitar/instrument itself, not an add on to it. The string is like the oscillator. Those tweaks he made were the start of the presets which were sent off to the UK distributer.

I do feel almost any good hardware will sound better than almost any good software, Of course YMMV. If you take the most buttery Neve preamp and put everything through it in and out it will impart its sound with a heavier hand. Might help glue things together, might muddy the water. Same with any processing. I think I would ere on the side of caution. Use the stuff you need to and not everything you have available. Easy to get lost in the endless parade of 'I can so I will'. Instead of 'it needs it so I will do it'. Lets not polish every 'scholars rock' into a shiny round pebble.

Like anything we need to use our ears most of all. Be discriminating. Be creative. I am a big believer in fewer powerful tools vs lots of little ones. I also really like single source music. By this I mean I would rather listen to someone playing JUST a serge or JUST a Moog or Just a Buchla, Waldorf, PPG whatever. I really like drowning in THAT sound THAT texture. I know others hate this. Thats what keeps it lively. We are who we are.

Find one or two companies you grow to trust. There are some very professional tools and toys out there.

Lexicon stuff I can duplicate in the Eventide. Not real interesting to me. I did some custom work for a few artists to help lighten there road rig. "I need this one trick that this 42 does" sort of thing.

I am much more interested in the structure and interesting architecture than I am in emulating the exactness of sonics. Am I getting the gravy? How many Moog style filters are there out there? Who cares? Am I close? Can I have fun with it? Will it let me go in the direction I desire? These are more important to me then sonic minutia which will be argued over to the end of time. Just go over to gearsluts for those discussions. I can find cool details inside this 'new thing' and ride that.

Rarely was I interested in reproducing some other product. I might be interested in some aspect of it though. Some cool trick it did. For example the head of engineering built a leslie effect. Does it sound just like a leslie? No. Does it matter? No. Why - he was after the mechanical issues of the leslie. Thats what "leslie" represented for him. Two speakers spinning at different rates inside a wooden box. So what did he put in to the emulation? "Squeak" to reproduce the metal rubbing. "Thump" to represent the speaker hitting the wooden box as it spun. And "Inertia" to slew the rate of change when you sped it up or slow it down. The 'hi' speaker will get up to speed faster then the 'low' speaker. Cool ! Who would have come up with that. Well he was a tech for ELP in their heyday so he understood what a leslie was. Just differently than what another might be after.

This to me is the power of an open architecture. Whats cool to you might be what is a fail for someone else. And here at muffs I think we can agree on 'open structure' !

Now to actually answer your question:
These boxes were like my children. I was not alone in putting enormous effort and care into them. I need the open architecture. So for me its Orville (or H8000 same deal a bit more power). I think having more I/O is always useful so I like those over the stereo I/O brothers (7000/7600). The Eclipse has lots of power but you cant get inside those structures the same way. This is one of the reasons you have two engines in the Eclipse. The Orville had two engines for one reason only - so I could use one half for 'preamp + effects' and the other engine as 'looper + effects'. Simple as that. Sold them on it as it also gives everyone else a huge jump in user power.

'Hands on' is how you decide to lay out the controls. What controls you want you put into the alg. Lots of folks use an external knob or fader box. I use a Peavey 1600. Global maps to whatever is on the screen. Hardly ever need to do that though. I put stuff where I thought it should go for public consumption but might add a menu in front for my own version to grab the parameters I'm likely to want up front.

The 2U boxes have a beefier power supply, more/better converters and more/better headroom. These boxes sound incredible. They have a depth like nothing else.

If any wonder why I've been here so long and not posted THIS is why. I cant just simply answer.


sdg