The ‘tonal’ component, meanwhile, has a smooth, dulled top end, and can take on a watery quality not unlike a low bit-rate MP3 file. ![]() So if, for example, you feed a vocal part into it, the ‘transient’ path contains most of the energy from fricatives and sibilants, along with quite a lot of artifacts in the high-frequency air band. As encountered in Fission, ’transient’ is more of a catch-all term covering chaotic or noise-based elements of the input, while ’tonal’ means anything where the frequency content stays stable for more than a few cycles. ![]() Despite Eventide’s terminology, however, the way in which Fission splits up incoming audio is somewhat different. Indeed, readers with long memories might recall Eiosis’s interesting E2 Transienter, which allowed the attack and sustain portions of the signal to be completely separated and processed independently. On paper, this doesn’t sound so very different from what you can do with some transient-shaping plug-ins. At the top end of its travel, Focus pushes the entire signal into the ‘transient’ path, and as you slide it downwards, more and more of the source is split off into the ‘tonal’ path, until you reach the lowest setting where everything is routed that way. The idea seems to be that you can ‘weight’ the splitting algorithm in favour of having elements detected as transient or tonal material. There’s also a Focus control, which is not quite so obvious. Trans Decay naturally makes the most difference on transient-rich sources such as drums, where short decay times see only the initial strike making it into the ‘transient’ path and longer decays can mean virtually the whole signal being treated as a transient. Once you’ve selected a splitting algorithm, you can fine-tune it using Smoothing and Trans Decay controls, which do pretty much what you’d expect them to. A Source Lock button nails down your selection so that the algorithm doesn’t change when a new preset is recalled. The differences between these algorithms are more apparent on some sources than others, but the right (or wrong!) choice can make quite a difference on complex signals like the human voice. The first step is to choose one of 13 named algorithms from a list where options include ‘general’, various drum and percussion instruments, guitar, bass, piano/synth and vocals. ![]() To create a Fission patch for a given source, you’d usually begin by optimising the splitting process to suit it. You can then apply your choice of effect to one or both of these components of the source before they are recombined at the output. Eventide’s Fission takes a different approach: rather than dividing up the source signal using a simple frequency splitter or time-based chopper, it divides incoming audio into ‘transient’ and ‘tonal’ elements. There are, for example, modular plug-ins that can simultaneously distort low frequencies and compress the mids while flanging the bejeezus out of the top end, and there are numerous ways to slice up drum loops and apply different effects to each beat. The idea of splitting up a source sound in order to apply separate processes to each element is not a new one. What does Eventide’s “new method for processing audio” offer that we don’t already have in our plug-in folders?
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