the Fly Clone Project

I was in a focus group with Eventide about their new Split EQ plugin, which allows you to separate the transient attack of a note from the rest of the signal and process each part differently—it’s pretty cool! And if you remove the attack completely you can get a synth-like autoswell—that’s not really what the plugin is "supposed to do", but it's a cool effect, so I made a little video with my Fly Artist to demo the level of control:



The only effect here besides the Split EQ is reverb at the tail end of my signal chain, so it really does do a good job of detecting what’s not part of the initial attack and then subtracting it, and it retains the timbre of my Fly instead of completely morphing it into a synth like a MIDI tracking process would do—not that that's ever a bad thing , but I like the way my Artist sounds so it was nice to try out a plugin that retains its timbre while doing some interesting processing.

The plug-in isn’t optimized for real-time playing because, again, it’s really supposed to be a more corrective device in studios, but I just sorta dealt with the latency while I tracked this. Hope you enjoy!

Nice demo, VJ. It’d fit in anywhere in Ken Burns’ Civil War doc. I suspect Allan Holdsworth would have enjoyed knowing he could use the plugin to sculpt the attack of his recorded notes to be more horn-like without the effect squashing all the little inflections he would normally have to sacrifice.

Thanks, Marc

Yes, absolutely—I saw Holdsworth twice and loved what he was able to do with swells; what a monster player I wish there was a Holdsworth plugin!

The Holdsworth plugin is beer. And he got some mean blues tones out of the tequila plugin. Kidding aside, the best Holdsworth presets you’ll find outside the old UDStomp and MagicStomps are the AxeFX ones Darryl Gabel made a few years ago. It gets counterintuitive dialing in a signal chain with eight delays.