Quote:
Originally Posted by David Rick  And to take the discussion in another direction, it seems like people value certain old hardware EQ's for sonic characteristics (distortion) some of which happen even with no boost or cut. Well, suppose you could "boost" a particular frequency region, but the plug in didn't really boost it -- it just created more 2nd or 3rd harmonics (but only for stuff in the "boosted" frequency region). Would that be useful. Does somebody already make such a plug in? |
Yes, I do.
Airwindows Audio Unit Plugins
But it really isn't QUITE what you're talking about. What it's doing is taking advantage of the fact that nonlinear transforms like distortions produce big changes in apparent loudness and also apparent depth/distance without altering the hottest peaks.
So you get to pick a cutoff, and then alter the bands above and below this- but rather than applying gain changes you're applying positive or negative saturation. If you're boosting it's obviously creating harmonics, though not in a eventide-harmonizer way- and the end result is not that additional harmonics are apparent, but that the band seems to come forward or drop back in the sound image.
Actually this one's due for an upgrade (free to existing customers btw) to turn it from two bands into three bands, because that would be more useful. The two band one is all too much like proof of concept and while it works, it hasn't been exciting people. A three band one would be capable of crazy great stuff like taking a track and dropping the mids back a bit for some flashy hi-fi-ism, or focussing them- and the basic algorithms are unusually good sounding though not very flexible.
Anyway, yes, I did one of those
it does what you say, it just doesn't isolate it so that the only change is adding harmonics. They become a major artifact of how apparent gain is changed for a band, and are intentional, but you hear them as closeness or farness and not as harmonics.