Reply To: The Power of Three – A preset thread for multiple H9s

[brock]

Given To Fly wrote:

I think this is a good thread topic for several reasons:

1. It is music related rather than support related. The ratio of the two has always been lopsided.

2. I’m curious to know if any natural “synergies” occur when 3 algorithms are used in Series.

3. I’m curious if Eventide built-in “synergies” between certain algorithms.

Speaking to Given To Fly’s comments:

1.  Yes, it seems like it’s always been like that here, Mark.  I’m sympathetic to TS requests, not an RTFM guy at all, but sometimes … the answer is a few posts down, or right on top of the Search results.

2.  I really believe in that, although it might not be very pronounced at first glance.  I would think that – for the price of a few MIDI cables – everyone would be sync’ing multiple H9’s together to MIDI Clock.  Less obvious might be a series / parallel configuration.  It’s a hard sell to convince your average guitarist into a stereo setup.  But three H9’s in dual mono / stereo (with straight series connections both before & after the “parallel modules”) open up some amazing possibilities.  Again, for the price of a few patch cables.  I’ll go a lot deeper into this when I post some preset combinations.

3.  My first thought is that many of the algorithms have the same range of parameter values [SPEED / RATE; DEPTH; MIX].  Latched together to an expression pedal, or Aux / HotSwitch, offers another level of ‘sync’ between units.  Sometimes the ‘curve’ of those parameters isn’t exactly the same, but that’s another area to be exploited.  For example, the start & end points are the same, but the middle values drift into unusual morphing-type effects.

Given To Fly wrote:

… For example, would a better multi-band distortion be achieved if all three H9’s focused on a different element of Sculpt? If less demand is placed on the 3 processors, perhaps the overall effect will benefit. That may not be how the H9’s work though. I suppose the idea is basically like gain-staging but instead of gain, you would be parameter-staging. Just throwin’ that out there…

More of rack approach than pedalboard, but I’ve set up a stereo split before the three H9s.  All are in parallel (plus dry), and summed them out to a small stereo mixer under the ‘board.  There are mono effects in series before the split, and stereo beyond to a line mixer with sends to rack effects (two amps or FRFR).

The reason I go into all that is that your Sculpt example brought something to mind: it’s almost made for parallel.  I’ve created many more ‘bands’ by carving up the frequency spectrum into smaller slices.  Really unusual results; almost like hex pickups.  I broke down the parallel H9s now for some other testing.  Straight series is much more common, and it certainly has it’s charm for building up effects chains.