Envelope EQ
 

I'm not sure what useful purpose it would serve, but I had an idea come to mind, so I am writing it down for posterity. :smug:

An Envelope EQ.

We have envelope filters controlling flangers, phasers and tremolos, but what about the humble EQ? What purpose could this serve? Maybe you could have the bass sound very different when you get to playing heavily. For quiet/normal parts, maybe you have the normal sound of the bass what you want, but beyond a certainly sensitivity, you wish the mids were dropped a little, or maybe the bass was enhanced...but only during that period of heavy playing. And without having to dance on the pedal board to activate/deactivate.

Great idea!

......my brain is now fully occupied with this idea....

YES!

Didnt Emma Electronics make an evelope controlled loop at some point, so you could put any sort of pedal in the loop and have it controlled by the evelope filter? sounds like a great way to experiment

Toadworks had the Enveloope, but it is long-since discontinued. The new Zvex Loop Gate might work as a substitute if you keep it on its clean settings.

do'h, don't know why I thought it was Emma, knew it was discontinued

You should be able to do this with most BOSS multi-effects boxes. You can use an assign that is envelope controlled and apply it to pretty much any parameter you want. Though I never thought to try it on an EQ.

One issue is that I think the EQ would fade with the decay of the notes as they dropped below the threshold to trigger the envelope. So it wouldn't be "hard playing" that changed the EQ but just the leading edge of the notes when playing hard. At least that's how'd I imagine it to work. Setting the sensitivity lower so that the envelope triggered more easily would make it hard to play below that threshold.

But it's an interesting idea.

I can see wanting to get rid of nasty lows and mids when I dig in. I wouldn't care of the mids and lows came back as the note faded.

Whatever the limitations it would beat the all of nothing EQs we live with now.

I wonder if something along the lines of this would help get close.
http://www.fealabs.com/products/OFC-0002.html

Not quite what you're after, I know, but the side chain eq only comes into effect and changes the shape of the compression peaks only when it crosses the threshold. The ratio would control the amount of effect when you dig in. The down side is because it's a compressor, you'll get a more even volume output whether you play softly or dig in.

It might be worth dropping FEA labs a line to see if something could be built.

Presuming it was versatile enough, an "envelope-controlled equalizer" could be configured to do many of the same things people use a multiband compressor for: De-essing, frequency-dependent levelling, etc.

Love it. The most annoying thing I've found with env. filters is that certain wider settings open up a massive wolf tone that is audible during the sweep...an unpleasant frequency that blooms then disappears during the decay period. It'd be sweet to be able to pinpoint this frequency in the filter and notch it out.

Lonnybasss

Love it. The most annoying thing I've found with env. filters is that certain wider settings open up a massive wolf tone that is audible during the sweep...an unpleasant frequency that blooms then disappears during the decay period. It'd be sweet to be able to pinpoint this frequency in the filter and notch it out.

Lonnybass

I'm not sure how best to do it but the automatic volume controls in a compressor could be configured to be an automatic mixer with an eq.

Most compressors use LED/LDR's or JFETs to vary resistant based on signal strength. That variable resistance could be used as part of a mixer network.

This is a cool idea.

I would love to have my straight tone and then something super colored like a sansamp when I dig in.

I only use the sansamp because I don't like my sound bass is pushed too hard (which happens all the time).

Okay, someone smart needs to make this real to prove/disprove its efficacy.

If you can find or borrow a TW Enveloope pedal with an EQ pedal it would be a fairly simple test of your idea.

I think that this can also be accomplished with a decent DAW that can be configured with all of the modules needed.

When I first read Chad’s idea I was thinking a comp circuit for each EQ band… which would be a huge circuit if it was all analog. Then I immediately thought of SA multi-band distortion pedals. A DSP solution could be implemented much more economically and could have features that expand and/or compress each band separately.

-Frank

I have never actually seen a TW Enveloope in the wild.

The old discontinued Boss EH-2 did exactly this. It was called an "enhancer", because I assume most people used it to boost high mids for slapping and such. But it has a mix knob that can go positive or negative, so it can boost or cut, and it also has a frequency knob that goes down well into the low-mids as well.