New Software Review: Fission, and a New Class of “Structural Effects” from Eventide
Fission is the first in a new class of “Structural Effects” from Eventide.
Every so often, audio developers come along with a truly out-of-the-box idea that can change the creative processes for artists and producers.
Eventide, a company whose history is rich with these kinds of forward-thinking developments, have recently released Fission—a new plugin that separates transients from tonal information, providing individual control over these two elements of a given sound, promising to go far beyond the bounds of conventional transient shaping.
Fission is the first plugin to feature Eventide’s proprietary new “Structural Effects” technology. Its sleek and simply-appointed GUI features three sections stacked on top of one another—Transient Effects, Structural Split, and Tonal Effects—that allow you not only to separate your transients from your sustain, but to balance and even effect them separately as well.
”Structural Split”: Cutting Your Signal in Two
The “Structural Split” section occupies the center of the GUI, sandwiched between the upper “Transient Effects” and lower “Tonal Effects” sections. This is where the actual deconstruction of the signal takes place.
In this novel section, you’ll find a vertical fader labeled “Focus,” which directs the internal bias of the plugin towards either the Transient or Tonal audio channel.
You can think of this control as setting the “splitting point” between these two separated elements. The user manual reinforces this, stating that “the real separation magic occurs in the middle settings, where Focus sets the main transition decision point where audio splits into the separate Transient and Tonal streams.”
This section of the plugin offers real-time visual feedback during playback, which shows transient information in blue and tonal information in green on a pair of waveforms representing the signal that you are affecting.
A closer view of the “Structural Split” module in Fission, which separates the original audio signal into two separate streams—one each for “transients” and “tone”.
This Structural Split section also features individual adjustments for “Smoothing” and “Trans Decay”.
Smoothing is primarily used to control any artifacts that may occur when using more complex source material, by slowing down the transition between the individual Transient and Tonal “streams”.
Trans Decay is an extension of Smoothing, and only works in one direction, effectively limiting how quickly audio transitions from the Transient to Tonal streams within Fission.
At the very bottom of the Structural Split section, you will find a horizontal slider and menu box for “Source Type”.
This section allows you to tell Fission the type of instrument that you are feeding into it (Kick, Snare, Tom, Full Drum Set, Bass, Piano, Synth, Guitar, Vocal), allowing the plugin to load up distinct “algorithmic tunings” to help refine the results of the structural splitting between transients and tone. You can use the drop down menu to select the source type, or simply move the slider from side to side to navigate through the different algorithms.
Although the manual encourages users to be adventurous in trying different tunings on source material, these settings are in built for the purpose of differentiating between signals full of complex polyphonic information and those that provide simpler transient information.
The last feature of the Structural Split section is a simple On/Off switch. When switched to Off, the internal Structural Split process of Fission is disengaged, and the Transient/Tonal fader becomes a simple volume crossfader between the two parallel channels.
This effectively turns Fission into a pre-effect mixer for each channel (similar to a DJ’s mix between two turntables) and the plugin becomes a parallel effects processor in this case. The processing done to either the Transient or Tonal stream still applies, however the plugin is no longer internally deconstructing the signal.
Dual Processing: Transient Effects and Tonal Effects
After the signal travels through the Structural Split module and is separated into its two components, you can then independently process them in the “Transient Effects” and “Tonal Effects” sections through a number of selectable “Effect Blocks”.
Using the drop-down menu in the Transient Effects section, you can select between Delay, Tap Delay, Dynamics, Phaser, Reverb, and Gate + EQ. Each individual effect has its own set of controls, unique to the effect type you’ve chosen.
For example, if you select “Dynamics”, you can tweak settings for Threshold, Attack, Release, and so on. If you select “Delay”, parameters such as Time, Feedback, Low/Hi Cut and Mix are available. Each effect is fairly robust in its available parameters, but with a tilt toward well-curated minimalism.
The Transient Effects module in Fission set to Gate+EQ mode.
The Tonal Effects section is just as extensive. The Effects Block here features Delay, Compressor, Pitch, Chorus, Reverb, Tremolo, and EQ. Both the Transient Effects and Tonal Effects sections have adjustments for Gain, as well as a Solo function, and 14-point meters.
The Tonal Effects module pictured with the Delay module queued up.
In Use
Fission offers much more than simply adjusting the balance between transient and tone—you can go fairly in-depth from an effects standpoint as well.
I had excellent results using Fission for transient balancing on bass, and I was able to remedy a track in such a way that I’ve only been able to partially achieve elsewhere.
As a mixer, I get a lot of work from sessions I had no part in engineering, and as such, sometimes tracks are delivered in less-than-stellar shape. One of the biggest offenders in this regard is a “soft” bass track, that needs more percussive definition from the finger or pick attack but is overshadowed by overwhelming roundness and note body.
Generally, my go-to tool here is Waves Trans-X, which essentially acts a reverse-multiband-compressor, allowing me to accentuate frequency-specific percussive elements of a sound with dynamics in such a way that EQ simply cannot. But this trick only works to a certain extent before it starts to sound unnatural.
Because Fission allows me to separate the transients from tonality, I was able to easily favor the percussiveness of the sound by simply dialing back the gain on the Tonal stream.
Similarly I often find I will want more “hammer” noise from a piano—not necessarily in terms of EQ, but more so in getting the full-frequency “impact” of the player striking chords. When I’m mixing, piano tracks tend to get a healthy dose of compression because I’ll aim to have chords sustain for quite some time. In doing this, I tend to lose more attack than I want to, even when adjusting the compressor’s attack to offset this effect, so I found that the option of emphasizing the transients with Fission is a great trick to have up my sleeve.
Next, I tried Fission for tuning drums, because I had seen some promotional videos demonstrating its uses here. I’ll give a bit of a disclaimer here by saying that generally, I’m a stickler for drum tuning. Very often, I’ll base kick and snare tunings on the key of a song (sometimes toms as well), and if I’m layering in samples, I’ll stay cognizant of how the pitches interact with each other and with the chord changes of the song. Oftentimes, I’ll even alter the pitch of drum samples to get them to play nicely with the recorded tracks.
The first thing I did for drums was to load up a full kit into Fission and start experimenting. It was a 2-track stem printed from a mix, so everything was pretty dialed-in already. I set the Transient Effect Block to Dynamics, and the Tonal Effect Block to Compressor, and solo’d the Transient Effects section. This revealed a pretty sharp, “spiky” set of transients (which was to be expected) and I noticed what seemed like some odd phasing artifacts in the overheads and hi hats when listening to the transient stream in solo. Fortunately, these artifacts were not present when the Transient and Tonal streams are both playing back together—only when listening to either stream separately in solo mode.
Soloing the Tonal stream revealed an almost room-like decay of the drum shells, which was quite nice, but again, I heard some audible phasing in the high end information when solo’d.
I’m thinking that it’s possible Eventide may have had to implement some sort of phase cancellation in order to make the soloing of either stream possible. So although hearing these phasing artifacts was slightly alarming when experimenting with either stream in solo, all traces of phase incoherence were gone once I deactivated solo mode and re-combined the streams.
Gaining up the Tonal stream, dialing back the Transient stream, and then finessing the Smoothing control made for a cool, sort of over-compression-for-effect type of sound, which I could see using in special-case scenarios. There is even a meter which gives visual representation of the release time in the tonal stream—a very helpful addition.
Moving on to work with the pitch, I wanted to test drive it on a full kit to hear the effect before trying it on something more applicable like individual tom, kick or snare tracks. Result: Weird! But kind of awesome. Think of Jay Z’s verse in Justin Timberlake’s “Suit & Tie”: Playback cut in half, with everything at half-rendered pitch… except in the case of Fission, playback is at normal speed and transients are in tact. It’s a pretty cool effect, if that’s what you’re going for. The fact that Eventide has made this possible is impressive in and of itself. I’ll keep that in my bag of tricks.
Results for altering the pitch of kicks, snares and toms were generally the same. Audible phasing makes me wary to actually put this to use in a real life mix scenario. Phase is so important when dealing with drums, to the point where I often take extra measures to time-align my tracks in my mix prep process to ensure bulletproof phase coherence.
To Fission’s credit, when I pulled the Focus slider down (more in favor of the Tonal stream), this audible phasing was no longer evident. That said, the fact that phase incoherence was even part of the equation here would make me lean towards trying to get similar results elsewhere.
It’s also worth noting that I didn’t run into any obvious phase issues beyond tuning drums. I was particularly suspicious of potential phase issues on anything with substantial low end information such as bass, but I’m happy to report that there were no real issues here.
Much of the promotional content for Fission that I came across seemed to focus first and foremost on drum tuning and processing. Because of this, the wealth of effects-centered possibilities in Fission came as a pleasant surprise to me, so I was excited to see what new sounds I could conjure up.
I put an instance of Fission on a rhythm guitar, removed all transient information and went to town on the Tonal stream using the delay module. The result was interesting in the sense that you can essentially turn a rhythmic guitar motif into a pad of sorts—though I can’t say I was getting results that I couldn’t achieve otherwise by using an extreme fast attack compressor and a (more comprehensive) delay. To Fission’s credit, the Delay Effects Block does feature the most essential parameters (Time, Feedback, Low Cut, High Cut and Mix) so it may be full-featured enough for many simple delay jobs.
Conversely, the idea of favoring the transient part of a sound, and then compressing or effecting only that portion is a very cool new idea to put into practice. I could see that being a more unique feature of Fission.
Applying Fission to a vocal was interesting. I can be a bit of a purist when it comes to vocal treatment, so the idea of affecting transients independently from sustain was admittedly a bit uncomfortable. My instinct was to get creative on the Tonal stream, so I dug into the delay and reverb there.
Generally speaking, I’m not sure I got much more out of Fission than I could get from busing a vocal to effects return with some creative EQ and time-based effects, and more comprehensive options are available outside of Fission in this regard. That said, kudos to Eventide for packing so much under the hood of Fission, and in a desert island scenario, this plugin could be a worthy contender to bring along, considering all it has to offer in one package.
Generally, I found the plugin to be of most use on drums (for effect!), on bass and piano, and for some out-of-the-box treatment of various other elements when you’re looking to turn an apple into an orange.
In addition to the wealth of unexpected effects options that Fission offers, I appreciate the little touches—such as the fact that any tweaks I made to effect parameters would remain intact even after navigating out of a given Effect Block and later returning to it.
To Be Critical
The bottom line is Fission makes possible something that previously was not. The literal deconstruction of a sound is Fission’s true offering, and although the Effect Blocks available for the Transient and Tonal streams may not be as robust as I would like, it did spawn an additional idea:
If I’d rather adjust compression, EQ, pitch, time-based effects and whatever else with my other tried-and-true tools, there’s nothing stopping me from doing so. I can easily duplicate a track, set the Focus slider to taste (using the same setting in both instances to ensure precise duplication) solo both streams in each instance of Fission accordingly, and process however I’d like with my additional tools. From there I can simply bus each duplicate track’s output to a combined aux track after the fact.
To my earlier points regarding the potential for phase incoherence when soloing or tuning, the laws of physics are a pretty sticky thing, and I tip my hat to Eventide for making this sort of black magic possible to begin with. The fact that we can successfully tune out these inevitable artifacts (to some degree) within Fission might be cause for laud rather than getting spooked and reaching for alternate tools. I’ll wrestle with that on my own time.
Summing it Up
After putting Fission through the paces, it’s clear that it is a one-of-a-kind plugin, so I’m eager to see what Eventide has in store for their next Structural Effects-based offering. If they were able to offer more robust and fully-featured effects capabilities in future offerings, it would address some of the most salient limitations I found in this first entry into this new class of effects.
Although I would be most likely to reach for Fission simply to split the sound and give me a more unique and isolated starting point (and from there I would likely turn to my more tried-and-true tools) the fact that we have access to this kind of isolated source material in the first place is an exciting new development for mixers, producers and engineers.
Having this access to this deeper layer of control over the transients could be valuable for drum routine processing, and Fission would certainly be my top contender in remedying a “soft” bass track (see ya, Trans-X!). Additionally, having the freedom to process only the tonal aspect of sounds like guitars or keys opens up a world of possibilities for sound design, whether you’re getting your effects from within Fission or just using it to isolate your source material.
Fission is priced at $179, with a limited-time discounted intro rate of $97. Because it is such a novel tool and its full breadth of useful applications are not yet clear, I might have been hesitant to make the investment at full price. But the introductory price near $100 seems a pretty fair ask for such a unique tool. At the very least, it is easily worth experimenting with for any audio lover with adventurous tastes. And there is the real potential that even more uses for this unconventionally new sort of processor could be discovered in the future.
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