6
Open
Open is the ‘snap’ band, turn it up on a snare and you’ll
immediately know what I mean.
Open got its name from its ability to pop the lid off a sound
and let the upper half reach for the heavens while keeping the
bottom half anchored in place. It leaves the telephonics
relatively untouched and begins to grab more in the ‘Abbey
Road Presence’ range, like 3k and upwards.
While it lives higher than Lift, Open is still part of the Focus
Engine which means it’s still nipping and enhancing harmonic
energy that is part of the ‘note value’ of the sound. At the
same time, the tone of both Focus bands is something akin to
what I would call ‘white hot’, so use it sensibly. Again, a kiss of
gain with this engine can be extremely meaningful, and even a
modest amount can stretch a sound into a very different shape
than its original form.
And as with Lift, the real power of Open lays in using it as a
‘first-stage’ filter in conjunction with the Clarity Engine. The
parallel nature of the Clariphonic allows for a tiny amount of
gain on both engines to cause serious shifts in the perceived
high frequency content of the program while adding very little
actual equalized sound to the internal mix buss. This
architecture is at the heart of why this eq sounds as natural
and unaffected as it does.
Tight & Diffuse
Simply put, Tight bends the Focus Engine’s bands into a gigantic
Bell shape, and Diffuse leaves them in a Shelving plateau.
When you switch to Tight, the lower frequency of the band
remains unchanged, but rather than rise up to a maximum level
and stay there, the curve begins to gently fall off again
somewhere in the neighborhood of 14k. This means that the
difference between the two modes is subtle, but once you learn
to hear it you’ll develop your own sense of which to use and
when.
