SHADE Review
While I’m on this creative EQ review phase, I might as well cover Shade by UVI. Shade is an incredibly capable equalizer full of a variety of filter types ranging from traditional bells, to modeled filters, to notches, phasers, and combs. I assume there is some hard limit on the number of filters you can add, but I gave up counting at 64. Shade also includes an extensive modulation section allowing you to manipulate and modulate all the various controls per each filter, these include an envelope follower, MSEGs, macros, an interesting figure generator, and a random generator.
Shade’s UI is sleek and modern with quite a bit of information, it’s fun to see all the various colors and motion as modulated parameters shift around. Shade can easily get out of hand as the peaks and resonances it is capable of are extreme, so do use the provided limiter, and avoid throwing parameters straight up to 100%.
There is a lot to unpack here with 30 filter types and 9 modulation types, so I will simply address my favorites. It is important to note, however, that Shade has simple bells and shelves as well, my favorites just happen to be the more wild and extreme options.
FILTERS
Notch Multi Resonant: Notch filters are always fun, they give you mid range motion without affecting the lows and highs. Notch width is always appreciated too, as many notch filters out there are incredibly narrow, making their impact far too subtle. All of the multi resonant filter types have a ripple that cascades towards the cutoff frequencies. This creates a series of peaks that color the filter in interesting ways. The quantity of these peaks increases with heavier slopes.
Phaser Tilt Resonant: Phaser filters are really fun, they are like a series of notches, providing more frequency content while still accenting midrange motion. The Shade phaser curves allow you to adjust the width or each notch, but also their spacing, slope and how many repeats or poles are active. The tilt resonance curves all allow for adding Q or negative Q to the cutoff frequencies.
Comb BP Multi Res: Combs are some of my favorite filters, basically just short delays they provide harmonically rich resonance and can virtually emulates physical strings. Shade allows you to adjust the Q-width of each “tooth” of the comb filter, providing a much wider range of sounds compared to a normal comb. Combining this with the BP multi resonant mode creates some incredibly sharp and extreme tones
Tilt: A simple tilt eq, lets you set the center point, slope, and direction of the tilt. A fun and simple way to shift the timbre of your signal.
MODULATION
MSEG: A looping Mseg for drawing patterns or curves, “Mseg” stands for multi segment envelop generator, you can use this to make shade into a sequenced filter of course. You can scroll to zoom out, and make a pattern as long as you’d like, there’s even options to duplicate your region, anyone who’s ever redrawn an Mseg to create a more complex pattern will appreciate this.
Figure: Figure is a 2 dimensional LFO, with separate outputs for X and Y axis. You can set up to 8 vertices and adjust a shape control for a variety of geometric variation. Modulating these controls will evolve the shape over time.
LFO: A simple LFO, but 3 controls give it some variation beyond the traditional shapes. Shape seems to taper or broader the LFO, symmetry bends it to either outward or inward, and pulse width bends things to the left or the right. As with Figure, you can modulate these controls as well.
The inclusion off all these filter types, especially the variety of comb and phaser shapes puts Shade easily into modal territories. I really enjoy using Shade to create wild spectral resonances and harmonic motion, you can even get reverberant ambiences from Shade and glittery blooming tones. I really don’t use it enough, and writing this review is making me want to change that. Applying modulation to these filters makes for an incredibly creative effect. Using the Envelope followers, which can be linked to a filter’s frequency, Shade can also be a dynamic EQ. It is a bit of a bummer however that there is no Sample Hold mode for the random modulator, which seems to warble around much more similarly to a jitter, spending most of it’s time gravitated towards center.
you can find SHADE on UVI’s website: https://www.uvi.net/shade.html
If you already own SHADE and want to expand your MSEGs, consider picking up my pack of 100 MSEGs for Shade “Shapes for Shade”: https://databroth.gumroad.com/l/xkRIl