the very fabulous Eventide Eclipse (not actual size)
So one of the pieces of equipment I am making music with these days is a wonderful, complicated, slightly expensive magic box called the Eventide Eclipse. Bren and I bought it largely because of the way it can take one violin note and echo it back transposed chromatically or diatonically into the stratosphere, kinda like this:
Brendan, my tech hero, valiantly plunged into the manual when we started working with it nearly a year ago, and he ran into a stumbling block early on. He’s too embarrassed to tell you this, so I’ll tell you myself: he could only find a global wet/dry setting. What this means is: we could only GLOBALLY set how much of the dry violin would come through versus how much of the “wet,” effected violin, e.g. that ratio would remain the same regardless of what song I was playing. This might seem like a small thing, but on stage I need each new effect patch to be different from the last (a warm reverb-heavy sound shouldn’t have the same wet/dry ratio as a more clean, precisely defined sound), and we were wondering if we had made a wrong decision about this box, if it wasn’t going to work for us after all.
We called Eventide technical support yesterday, and a real human answered the phone right away, and immediately directed us to a real human in tech support who was *intimately* familiar with the Eventide Eclipse and showed us *exactly* where to look to find the wet/dry mix for each preset. We felt simultaneously embarrassed for not reading the manual more carefully, and *completely* psyched that Eventide’s technical support was 1. right on it, 2. right there when we needed them, and 3. generally awesome.
May we humbly suggest that if you play guitar or violin, you might want to get some of their effects. They sound terrific, and if you can’t figure something out, you can reach a real human being to help. We are now deeply in love with Eventide. 🙂
