New Music Gear Monday: Eventide Physion Structural Effects Plugin

Transient shapers have become an integral part of the sound of a modern mix, but sometimes you need more adjustment than what is normally available, especially when it comes to sound design. That’s why transient shapers have entered another realm to become “structural effects processors” where a sound envelope is not only broken down to its essential parts, but each of those parts can be further modified as well. Eventide’s Physion plugin is an excellent example of this kind of processing.

Physion allows you to split a sound into its transient and tonal parts, independently manipulate them using Eventide’s excellent built-in effects, and then fuse them back together. With the ability to add effects and dynamic controls to the transient and tonal sections of a sound, you can produce a wide range of new effects and sounds, from subtle to extreme. This lets you radically re-shape a sound by soloing the Tonal and Transient channels, like tightening up drums by lowering the level of the tonal section, or turning a guitar sound into an ambient sweep by decreasing its transients.

The plugin is broken down into 3 sections. The main section is Structural Split, which as the name implies, allows you to split a sound into its transient and body (called Tone here) components. The section contains a Smoothing control that acts like an attack parameter, a Trans Decay which looks at the decay of the transient portion of the signal, and a Focus control that lets you adjust the split between the attack and body of the sound.

The Transient Effects section allows you to add one of 6 effects (delay, tap delay, dynamics, phasor, reverb, and gate+EQ), and tweak them with Threshold, Low Gain, Mid Frequency, Mid Gain, High Gain and master Gain controls.

The Tonal Effects section is similar to the Transient section as you can add 7 effects to the body of the sound (compressor, chorus, EQ, delay, reverb, pitch shift and tremolo) and control them with Time, Feedback, Low Cut, High Cut, Mix and master Gain controls. The result is something unlike anything else available.

Eventide’s Physion plugin costs just $49 and also has a 30 day trial available. Like most plugins today, it’s compatible with most hosts and DAWs on the market.

Check it out on its dedicated page or the video below.

---