Friday’s Tip of the Week #137: Get More Out of TH3 Cakewalk Edition Welcome to a special "stuck in the Houston airport while my 3:35 PM departure gets shifted to an 8:00 PM departure" Friday's Tip of the Week. This is Day 2 of my trying to get home from Ft. Lauderdale, after being at sea since March 11th. Fortunately, due to my inherent distrust of airline schedules (note to Delta: It probably wasn't a good idea to name your airline after the Greek symbol for "change"...just sayin'), I had the presence of mind to prepare this tip before leaving. And amazingly, the wi-fi here actually functions! So we're good to go.
TH3 has a Splitter module—drag the little button in the “pedalboard” section’s lower left corner into a signal chain, and you’ll insert a split that’s great for parallel processing. What TH3 Cakewalk Edition
doesn’t have is an equalizer. Sure, you can put an equalizer before it or after it in the FX Rack, but sometimes it’s cooler to have equalization built into the preset itself…or be able to put it in the middle of a TH3 effects setup.
However TH3 actually does have an equalizer, and a pretty cool one: the Splitter. That’s because the Splitter can be a crossover, so if you use just one of the Splitter paths, it can have a highpass, lowpass, or bandpass/notch response. And the Splitter can go anywhere within a TH3 preset—at the beginning, end, or in the middle.
So here’s the deal for obtaining a highpass or lowpass response.
- Set the Splitter X-Over Mode to Normal.
- Move the Splitter and Mixer output sliders all the way to the top.
The X-Over Freq knob controls the lowpass filter frequency feeding the upper split. If you move the Splitter and Mixer output slider all the way to bottom, the X-Over Freq knob controls the highpass filter frequency feeding the lower split (although technically, it’s no longer a split because there’s only one signal path).
For the bandpass or notch response, do the following.
- Set the Splitter X-Over Mode to Bandpass.
- Move the Splitter and Mixer output sliders all the way to the top.
The X-Over Freq knob controls the bandpass filter frequency feeding the upper split, and Freq Spread sets the Q (higher values = higher Q). If you move the Splitter and Mixer output slider all the way to bottom, the X-Over Freq knob controls the highpass filter frequency feeding the lower split (although technically, it’s no longer a split because there’s only one signal path).
If you move the Splitter and Mixer output sliders all the way to the bottom, then the X-Over Freq knob controls the notch filter frequency feeding the lower split; again, Freq Spread sets the Q.
Also note that if you click the little crossover button in the Crossover module’s lower left, then that reverses the processed path. For example if you’ve set up the upper split to be a lowpass filter, clicking the crossover button turns it into a highpass filter instead.
So you’re probably thinking “okay, but why is this useful?” Here are two examples, but there are plenty more.
The above inserts a lowpass filter in front of an amp set for a fair amount of distortion. Lowering the frequency means that high frequencies are filtered out before hitting the amp, so they’re not distorted and don’t generate ultra-high frequencies. The result is a beefier, bassier sound that works great for power chords when you want to leave some room in the high frequencies for vocals and other instruments.
The next example inserts a highpass filter between the amp and speaker cabinet to reduce the low frequencies. This makes the cabinet sound more like an open-back type.
Note that there can be only one Splitter within an effects chain, but aside from that limitation, the Splitter-as-EQ can be very handy when you want to tailor a preset’s tone.
Okay, time to use my meal voucher to go grab dinner...