TDR VOS SlickEQ is a mixing/mastering equalizer designed for ease of use, musical flexibility and impeccable sound.
Three (and a half) filter-bands arranged in a classic Low/Mid/High semi parametric layout offer fast and intuitive access to four distinct EQ modes, each representing a set of distinct EQ curves and behaviors. An elaborate auto gain option automatically compensates for changes of perceived loudness during EQ operation. Optionally, SlickEQ allows to exclusively process either the stereo sum or stereo difference (i.e. “stereo width”) without additional sum/difference encoding.
In order to warm up the material with additional harmonic content, SlickEQ offers a switchable EQ non-linearity and an output stage with 3 different saturation models. These options are meant to offer subtle and interesting textures, rather than obvious distortion. The effect is made to add the typical “mojo” often associated with classy audio gear.
An advanced 64bit multirate processing scheme practically eliminates typical problems of digital EQ implementations such as frequency-warping, quantization distortion and aliasing.
Beside the primary controls, the plug-in comes with an array of additional helpers: Advanced preset management, undo/redo, quick A/B comparison, copy & paste, an online help, editable labels, mouse-wheel support and much more.
SlickEQ is a collaborative project by Variety Of Sound (Herbert Goldberg) and Tokyo Dawn Labs (Vladislav Goncharov and Fabien Schivre).
Key specs and features
- Intuitive, yet flexible semi parametric EQ layout
- Full featured, modern user interface with outstanding usability and ergonomics
- Carefully designed 64bit “delta” multi-rate structure
- Three EQ bands with additional 18dB/Oct high-pass filter
- Four distinct EQ models: “American”, “British”, “German” and “Soviet” with optional non-linearity
- Four output stages: “Linear”, “Silky”, “Mellow” and “Deep”
- Advanced saturation algorithms by VoS (“stateful saturation”)
- Highly effective and musically pleasing loudness compensated auto gain control
- Oversampled signal path including stateful saturation algorithms
- Stereo and sum/difference processing options
- Tool-bar with undo/redo, A/B, advanced preset management and more
Availability
TDR VOS SlickEQ is a freeware audio plug-in available for Windows and Mac in VST and Audio Units format (both 64-bit and 32-bit). VST3 and AAX formats will follow later.
All downloads are available via the Tokyo Dawn Labs website.
Related Links
Variety Of Sound 
Thankyou for this, and all your past and future efforts.
I will put it to thorough use in the coming weeks and report back.
Big Love Herb!
thank you!
I’m loving it. Nice sound, useful colors, and variety.
I LOVE the volume compensation feature, it makes judging the curve and the character a breeze!
Can I ask how you moved your code from synthmaker/flowstone? I’m still in early stages of DSP learning and I was worried that the code language in it is too unique to be useful elseware, so I’m concurrently learning java too. I take from this collaboration it is transferable then? as to my knowledge flowstone is still a single precision (and vst only) evironment?
Thanks again.
BB
What the?!1 You guys are killing me…
Hmmmm why so good for so free ?! No way, thank’s guys …
now I can’t wait to get home…….. ^_^
Thanks to the new dream team for this beautiful EQ !
Like probably many of you, I have lots of good EQs to choose from already, this one stands out however, both in terms of subtle character options that always sound “expensive” and an incredibly well thought out UI, rivaling the very best commercial products available.in both aspects.
Sure hope you guys will get along fine and we’ll see more fruits of this winning collaboration in the future !
susiwong
habe schon einige eq plugins gekauft oder getestet, bin von deinen plugins immer wieder beindruckt, wirklich durchdacht. diese zusammenarbeit konnte ja nur gut werden. danke
Thank you very much .. the “SlickEQ” is realy great…!
Why the change to an installer? It was a lot better when we could just drag the DLL into the VST directory, now we’ve got to select two directories and make a shortcut in the start menu that I can’t imagine anyone using.
Agree on this, installers for me create a discomfort, a feeling of that my system is being manipulated behind the scene where as dll is just a file, and all actions with it are transparent. Well, I’m a bit of a paranoid perfectionist and I guess installer is the input of the TD philosophy.
Fwiw, I wouldn’t need an installer either, but with 4 different plugin formats on PC already, and more to be added soon, a person not doing this day in-day out might easily be overwhelmed by all those paths dictated by Windows and the various hosts.
And this installer is squeaky clean, it only puts the plugins in the correct places, no fishy registry entries or “added value”, and it uninstalls perfectly, too.
Maybe it’s not such a bad idea after all ?
just saying,
susiwong
As far as I can tell all it’s installed is an uninstaller, a changelog, an icon, and the DLL. I don’t need that other trash, I’m interested in the plugin. I don’t need a program to put a DLL in the VST directory with two (one for the DLL, one for the uninstaller for the DLL as far as I can tell) list-view file browsers that are the worst things to navigate, I don’t need yet another one to take it out. It’s slower and bulkier and boosts the file size compared to a ZIP, RAR, or 7z of just the plugins. The installer can’t possibly be to improve the user experience so I guess it’s for pushing the new brand but I’m going to be looking at their logos every time I use the plugin. There is no reason for this that makes sense to me.
The “no installer” download button has arrived, such love and compassion for us, clean system addicts! Thanks to the dev team.
That’s great so that no one else has to put up with the installer but I still want to know why there’s an installer in the first place. I seriously can’t figure it out. It’s objectively worse in every way imaginable unless somehow there’s a user that, despite knowing that you can get new VST plugins, does not know how to navigate to the VST plugin directory.
It’s all about trusting the developers then heh, my paranoia eased 🙂
Ok, so I just HAD to come back here and comment about the switching of EQ curves and color shifts of the GUI.. such a nice touch!!! I am amazed on how simple the layout is and how easy it is to start tweaking, but at the same time, it can get quite complex.. It does seem to require a little bit more CPU than the other Bootsy plugs, but from what I am hearing (and experiencing) right now, it is well worth the minor CPU hike..
THANK YOU TO EVERYONE INVOLVED! 🙂
unbelievable, have to try this thing out! You guys are amazing!! Congratulations, That’s a great Team!
Wow, i see 64 bits. Thanks, bootsie and td guys.
which of the preloaded presets models a british eq
JUST ONE STATEMENT FOR THIS BEAST!
.
“A SWISS ARMY KNIFE”
Well done guys. 🙂
too bad that we live in different places, can’t give you a real hug for this, but be sure that all that love that your work generates comes back to you in one form or another 🙂
I have a question: When I turn the EQ Sat on, why does the Calibrate button light up?
Calibrate affects all non-linear parts of the plugin and EQ sat too
Thanks so much guys!!
The auto-gain is one of the most useful features in a plug-in in a long time for me!
Hi. I am not having any luck installing this on my Mac. I get a script error.
What exact error message have you got?
Dave, pls retry download and install, we’ve just fixed some issues with he installer
Thank you so much!
Stunning VST!
I just dropped this EQ onto a vocal and percussion track and it made a very smooth improvement.
Cheers!
Thank you guys for the fix. It now installs with ease on my Mac. You are the best 🙂
Thanks Bootsy. ‘will check it out soon. Cheers.
Amazing!
Thank you for all the hard work guys! You and your plugins are inspiration for all of us.
Keep up the good work!
Incredible! Big thanks to the three of you!
I get some massive slowdown when silence is being fed through the plugin. with eight instances up, it’s enough to lag my mouse cursor! is this a denormal issue? it seems pretty serious.
I can recreate this by starting a new project, creating an empty track with SlickEQ on it, setting it to Silky non-linearity, and duplicating the track several times.
32bit VST on 32bit Reaper on 64bit Windows. AMD Athlon II X4 620.
there was a denormal issue with the release day version. when did you downloaded the plug-in?
on the release day 😉 I saw the version number was still 1.0.0 so I didn’t think there was an update.
thanks, I updated my version and all is well. ❤
Thanks a bunch for all your offerings.
The Process mode button doesn’t seem to work using Reaper as host(Windows 64 bit version). Everything else works and sounds great.
Slick EQ sounds great, thanks Fabian and you and everyone involved. I used in a mastering situation and it worked fantastic. The mid band opens up quite well, The American and German emulations were very interesting. The German was wide with huge harmonic boosts. I could not use the low and the high bands at all. It wasn’t useful on my chain.
Congrats again … great work mates… Cheers.
Hello,
i´d like to know how the automatic gain compensation works, cause I asked a other a guy about this function for his plugin eq and he tells me this:
“In slickeq they possibly calculate magnitude difference of white noise and use that for output volume (just guessing), but that’s just wrong. Yes, it’s stable, no pumping or whatsoever, but it’s wrong.
Why? Simple. Imagine you feed it with sine 1k into a static eq (the simplest case of all). The processor will be a steep lowpass at 100Hz, so it should destroy the sine completely, right? So if my guess above is true, such compensation wouldn’t work at all, because there will be something remaining from a white noise. But I shall explain why it can never work. Let’s imagine that at one moment the input sine changes into a white noise. Now you should already see the problem. While the processor kills everything from the sine, so the theoretical ideal “gain” would be like +200dB, there was lots left from the white noise, so it became say +20dB. But the eq CANNOT KNOW THAT! And this doesn’t even account loudness estimate etc. So I’m just hitting the ground…
Instead the AGC/ALC is measuring input loudness, which must always be done continually, and of course this causes a delay. And about lower the time – that’s exactly what you DO NOT want! Because then you will have lots of distortion etc. Right now the window is about 3 seconds, which means it takes it 3 seconds to adapt to changes in the signal. The fact that your signal is too dynamic is really your problem, nothing can solve it for you (except for 1.5 look-ahead and I don’t think that’s what you want 😀 ). If it would be say 100ms, then yes, not much pumping, but distortion instead, nobody would want that.”
Hey Marek, I can’t really see the point, what exactly is wrong with SlickEQ’s equal loudness function?
To be honest, I don’t see the need to justify and explain a perfectly fine function. There’s neither a “window of 3 seconds” nor does SlickEQ introduce any form of distortion as long all sat modes are disabled, and of course, it doesn’t boost gain by 200dB at any point. All I can say is that your buddy isn’t the most creative when it comes to engineering. 🙂
The answer from a very talented buddy to Fabien:
“Hehe 😀 😀 😀
Well, as I explained, it cannot be done :D. So they indeed use a stable compensation as I suggested in the beginning, which is not truly “automatic loudness compensation”, but whatever :D.
I was actually curious, so I checked the demo, and it doesn’t compensate at all… I tried the basic noises to see what it does, I assumed it would compensate well for them as these are the easiest signals and nope I’m afraid, it didn’t work either, tried +18db of all filters, usually got like +5dB difference… So yes, it is based on some specific signal measurements, pretty much the most trivial approach with quite a few problems, e.g. that it doesn’t really work :D.“
Forget all your (again: faulty) assumptions for a second and use the plugin on real world signals in real situations.
Feel free to post some worst case examples (audio + preset) popping up so that I can reproduce the “problem”. You are calling the function broken/wrong/not working in a very aggressive manner, while thousands of satisfied users including our own very experienced test team and all three (!) developers greatly enjoy the function.
Please be more precise with your criticism, I have serious difficulties following your points. For example: “tried +18db of all filters, usually got like +5dB difference” what does this mean? Difference to what exactly? And at which frequency and shape settings? And which type of material? And what are “the basic noises”?
Sure it’s an approximation, but a very good one imho. By far the slickest I’ve seen to date on an EQ. 🙂
… there’s people who create and people who discuss, with varying degree of competence.
just saying,
susiwong
Have you guys thought about making the ultimate all-in-one analogue plugin? There was a great compendium recently at Attack Magazine:
http://www.attackmagazine.com/technique/walkthroughs/lessons-analogue-recording-techniques/