Eventide DSP 4000

[Charlie_M]

Amazing unit in my humble opinion. Only thing I can say against it is that it may be a little dated (I think it's from the mid-90's). That really only shows up when you try to get into programming your own patches - you may string together a complex enough patch that you run out of memory on the unit. That's a bummer because in that case to get where you wanted to go with that custom patch you now have to do it in 2 passes. Rare that this happens though.

Good stuff:

Reverbs aplenty! Tons of halls, plates, ambience, etc... I have only scratched the surface. I liked a few of the plates on my voice, the halls struck me as a bit much for rock vocals but they are editable. Never explored that because there are plenty of reverbs in there that just work for me as they are.

Guitar effects: I'm not a big guitar effects guy. I mainly like rock guitar just dirty and crunchy. But some of the patches on the 4000 work well for rock leads. Some just make the lead sound "better" somehow. Some of the guitar effects are too much for me ... there are only 5-6 patches that do it for me, but for me that is a lot.

Bass guitar effects: If I'm not much of a guitar effects guy, I'm REALLY not much of a bass guitar effects guy. In rock music Bass belongs pretty dry most of the time I think. Still I've found places where the eventide bass effects fit in with what I want to convey musically (like if I want the bass to sound "spacey" for example, or have a leslie type effect in a solo or break). Stuff that I probably wouldn't normally think of or try, I do pretty routinely now on bass. You could say the 4000 inspires my creativity on bass or you could say it is a crutch. Say what you want but don't take my 4000 away.

Vocal effects: most of these are a little too much for me. Some of them are useful (like the doubling, or double+delay+pan, etc..). Most of what I use here can be done just as easily with a plugin in the DAW. Just depends if you want that eventide flavor on your vocal effects or not and what suits the song. There are compressors also for voice. The ones I've tried are pretty inaudible in therms of artifacts (to my ears). I guess that could be a good thing sometimes. Also you can string together patches to give you EQ, verb, comp, doubling, etc... on your voice and save that patch for later use. I wasn't thrilled with the harmonizer capability. I think you either like that sound or you don't - I don't.

There's a bunch of stuff I haven't tried yet (a whole bank of drum compressors and reverbs and stuff). I can report back as I get around to trying those out. For drums though I'm happy enough with what I'm getting via samples and itb plugs so I may not ever get around to that bit.

Overall I'd call this a super versatile box with a lot of capability. For a small operation where you might only have a small number of outboard units, I would want this or one of its cousins as part of that mix.

People talk about a big learning curve with eventide stuff....Depends what you want to do I guess. I suppose there are people that what they do all day is program these boxes. I have gotten into more deep editing but really I find it's diminishing returns. For me I'm happy with minor tweaks to the presets. Editing those is something you can be doing an hour or two after you first turn the unit on.

In summary I got this box mainly for the reverbs and vocal processing. Having now used that and some of the other stuff (and the quality of it) I can see why the fuss over eventide. Having used this unit for a month or two now, I could easily see making a greater investment to get into some more current eventide gear down the road, just to have more memory and other more modern conveniences (but that is WAY down the road....).

by the way.... I couldn't even tell you what the bit depth or sampling rate is on the conversion. The overall sound is so good that I just haven't given the conversion a thought until looking over this review to see what's missing. What's missing is specs and like I said I'm not up on those and given the sound I just don't care what the specs are.

Charlie