Ok one morning and half afternoon of testing later... Quick conclusions:
1. dual band overdrive on drums is great
2. dual band overdrive on drums needs to be done parallel, so mixing the clean signal with the two distorted bands
3. the split frequency for overdrive on drums is somewhere between 350hz and 500hz
4. the Austin Gold is perfect for overdriving the lower freq band
5. all distortions I tried for the high band clutter the mid highs /highs
6. drumloops need a fairly clean overdrive on high band, individual kick and snare can do with some more dirt
7. overdrives and distortions act as compressors, the only nice added compressor sound for me was a parallel compressor on setting "are you out of your mind?".
8. blending all those clean and processed bands does funny shit to your audio
Of course, all these conclusion are my personal ones, and me being:
1. almost tonedeff
2. convinced that the first Stone Roses album is great but sounds terrible
3. out of ADD medication
I would advice all of you not to start building commercial products based on these findings. Unless you got shitloads of cash to burn of course.
For me however, these experiments have proven that Iam right on one or two subjects, and have to rethink my concept completely on all others. So that is a good thing.
Iam pretty sure about:
1. parallel dual band overdrive
2. Austin Gold on lower freq
Serious thought needs to go into:
1. the overdrive for the higher band. It needs something with a wide range of overdrive / distortion and a "open" sound on the (mid) highs.
2. filtering of the processed bands. The parallel overdrive makes it a pretty precise tool for colouring loops. I have the idea though that is could be even more precise if I was able to add smaller bandwidths to the original.
3. the crossover filter. Especially when blending in both bands again with the original, all sorts of audio things happen. Most of them not particularly usefull.
4. EQ. Espcially with loops, I found that I quickly went for eq-ing the clean signal (pre compression) or the end signal (post compression) for more sound sculpting. Lost of fun and great results. I havbe a pair of boards and front-plates for bluzzi's EZ1084 EQ on the shelf. It could be interesting to use these on insert points, preferably switchable between clean (just the original) pre compressor and post compressor.
First things first though: The crossover filter and the high band overdrive.
In the mean time, I would like to hear your comments on everything, but especially on the filtering of the two distortion bands and on the eq (placement and is the EZ1084 the right eq for this job?)
Cheers
Erik