7.2.2 Shape

This manual is what the plugin does and how to drive it.

7.2.2.1 The window

┌── top bar ─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│  PHASE   LINEAR RES   CHARACTER   OUTPUT   AUTO-GAIN   …   COMPARE     │
├── stage ───────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┤
│                                                                        │
│      analyser + EQ curve + band nodes                                  │
│                                                                        │
├── feature bar ─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┤
│  KEY   MASKING   SPECTRAL   HUNTER   SNAPSHOTS   MATCH                  │
├── inspector ───────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┤
│  the selected band: type · freq · gain · Q · slope · channel · dynamics │
└────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘

The stage is where you work. The inspector shows one band — whichever is selected — rather than a fixed strip of 32 channels. Nothing is hidden behind a mode switch; the controls that apply to the selected band's type are the ones that appear.

7.2.2.2 Bands

Making one

• Double-click empty stage space. A bell appears at that frequency and gain.
• Right-click empty stage space → ADD BAND HERE, which shows the exact frequency before you commit.
• Run the Resonance Hunter or the Masking Map and accept what it offers — those create real, editable bands, not a hidden curve.

Moving one

• Drag a node — horizontally is frequency, vertically is gain.
• Mouse wheel over a node — Q.
• Arrow keys with a band selected:
  • ← / → frequency, in cents, 10 cents per press, 1 cent with Shift. Cents rather than hertz because a semitone at 80 Hz and a semitone at 8 kHz should feel like the same step.
  • ↑ / ↓ gain, 0.5 dB per press, 0.1 dB with Shift.
• Double-click any knob and type the value. Enter commits, Escape discards, clicking elsewhere commits what you typed rather than losing it. 1.7k means 1700 in a frequency field. Out-of-range values clamp — typing 400 into a gain means "as much as this goes".
• Delete removes the selected band.
• Ctrl+Z undoes, 64 levels deep. A drag is one undo step, not four thousand, and so is a typed value.
• Esc backs out one level at a time: an open menu, then an open dropdown, then the window.

Right-click on a node

The context menu carries all ten band types with the current one marked, then MUTE, SOLO, RESET GAIN, REMOVE. SOLO auditions inside the band — you hear what the band is working on, not the band removed.

The ten types

Slope

Cuts run 3 to 120 dB/oct, continuously, in 0.1 dB steps — not the usual 6/12/24/48 ladder, so 19.4 dB/oct is a real 19.4 dB/oct.

Channel

Each band is Stereo, Mid, Side, Left or Right.

7.2.2.3 Phase modes

Linear phase costs latency and Shape tells you exactly how much. The overlay reads LINEAR PHASE LATENCY on the stage while the mode is engaged.

Two things to know:

• LINEAR RES is not automatable. It changes the plugin's latency, which can't change while the song plays. Set it, don't automate it.
• Linear phase does not switch the rest of the plugin off. Bands with dynamics or spectral processing running keep working as they do in the other modes.

7.2.2.4 Dynamic bands

Turn on DYN for any band and it gets its own detector and moves in time. This works on all ten types, and what "moves" means depends on the type:

• Bell and the shelves move their gain.
• Cuts, notch, bandpass, allpass have no gain to move, so they move depth — the filter fades between fully applied and bypassed.

Band-filtered means the detector listens through a copy of the band's own filter — the band reacts to what it is actually touching. Wideband means it reacts to the whole track getting loud. External uses the sidechain input.

The band's shape is preserved while it moves. A dynamic bell stays a bell; it does not become a broadband duck.

7.2.2.5 Character

Four voicings and one knob, plus one switch that is the interesting part.

• Clean — bypassed, bit-transparent. Not "subtle": off.
• Silk — even-order, mostly 2nd, very low drive.
• Warm — asymmetric, tube-style; 2nd with a little 3rd.
• Iron — transformer-style; odd-order plus a gentle low-frequency droop.

SCOPE: Global or Band-local. Band-local is the reason this stage exists. With band-local scope, drive is scaled by each band's own boost, so saturation appears only where you boosted. Push 4 kHz by 5 dB and only 4 kHz gets harmonic content; everything else stays clean. The bigger the boost, the more colour it gets.

Two practical notes:

• Band-local colours the bands with the largest boosts, not every band at once. The panel names which ones. Bands that start or stop being coloured fade in and out rather than switch.
• Oversampling (2× / 4×) engages only when Character is not Clean and the drive is above zero. It adds a very small latency (about a millisecond), reported to the host for automatic delay compensation; it changes slightly when you change the setting.

7.2.2.6 Key and chord awareness

This is the feature no other EQ has, because no other EQ is given the chord track.

• KEY SNAP: Off / Scale / Chord. Band frequencies quantise to the pitch classes of the Master Key, across every octave — or to the current chord's tones. Notch a ringing note by name instead of hunting in hertz.
• KEY FOLLOW. Snapped bands move with the Arranger's chord track as the song plays. A resonance notch that tracks the harmony.
• PIANO RULER. Frequency readouts become note names and cents, and the stage draws a note-name axis.
• Each band has its own SNAP switch, so a band can opt out of global snapping.

7.2.2.7 The Masking Map

Shape instances that share a MASK GROUP share what they hear with each other. Any instance can then show you the whole group's collisions.

Not "these two clash" — "the guitar is costing the vocal 4.2 dB at 2.4 kHz for 31 % of the song."

Set ROLE per instance: Neutral, Leader, Follower. Mark the vocal Leader and the pads Follower, and the Followers duck where the Leader has energy, using dynamic bands. The moves it makes become real bands you can see and edit afterward. It is not a black box.

7.2.2.8 Spectral bands

Switch SPECTRAL on globally, then opt individual bands in with their SP switch and set SP AMT.

A spectral band works on the sound's individual frequencies rather than as a filter, which lets it distinguish transient from sustained energy in the same frequency region. BIAS (−100…+100) aims it: negative targets transients, positive targets sustain. This is how you take the ring out of a snare without dulling the hit.

FLOOR (−80…0 dB) is the anti-homogenising guard: anything quieter than this is left alone entirely, so spectral processing does not flatten your noise floor into a shape.

7.2.2.9 Resonance Hunter

Scan — live, or offline across the whole song — and Shape finds sustained narrow peaks and ranks them, each with its reason attached:

412 Hz · +9.1 dB above local average · present in 78 % of the song · Q ≈ 14 — likely a room mode

One click turns any of them into a real band. You learn what was wrong; you are not handed a curve.

The Hunter only reports peaks that last, so short, passing peaks and plain noise are never listed as resonances.

7.2.2.10 Timeline snapshots

Store up to 8 full band-state snapshots and place them on the timeline. Shape morphs between them over a time you set per slot. Verse EQ → chorus EQ, as part of the arrangement rather than as thirty automation lanes.

• SNAP SEL — 0 = none, 1–8 = the target slot.
• SNAP MORPH — 0…100, where you want to be. A panel click sets 100 and the travel is the morph; an automation lane writing it continuously gets a de-clicker instead. The morph is linear in time: "240 ms" means the morph takes 240 ms and arrives.

A snapshot holds the band block and nothing else — not output trim, not Character, not the analyser, not the masking group. So a morph can never change the plugin's latency, which is why snapshots are safe to automate anywhere.

Settings glide smoothly from one snapshot to the next; switches change at once.

7.2.2.11 Match EQ

Capture a reference — a file, another channel, or a session snapshot — and Shape computes the difference and fits it to bands.

The difference from every other match EQ is the smoothing. The fit is smoothed by fractional octave (1/3, 1/6, 1/12), and by the key when key snap is on. A cut that lands on a scale tone is held back; on the tonic or its fifth, hardest. Boosts are untouched — nobody has ever ruined a mix by emphasising the key, so the protection is one-directional, exactly like the damage.

Level is removed before fitting. A match EQ that also matches loudness is a gain stage in disguise; AUTO-GAIN owns level.

7.2.2.12 Output, Auto-Gain, and the global shapers

COMPARE in the top bar is gain-matched, so you are hearing the EQ and not the level.

7.2.2.13 The analyser

• MODE: Off / Pre / Post / Pre+Post. Pre is the multicolour fill; Post is the crisp line — where they differ is what you did.
• RES: how finely the display is drawn.
• SPEED: decay ballistics.
• TILT: 0…6 dB/oct, default 4.5, which is about a pink reference — a well-balanced mix reads roughly flat.
• RANGE: ±12 / ±18 / ±30 dB.
• FREEZE: hold the current trace to compare against.

The analyser is a display. It does not affect audio, and turning it off costs you nothing but the picture.

7.2.2.14 Presets

Presets live in the plugin's own folder, one file per preset, folders as categories:

presets/
    Factory/<Category>/<Name>.hsprst      shipped, read-only
    User/<Category>/<Name>.hsprst         yours

A preset is a single file you can rename, copy to a USB stick, mail to someone, or put in version control. The factory bank is 22 presets across Mixing, Mastering, Vocals, Drums, Bass, Guitar, Repair and Creative, and every one of them says in its notes what it is doing and to what — a preset called "Vocal Magic" teaches you nothing.

Three things worth knowing:

• Loading a preset replaces everything. If you load a three-band vocal preset over a twelve-band mastering curve, you get three bands. The other nine are gone, not hiding underneath.
• A preset does not touch your session. It carries no analyser settings, no masking group, no snapshot position and no sidechain monitoring. Loading one cannot change how the analyser is drawn or which masking group the track is in.
• The factory bank is read-only. SAVE always writes to User/. To modify a factory preset, load it and save it under your own name.

If a preset file is damaged it shows in the list as !Damaged with the reason, and does nothing. It will not stop the rest of your library loading.

7.2.2.15 The window remembers where it was

Move the editor where you want it, size it how you like, and the next one opens there — on any track. If you saved it on a monitor that is no longer connected, Shape keeps the size and lets Windows place it, rather than opening somewhere you cannot reach.

7.2.2.16 Automation

Your saved automation lanes keep pointing at the same controls when Shape is updated.

LINEAR RES and OVERSAMPLE are not automatable, because both change latency.

7.2.2.17 Performance

Shape is light on your computer, even with all 32 bands in use. The editor costs nothing when it is not visible: a closed or minimised window draws nothing at all.

7.2.2.18 Quick reference