Future Music magazine reviews the Q-Clone sampling EQ plugin. As they say, this is an all-in-one native plug-in package for sampling and saving any hardware EQ. It works by sending a test signal out to your hardware EQ, which you have set up with the settings you want in the normal way. The EQed signal comes back in to Q-Clone, which analyses it and saves the analysed EQ. You can then apply this EQ like a normal software EQ, to as many tracks as you want.

If you don’t have a hardware EQ, you can use one of the presets included with Q-Clone. The review notes that, bizarrely, it’s not entirely clear which hardware EQs these presets come from, so you just have to try them out. You can also combine multiple saved EQ settings: “it’s a clever little function that packs more punch than is at first apparent.”

This is such a simple concept that it’s interesting nobody has done it before; presumably the calculations involved in the software are quite tricky. The results, though, are very good — the reviewers couldn’t tell the difference between the original hardware EQ and the Q-Cloned version. They tried Q-clone with several different EQ units, and said, “the results were certainly very impressive.”

Overall they give good marks to the Q-Clone. The idea of “sampling” effects is likely to become more common — it started with convolution reverb, now EQ, and they say “one day all software plug-ins will be made this way.” Q-Clone gets a perfect ten out of ten for stability and sound quality, and at least seven for their other criteria. As they say, it’s not a new concept, but “Waves’ Q-Clone is the first to really deliver it in plug-in form.”

Buy Q-Clone at SameDayMusic.com