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RIDGE quickstart

Install it, put it on the track, press SCAN, and let APPLY write the bands. The first useful move in RIDGE is a button rather than a sweep.

What RIDGE is

RIDGE is a 24 band equalizer with a full dynamics section on every band and a scan that finds resonances for you. It runs as AU, VST3 or a standalone app on macOS 11 or later, Apple Silicon, and as VST3 on Windows, sitting on the track like any other EQ. The thing that makes the first five minutes different from every other EQ is SCAN: instead of sweeping a narrow bell around until something screams, you press a button, let it listen, and read the marks it leaves.

The whole Nolvra RIDGE window with a vocal running through it. Along the top strip: the wordmark, the preset VOICE CLEAN, UNDO and REDO, the A and B slots with COPY A>B between them, MATCH, and the SCAN group beside BYPASS at the right. The well underneath draws the analyser before and after the six bands the preset wrote, with four numbered scan marks standing over them, and the parameter bar runs along the bottom.

Your first pass

Install it, then open either door

The Nolvra Hub installs RIDGE and keeps it updated. Two things unlock it and either one is enough on its own: a RIDGE licence key, which reads RIDGE-XXXX-XXXX-XXXX and goes into the plugin's activation screen, or an active All-Access membership on the account you are signed into in the Hub. A key owner never has to sign in and a member never has to type a key. One licence covers two machines. Rescan plugins in your DAW afterwards if RIDGE does not appear on its own.

Put it on the track

It is an audio effect. Insert it on the track or the bus you want to work on and play the part. The analyzer draws what it hears straight away, and nothing else needs setting first.

Press SCAN

SCAN sits at the right hand end of the top strip, next to BYPASS. Turn it on and let the part play. It needs a few seconds of material before it will say anything at all, and it says how many frames it still owes rather than sitting there silently.

Read the marks, then APPLY

Each mark is a frequency the scan is confident about. APPLY writes a band for every mark that is standing, up to eight of them, and the strip tells you how many it took. One undo takes the whole thing back, and DELETE removes the bands the scan made without touching the ones you made yourself.

Work the bands by hand from there

The scan gives you a starting set, not a finished EQ. Every band it wrote is an ordinary RIDGE band: move it, change its shape, change its slope, put it on mid or side, or turn its dynamics off. Nothing about a scan band is locked.

The right hand end of the top strip: SCAN lit, APPLY with the count 4 beside it, DELETE, and BYPASS pinned at the edge.
The well just after APPLY: four bands numbered 01 to 04 standing on the flat line, each drawn as a bell whose dynamic range hangs below it as a dotted drop, and the trace along the bottom of the well reading 4 BANDS CUT FROM THE SCAN.
The parameter bar with band 01 selected. The top row reads SHAPE BELL, SLOPE dashed out, FREQ 242 Hz, GAIN 0.0 dB, Q 8.99 and CH STEREO, with the four marks beside them. The row under it reads DYNAMIC, RANGE -12.0 dB, a THRESHOLD track marked -33.3 dB, TIMING on AUTO, and ATTACK and RELEASE dimmed because AUTO derives them. BAND 4/24 and LATENCY 0.0 ms sit in the slack to the right.

What is on the top strip

Left to right: the wordmark, the preset group, UNDO and REDO, the A and B slots with the copy button between them, MATCH, and then BYPASS pinned at the right with the SCAN group beside it.

A and B are two whole settings you can flip between. COPY A>B writes what you have onto the other slot, so the usual way to try an alternative is to copy across first and then change one thing. MATCH is explained in the SCAN and MATCH article; the short version is that it reads how much level your moves added or removed so a comparison is not decided by loudness.

The top strip end to end: NOLVRA RIDGE, the preset group reading VOICE CLEAN with arrows either side and three lines at its end, UNDO and REDO, the A and B pair with A held, COPY A>B, MATCH, and at the far right the SCAN group reading SCAN, APPLY 4 and DELETE with BYPASS pinned beyond it.
The same corner of the strip with BYPASS engaged: the BYPASS cell lit while SCAN, APPLY 4 and DELETE sit beside it unchanged.

The three things worth knowing on day one

The analyzer has a smoothing control, which is unusual in this class. SMOOTH, MID and SHARP set how wide a window the drawing is averaged over, and it opens on SHARP because that is the setting that can still resolve individual harmonics at low frequencies. On a busy mix, MID is one press away.

The dynamics threshold is a level rather than a running average of what the band was just doing, which is why a band that ducks a loud passage keeps ducking it for as long as the passage lasts. That has its own article.

Every parameter is published and the list is locked at 453 from the first release, so automation you write today reads the same in every version that follows.

The ANALYZER cell with its list open: SMOOTH, MID and SHARP, with SHARP ticked.

Things people look for on the first day

  • SCAN and APPLY are two separate presses. The scan can run and mark things without writing a single band.
  • The scan needs a few seconds of material. It is watching a five second window, and it will not report anything before it has one.
  • APPLY is one undo, not eight, however many bands it wrote.
  • DELETE only removes bands the scan made. A band you dragged more than a semitone away from its mark is yours now, and DELETE leaves it alone.
  • Twenty-seven factory presets ship with it, sorted by the job they do rather than by filter type, and FLAT is the first of them. The preset bar on the top strip carries previous, next, the name and a list, and the list holds the factory set, anything you have saved, and SAVE AS at the end.
  • PROCESS lists three modes and this release runs one. Choosing NATURAL PHASE or LINEAR PHASE leaves the audio on zero latency and says so rather than pretending: the bar prints MODE FELL BACK, spelled out as ZERO LATENCY (FELL BACK) where there is room for the sentence. Latency is on the bar in milliseconds either way, including when it is zero.
The preset list open under the name cell, showing the twenty seven factory rows from FLAT at the top down to RESONANCE, sorted by the job each one does, with VOICE CLEAN ticked.
The settings menu open under the three lines on the preset group: SAVE AS, DELETE dimmed because a factory preset cannot be deleted, then SKETCH, COLOR, RESET, FULL SCREEN and QUICKSTART.
The read-out line and the two cells at the right of the parameter bar after another processing mode was chosen: MODE FELL BACK, RESERVED 1, BAND 6/24 and LATENCY 0.0 ms, with OUT 0.0 dB and PROCESS reading NATURAL beside them.

What ships in the first release

  • ItemRIDGE 0.24.3
  • Bands24, dynamics on every one
  • Shapes6: bell, low shelf, high shelf, low cut, high cut, notch
  • Slopes10 rungs, 6 to 96 dB per octave plus a 192 dB per octave brickwall
  • Placement5: stereo, mid, side, left, right
  • Processingzero latency in this release; the other two modes are listed and fall back, on screen
  • Presets27 factory, sorted by job, plus your own
  • Scanup to 8 resonances per take
  • FormatsAU, VST3 and a standalone app on macOS, VST3 on Windows, 64-bit
  • Activationa RIDGE licence key or All-Access, 2 machines

Still stuck?

Nothing here matching? Write to a person.

support@nolvra.com