DJ Swivel HitStrip

A traditional ‘you’d never use these all these settings in real life’ shot to highlight some of HitStrip’s features!

With its combination of creative and corrective tools, HitStrip puts all the channel processing you’ll ever need in one intuitive window.

Channel strip plug‑ins aren’t a new idea, but DJ Swivel’s HitStrip seeks to bring it up to date, combining commonly used elements of different plug‑ins — plus a few more special features — in a single, intuitive GUI. This plug‑in is available in the usual formats on Mac and Windows and authorisation is by serial number. The download was refreshingly small (a 69.1MB DMG file for my M1 MacBook Pro) and installation painless. On first opening an instance, only the EQ and dynamics sections are activated, but you’ll can see an array of greyed out options in tabs across the top, and I’ll run through all of these facilities below.

Banding About

Let’s start with the EQ, which is based around a familiar‑looking nodes‑on‑curve plus frequency‑analyser display. There are multiple ways to create nodes, the most intuitive being to click on the yellow line. This adds a bell node and, in FabFilter Pro‑Q‑esque fashion, the controls for this band or whichever you select thereafter float over the display. Other features are borrowed not only from Pro‑Q, but some other modern EQs too. For example, not only can each band can be static or dynamic, but it can instead be set to EQ only the transient or tonal portions of the signal, as in Eventide’s SplitEQ (whereby the default range control for the dynamic bands becomes a transient‑length control). These modes are selected from a drop‑down on the floating control set.

Each band is a bell by default, but another drop‑down presents different options: low‑pass, high‑pass, band‑pass, notch, low‑shelf, high‑shelf, and two variations on a ‘tilt’ EQ (a straight line or dual shelves). There are two more drop‑down menus, the first setting the slope from 6 or 12 dB/octave up to 96 dB/octave in 12dB/octave steps. Such options are a familiar sight for high‑/low‑pass filters, but here they’re available for all filter types, meaning you can do some very interesting things to the curves, as seen in the main screenshot. But it’s not just about making interesting shapes possible: it also means you can create pretty intricate EQ responses using just a few nodes — and so with less clutter. The final drop‑down menu determines which signal(s) the band acts on: stereo, left, right, Mid or Sides.

Between the menus, you have the main length/range, gain, frequency and Q knobs, and top right of the floating control set you can engage band solo, and split the band into separate channels (if the band is in stereo, left or right mode, you’ll have separate linkable nodes for left and right, whereas if you start with a Mid or Sides band, you’ll have both Mid and Sides nodes). You can also delete the band. Some of this control is helpfully duplicated in a smaller control set under the node nearest the mouse cursor, but there are some subtle differences: while you can see the settings, for example, you can’t tweak them on this window (you can move the node to change the frequency and gain, of course, and can hold down a modifier key to adjust the Q); the band solo here is a click‑hold type, whereas that in the lower window latches on when clicked; and you can’t split nodes, access the dynamic/transient functions or set the slope steepness.

You can create anything up to 24 nodes, so there’s plenty of scope to get as surgical as you need to. The display also includes a frequency analyser, and can be set to show a mastering‑friendly ±6dB range up to a more radical ±36dB; it defaults to a ±12dB, and the range grows automatically if you boost/cut beyond the display....