Klevgrand Gaffel review

Gaffel means fork in Swedish, and Klevgränd’s new plugin of that name is designed to split a series of duplicated tracks into a multiband ’fork’, for independent processing of up to four frequency ranges within the same sound. 

The plugin itself is nothing more than a four-band pass-through device with a spectrogram in the background: click a frequency band to mute and unmute its output, and resize them by dragging the crossover handles. 

To put it to work, simply copy the track you want to process up to three times (for four identical tracks in total), then load Gaffel onto each one. Each successive instance loads with the next band upwards active and the other three muted, so with all four in play, what you hear is effectively the same as the original single track. 

With that done, you’re all set to process each filtered band/track with its own plugins, and the real genius of Gaffel is that adjusting the crossover in one instance also adjusts it in the other three, so the workflow becomes the same as running a plugin-hosting multiband splitter on one track. Very clever! Up to eight separate Gaffel groups can be assigned at once, too, using the buttons at the top right. 

It all works exactly as advertised, and of course, there’s nothing stopping you using Gaffel on non-identical tracks. We got great results throwing random quartets of drum loops at it/them and messing with the crossovers to create composite grooves and beats - and that’s before we’d even got any other plugins in on the action. 

Although the likes of Blue Cat’s MB-7 Mixer can do the same thing without the need for multiple tracks and plugins (that’ll be the aforementioned plugin-hosting multiband splitter, then), Gaffel is elegant and affordable, with a multitrack approach that actually constitutes a creative opportunity as well as an effective technical workaround. 

Gaffel is elegant and affordable, with a multitrack approach that actually constitutes a creative opportunity as well as an effective technical workaround.