![]() ![]() Subtractive EQ: cutting offending frequencies out.Additive EQ: boosting frequencies to achieve the results you want.With that in mind, there are two main ways to approach EQ. The best way to use EQ is to use it as little as possible. Adding and subtractingĮxtreme tonal shifts can have a negative impact on your sound. No matter how tightly you set your Q or how steep you make your slope, an EQ band will always affect a range of frequencies around the target, so be careful. It’s important to remember that there’s no such thing as a perfect filter. This control determines the range where boosts or cuts will occur. The frequency is the centre of your EQ band’s action. Make sure to keep gain staging in mind so you don’t run out of headroom. That means extreme EQ settings can change your levels a lot. Hot tip: When you make adjustments with EQ, you also affect the overall gain of your signal. Positive gain values indicate a boost, while negative ones make it a cut. Gain determines the amount of boost or cut you apply with your EQ. Q values of less than 1 will give you broader EQ curves, while values greater than 1 will give you tighter, more selective boosts or cuts. You can think of it as the “bandwidth” of an EQ band. Use sharper cut-offs like 24 and 48 db/octave for aggressive filtering at precise frequencies. Use less severe slopes like 6 or 12 db/octave to create gentle, transparent low end roll-off with a low-pass filter. Slopes of 6db/octave to 24db/octave are common, although some advanced digital EQs can create slopes of up to 96db/octave. The higher the number, the steeper the drop off around the corner frequency of the filter. The slope of a filter refers to how aggressively the sound beyond its corner frequency is attenuated.įilter slope is usually associated with HPF and LPF and types, but some modern EQs allow you to choose the slope of bell or shelving bands as well. Keep this concept in mind as you move through the basics of EQ. When you use EQ to alter a sound, you’re really changing the volume of its partials relative to the rest. If not, they’re inharmonic.Ī highly harmonic sound like a bowed cello string is rich in evenly related partials, while a highly inharmonic sound like a cymbal crash is made up of only unrelated ones. If the partials are related to the fundamental by a whole number ratio (ie, 2:1, 3:1, 4:1 etc.) they’re harmonic. These basic components are called partials. Complex just means any sound other than a basic sine wave.Īll complex sounds can be broken down into simple sine wave components. Unique, identifiable timbres are a property of all complex sounds. What makes them sound different? Both instruments are playing a note with the same fundamental frequency, but each has its own unique timbre.Ī sound’s timbre gives our brains a lot of information about what it represents in the real world. Imagine a French horn and an electric guitar both playing the same A=440Hz note. ![]()
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