Equality, Equiibrium, what have you!! EQ plugs..

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sound for sandwiches
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Re: Equality, Equiibrium, what have you!! EQ plugs..

Post by sound for sandwiches » Fri Apr 20, 2018 10:05 am

I use the hell out of the Stillwell 1973 EQ. It's great at helping an otherwise good sounding instrument track find its place in the mix. for surgery, I'll pile on with another endorsement for ReaEQ.

ashcat_lt
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Re: Equality, Equiibrium, what have you!! EQ plugs..

Post by ashcat_lt » Fri Apr 20, 2018 1:38 pm

Magnetic Services wrote:
Fri Apr 20, 2018 9:00 am
Holy shit my life just changed. Honestly did not know you could add bands! Four is usually enough, but I do sometimes find myself wishing for a fifth. I'm mostly a "set and forget" EQ-er, but I'll have to look into the envelope detector. That sounds nifty.
LOL! Glad I could help. I very rarely actually need another band except when I'm doing kind of "special effects" things with it, but it does lend itself well to all kinds of less "EQ" type uses as well. It's pretty much my go to any time I want any type of filter to happen.

The allpass type is a "secret weapon" that I use on vocals - especially deeper male voices - which are often pretty severely asymmetrical. It's a trick I stole from broadcast processing that helps to redistribute the energy more evenly. It's a subtle but noticeable effect almost like free compression that also has the advantage of making whatever compression/limiting you add after work more consistently and efficiently. Put a band or two in around the area of the fundamentals. Settings are almost arbitrary because you really do want to "randomize" the phase relationships between various harmonics in the voice.

I actually put a reasonable amount of effort into creating presets that mimic the tone curves of various guitar heads and cabs to use in my live rig (along with a fairly efficient saturation plug) in place of more CPU intensive amp simulators. I'll still bring up the "name brand" sims for recording/mix, but for live work it's definitely close enough and saves me quite a few ticks across a band's worth of tracks.

Definitely get in and play with Reaper's Parameter Modulation. This is not part of ReaEQ itself, but part of the "wrapper" that Reaper puts around every plugin. There's a lot of fun stuff in there. LFO, envelope follower, linking of parameters to each other (even between different plugs) and/or to MIDI messages... It's extremely powerful. Of course, when you start wiggling knobs around during playback a lot of plugins will stutter or click or make that zipper noise, but ReaEQ itself is coded to smooth those things out and I've never had any of those problems with it.

That means you can use it for all kinds of filter sweeps and wobbly fun and autowah and dynamic EQ and like anything else you can imagine. Add to that Reaper's multi-channel routing capabilities for infinite sidechaining possibilities. Duck the low end of the bass out of the way of the kick drum. Cut some mids in the guitars while the vocals are happening. Most of what I record doesn't lend itself to those types of things, but sometimes it can be exactly what you need..

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