When to use "character" EQs

He's Dead, Jim

He's Dead, Jim

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Dec 10, 2012
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What the title states- when do you guys use warm, sometimes tube saturation-emulating "character" EQs like the modules in the VMR and free stuff like the Variety of Sound plugins or Ignite's PTeq, versus more surgical EQs like stock DAW plugins/ProQ/EQuality? My default project template exclusively uses ProQ because it's so intuitive, but then I have all these neat plugins lying around and I don't know where to make use of them.
 
bryan_kilco said:
I'm pretty sure the general consensus here is to use colorful EQ's on boosts and your other (surgical) EQ's on cuts.
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I've always wondered what is the logic behind this type of thinking. If a certain piece of eq yields pleasing results, be it from unique curves, phase distortions, saturations or whatever, why would you dedicate those results solely for boosting?

I do understand the broad boost / surgical cut logic people seem to have, but why would the 'colour pieces' excell, by defaut, more in boosting then cutting? Doesn't really make sense to me.
 
Since VMR was released, I've exclusively gone VMR SSL/Neve EQs on all channels for cuts and boosts and Air EQ on Busses for any clean corrections. Everything seems to happen much, much quicker - perhaps because boosts don't sound so harsh and thus I try to reach the end goal with cuts only.

Only exception to this is ReaEQ on toms to help with resonances.
 
SoundsLikeFog said:
I've always wondered what is the logic behind this type of thinking. If a certain piece of eq yields pleasing results, be it from unique curves, phase distortions, saturations or whatever, why would you dedicate those results solely for boosting?

I do understand the broad boost / surgical cut logic people seem to have, but why would the 'colour pieces' excell, by defaut, more in boosting then cutting? Doesn't really make sense to me.
Click to expand...

Because using the "colorful" EQ to make cuts seems to be counter-productive, at least that's what I'd safely assume. Why color the area which you are notching out anyway?
 
bryan_kilco said:
Because using the "colorful" EQ to make cuts seems to be counter-productive, at least that's what I'd safely assume. Why color the area which you are notching out anyway?
Click to expand...

It's much more complicated. Let's say a good musical EQ shouldn't make the source sound EQ'ed no matter what. Even a cut can seem to enhance rather than diminish the source.

I personally only use "surgical type" of EQ when I need to notch an annoying overtone, resonance, lip sound, string noise etc... Very specific narrow band stuff.
Also linear band high/lo pass on multi-mic'ed sources is a often good idea to avoid introducing more phase problems.

Other than that I'm VMR'ing the fuck out of everything lately.
 
I generally use the 'colour' EQs on drums, to get the sound 90% there before taking a closer look with Pro-Q. That's about it. Just about everything else with the exception of vocals is entirely Pro-Q, since I'm subtractive-minded when I mix.
 
bryan_kilco said:
Because using the "colorful" EQ to make cuts seems to be counter-productive, at least that's what I'd safely assume. Why color the area which you are notching out anyway?
Click to expand...

Well, first because it doesn't really work as simple as that.

Second, and more importantly, because it might sound better than using standard digital parametric eq?
 
its good practice to be comfortable with whatever EQ is in front of you. I try and do as much as I can with something like an SSL EQ where theres a limited amount of bands. if I need to notch something else on top then I'll pull up a parametric eq with a tight notch.

usually the character EQ's I pull up have an analogue style behaviour on the q/gain relationship where boosts sound nice & sweet. that's not to say EQ's like sonnox/logic EQ can't behave like that either.......
 
Typically anything where I'm boosting a lot of mids. Between the VMR and SlickEQ I can usually get ballpark the core sound I'm wanting and then I'll fine tune and sidechain with ProQ. I use VCC,VTM,VBC a lot too so I'm getting tons of color there so sometimes I'll bypass VMR/Slick and just clean up with ProQ
 
I think the difference in most digital eqs is how the bands and qs are set, so I try different plugins with the bands exactly as they are set when you first load them up. I sweep around for problem freqencies and adjust qs but I like to first try all my options. API 560 is a weird one where the bands are set but the qs tighten the deeper you cut or boost, API 550 only gives you 2db at a time which is too much most of the time, reneq has all its lo bands set higher than all my other options which makes everything smoother but vintage sounding, and q10 I seem to use for major problem solving. The API eqs seem colorful but also the ones I use the least.
 
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