EQ matters. You need it for everything. Unless you mic technique is flawless in an ideal room, or the guy who you are sampling has flawless technique in an ideal room, something is gonna need to be cut, boosted, notched, shelved, or generally massaged like Kobe beef at a Japanese farm.
Enter Fabfilter Pro-Q. This plugin is so good at doing what it is supposed to do that I often find myself wondering if it was too easy.
First off, it is very transparent. What this means is that you aren’t going to notice it adding any particular characteristics that weren’t there before you added it. When I boost or cut a frequency, all I hear is the music I am working with. I don’t get extra saturation, or color, or even “tube” sounds. This is critical. Plugins nowadays love to throw everything under the sun including the kitchen sink into everything. Every VST shouldn’t be it’s own workstation. The number of plugs I have that act like a DAW within a DAW make me feel like I am in a sonic Inception. Sometimes you just need specific tools that do one job, and only one job.
I like Pro-Q as a subtractive EQ mostly. It has a “listen” function that allows you to hear only the eq bandwidth you are going to affect. This can be widened or narrowed using the Q variable knob. This feature is so great, I can’t understand why it has not been universally adopted by all competitors. When I hear the low end as too muddy, I can sweep the eq with the listen button enabled until I find the dominant signal. Then I just cut the eq on either side. It’s also good for seeking out the finger noise in the high end of a bass guitar and boosting only that. This has been a very quick tool for getting things in the ballpark immediately after tracking to see if I have the right tones to work with. I invariably find rogue frequencies that can muddy the whole low end while shaking plates off the shelves around 250hz. By making a solid notch to the bass here I can provide a boost to clarity and punch without affecting anything else.
To be clear, the power of this program, in my eyes, are:
- You can hear only the frequency bandwidth you are working with easily and intuitively.
- It adds little if any color to your track.
- It has a very effective pre/post monitoring display that can help you identify trouble frequency buildups.
- Very low latency and ram usage. This means you can use it on every track if you need to.
In a perfect world you have the time, money, space, and equipment to get the perfect recording of a perfect take. But not only is this rarely realistic. Too much effort spent trying to achieve this can easily make the track more sterile.
The bottom line is that once you begin a track a countdown starts. If you don’t work quickly with precision to a satisfying conclusion, a downward spiral begins that is the race towards absolute perfection. This is a dead end usually, because even if you get there, it will be no different than attending your song’s funeral. It will be a dressed up and perfect sounding corpse. Lifeless and inert. -Trackhammer
Watch this video of me using Pro-Q for some critical adjustments in a mix to see what I mean.