Alesis DEQ830 manual Applications, General EQ tips, Rock Kick Drum, Vocal Air, Tape Hiss Removal

4Applications

This section is designed to get you started with the DEQ830 by giving some sample settings. These are merely suggested settings; experiment and find your own once you begin to hear what the DEQ830 does to your sound.

In a way, it’s absurd to suggest EQ settings without knowing what the source sounds like. EQ is a tool that’s used to change the timbre of a sound, and it’s impossible to suggest an EQ setting that, for example, will make all guitars sound better. So the goal of this section is to give you some ideas for using EQ on your own tracks.

General EQ tips

Rock Kick Drum

A rock and roll kick drum is usually EQ’d quite a bit to make it sound the way it does on the radio. Usually an engineer will choose to cut some of the woofy low-midrange, while boosting the high- end "slap" and maybe even some of the lows. Here is a setting to try on a close-miked kick drum:

•Select all frequencies below 80Hz and boost 3dB

•Cut 500Hz by 8dB

•Boost all frequencies above 5kHz by 4dB

You may also want to apply some compression and gating with the

Alesis CLX-440.

Vocal Air

A popular effect on vocals is to boost the high frequencies to add "air" to the vocal. This is an especially popular effect on ballads sung by R&B divas. This effect is achieved by boosting the high frequencies:

•Boost 16 kHz by 6dB

•Boost 20 kHz by 6dB

Tape Hiss Removal

If a recording has a lot of tape hiss, such as one transferred from cassette, you can usually get rid of it by dropping the high frequencies a bit:

• Select all frequencies from 8kHz up and cut them by 6dB

Adjust the gain of different bands to compromise between keeping the high end of the recording and eliminating tape hiss.

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