4Applications
This section is designed to get you started with the DEQ230 by giving some sample settings. These are merely suggested settings; experiment and find your own once you begin to hear what the DEQ230 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.
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
•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
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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