Alesis PEQ-450 manual Applications, Rock Kick Drum, Vocal Air, Chapter

Chapter 4

Applications

This section is designed to get you started with the PEQ-450 by giving some sample settings. These are merely suggested settings, experiment and find your own once you begin to hear what the PEQ-450 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 EQed 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:

•Band 1 set to Low Shelf, boost +3dB at 80Hz

•Band 2 set to cut –8dB at 500Hz, Q set at 12 o’clock

•Band 5 set to High Shelf, boost +4dB at 6kHz

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.

• Band 1 set to High Shelf, boost +6dB at 15kHz

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