Audio Recording

Some beginners find it hard to translate the EQ setting suggested in this website to their own DAW software. Most of the tutorials here are using Adobe Audition, Audacity and some featuring Sony Soundforge. While these softwares are very popular, there are also so many users that are using other great DAW software such as Cubase.

One particular newbie question such as below:

Hello Emerson,

I recently found your website and I am slowly learning many things from it for my own home recordings. You are excellent instructor. Thank you. One thing I am trying to understand and learn is EQ. I use Cubase and the EQ I have (I attached photo with this email) and I read your article about EQ and about Q and I am confused so need to ask you a few questions so you can help me.

1) How do I set or find the Q in my EQ? Which is the Q button on my EQ? If I click on EQ1 for example, I get band filter and thats all, it doesn’t tell me the Q setting? Is it the top 0.0 number or the bottom 0.2 number?

2) In your wonderful article on guitar mixing you mention:

Freq1: 160Hz, high pass filter, Cut 6dB
Freq2: 3000Hz, Cut 9dB, Q 1.0

For freq. 1 – would I use EQ1 to set the 160Hz/ 6db cut? And what would “Q” be?
For freq2: – Do I use EQ3 to set 3000Hz/ 9 db cut?

And can each of the filters/EQs overlap?

Sorry for my questions and I hope you can help me.

Joe

Reply:

Parametric equalizers works the same regardless whether they are software or hardware based EQ. If you are completely new to parametric equalization, I highly recommend you will read these following tutorials:

Parametric Equalization Theory
How to use a parametric equalizer

Once you get familiar with parametric EQ, it is now the time to use it in practice. Your first question:

1) How do I set or find the Q in my EQ? Which is the Q button on my EQ? If I click on EQ1 for example, I get band filter and thats all, it doesn’t tell me the Q setting? Is it the top 0.0 number or the bottom 0.2 number?

Since you are using Cubase, see the screenshot below and you will see know where you can find the Q settings, the boost or cut as well as the center frequency settings:

In your screenshot provided , it is the one with 0.2 setting which is the Q. The topmost number is the boost and cut settings. The center value lets you adjust the center frequency. Try adjusting the Q and assigning a reasonble boost, as you lower the Q, the bandwidth of the boost tends to widen, such as shown in the screenshot below:

In your second question: For freq. 1 – would I use EQ1 to set the 160Hz/ 6db cut? And what would “Q” be?

My recommended setting is: Freq1: 160Hz, high pass filter, Cut 6dB, take note that this is a “high pass filter”. You do not need to set Q value for a high pass filter or even a low pass filter. What you will do is to set your Cubase EQ in high pass filter mode for a specific frequency cut off (in this case 160Hz):

Photo credits: Sound on Sound

In the screenshot above, the cut off of the high pass filter is set to 54Hz, do the same but using 160Hz as the setting. For more details you can read this detailed tutorial on doing high pass/low pass filters using Cubase built-in EQ. Your other question: For freq2: – Do I use EQ3 to set 3000Hz/ 9 db cut?. Yes, just set the center frequency to 3000Hz with 9dB cut and Q setting of 1.0 using the techniques discussed previously. And your last question: And can each of the filters/EQs overlap?. Possibly, do not worry about it; just do the settings as suggested and leave it the Cubase EQ to automatically compensate for the possible overlapping. Finally use your ear to judge if the EQ setting is right.