EQ offsetting question

C

ChorazaiM

New member
This may seem strange, but what I'm after is some sort of plugin/filter (be it VST or DirectX) that can analyze a waveform and reset each frequency to zero - sort of the opposite of EQing a sound : bringing everything back to 0db in each range. Anyone know of such a beast? I suppose the more difficult/time consuming method would be to use Wavelab to get a visual representation of the wave and then tweak it via a 20 band EQ so that everything's approximately the same, but I can't help thinking that no matter how crazy a notion this may be, someone else must have also had this thought before ;] Any takers?
 
The problem might be knowing what 'flat' is.
For example, would it add a bunch of highs to a naturally dull instrument, then turn around and kill a nice sharp Twin reverb sound?
wayne
 
I've never heard of such a device but I guess they could exist. Just out of curiosity why would you want to do that?

That is essentially what compression and limiting do.
 
Well you could use Steinbergs Freefilter to do this. The only trick (maybe) would be finding a flat source file to duplicate the EQ of. I Believe pink noise has somewhat of a flat spectrum or maybe you could use "no" source file and that would give you a flat reponse.
 
Thanks for all the replies/feedback. Mostly I'm interested in this effect as an experiment in radically strange mixing - equalizing all signals to a common zero ground (so that every instrument occupies all frequencies equally), and then tweaking each to occupy a certain range only. Granted, each sound would naturally do this without any EQ (occupy a given range more prominantely that is), but I'm not interested in an instrument's "natural" sound per se...
 
I'm assuming you understand that a sound that occupies all frequencies equally is white noise and a sound that only occupies a specific fequency is a sine wave. Neither of which are considered very musical sounding.

Acoustic sounds create a constantly changing frequency picture. There is no baseline to match them up against (full volume or no volume?) and if you could you would need an EQ that was able to constantly adjust to the changing frequencies.

But good luck :D
 
High!

You don't really need to get some 'zero' first... Just play with an EQ with sweepable bell filters to find the frequencies you like for your instruments. Write them down. Then compare to the freqs of the other tracks and cut off what you don't think is important. If you have 'collisions', decide what is the more important tracks and give this it's 'main' (i.e. most important) frequency.

This way is a very formal way to rasie the discrimination between instruments. You can get rather 'airy' mixes with it. I tried it on two songs, as I wanted to experience how good I could separate instruments in mono. But I had to enhance the effect by additionally using different verbs for all tracks (or rather different blends of the same eraly refl and verb tail). In the end I had to pan a little (max 11 and 1 o'clock) to get separation. Everone but me hated the mixes. They were rather artificial sounding. Perhaps I used too much additive EQing instead of subtractive - I don't know.

Hope this helps...

Axel
 
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