Filter VS EQ: Which, When, Why?

Written by Chris Cartledge

Okay, if one was better than the other, top flight mixers would only have one – right? Yet it tends to be the cream of the crop that feature both. Why is this, and when should you be using which?

BACK TO BASICS

Not to confuse you, but EQs are a form of filter. The bottom line is that a filter takes a sound input, applies a rule to it, and then outputs its modified version. Whether that’s an EQ/tone, low pass, high pass, band pass, notch, or any number of others, filter is as filter does – but when we talk about filters on DJ mixers we just mean that single knob that sweeps across the entirity of the track.

The image above represents a low pass filter’s frequency response. A DJ filter, when integrated into a mixer, is almost always, nowadays, a dual mode affair; the central detent is the off position and a clockwise and anti clockwise motion respectively take care of high and low pass filtering (the Vestax mixer in the header is an uncommon exception… but it’s a very pretty mixer so we thought it was worth the confusion. Allen & Heath have also traditionally used filters that switch modes with a button). ‘High pass’ and ‘low pass’ are pretty well termed in that they, as they are ramped up, have a progressively smaller guest list, so to speak, and the frequencies allowed through are whittled down until only the very lowest/highest are allowed past.

EQ, on the other hand, tends to have three ‘bands’ – think of them as areas of influence over frequencies in the track – but sometimes have two (ala the lower end Vestax PMC mixers) or even four (the Allen & Heath Xone 62/92, for instance), and the most notable thing that a DJ filter doesn’t do that the EQ section does is boost. All the filter does is reduce the amplitude of frequencies; turn your EQ clockwise and it will make the frequencies in its domain more powerful.

One of the big advantages to a filter is the way that there’s just the one knob to worry about. Mixing with a filter can be really subtle, because of the smoothness with which frequencies are added to (or taken away from) the mix.

Mixing with EQ brings with it the advantage of a high level of control, at the expense of the sweeping smoothness of a filter. Whilst it’s difficult to create a smooth sweeping frequency effect with channel EQ on account of the reality of dealing with a knob for every EQ band, it’s not only simpler to pinpoint a specific problem point or sweet spot with EQ but is the only way to isolate the mid range of your audio as well as both top and bottom end.

CHARACTER WITNESS

If all filters were born equal, then there’d be no arguments over who had the best – and we all know that’s not the case. A good DJ filter isn’t completely flat; a good DJ filter has character over and above simply ‘turning the sound down’. All the things that make one filter sound different to another are actually quite involved so we’ll leave the nitty gritty for another day,  but two of the big ones are steepness and resonance. The steeper a filter’s cutoff is, the harder frequencies are attenuated when they pass the threshold. An exceptionally steep filter will completely kill frequencies more or less as soon as they fall outside the cutoff point, whereas a gentler one will attenuate the frequencies smoothly as they’re cut out. This steepness curve is measured in dB per octave, and typically speaking DJ filters are quite, but not ruthlessly, steep. Resonance (often called Q) is the amount by which, just at the cusp of the cutoff point, frequencies are actually boosted with a little hump before they’re cut out. The more Q a filter has, the more of a warbly, ‘singing’ sound it creates as it’s turned, and this characterfulness creates two camps: those that love it, and the more the better, and those that hate it.

The smoother a filter, the more clinical and precise it is and thus the more accurate for using as a blend control, but at the same time the less musical it tends to sound. Different manufacturers and software developers give their filters different characteristics – and in this digital age, many are building in the opportunity to choose the style you prefer in settings.

TECHNIQUE

If you’re DJing with only the biggest, boldest, brightest confirmed dancefloor destroyers, and especially if they’ve never been out of the digital domain, using EQs for technical rather than creative reasons might be a foreign concept. If, however, your selections are a mixed bag of different eras, genres, formats – especially vinyl – and top-secret work in progress dubs, you’ll know that a little EQ goes a long way to bridging the gaps between how two tunes are mixed (and I mean mixed in the engineering sense here), and this is definitely the area in which EQ shines.

The ‘highs for high hats, mids for vocals and lows for bass’ mantra that many a DJ spits out whenever EQ is mentioned is a pretty big over-simplification, but it’s not one without foundations. Matching the levels of not just the general volume of the tracks you’re playing, but also their composition, will make for a smoother mix. Got some 80s house that just doesn’t thump as hard as 2011’s sonic pallet? Perhaps some bass is in order. The sound coming off your records a little harsh compared to the digital smoothness of your latest Beatport wavs? A little tweak to the mids should sort that out. You may even be the kind of perfectionist that, armed with the power to twist, stretch, and massage tracks, always has a hand hovering over the EQs to smooth out any changes in the tracks. But with all this technical tweaking, your EQ dials resembling the London/New York/Sydney world clocks in a high end board room, how do you fit in the creative frequency fiddling without losing your consistency? You guessed it.

DJ filters are, I’m fairly sure without exception, post-EQ (please let us know if you know any otherwise!). Whatever those EQ dials are doing, they’re doing it before the sound gets into the filter. This means that the filter’s effect on the track remains consistent no matter what’s going on up there, and so you can use the EQs to dial in the perfect character for the track – the setting at which all your tracks match each other tonally – and leave the filter to provide the artistic flair and frequency led mixing and blends.

TOP TEN TIPS FOR SUCCESSFUL SOUND SCULPTURE

• Don’t forget your gain when you EQ!
• Use filters to allow you to make creative sweeps to the track and still be able to go back to the tuned EQ setting.
• Experiment with the filter Q types available to you to find your favourite.
• If you use a chunky Q, ride it rhythmically to get the track to ‘sing’!
• If you don’t have filters available on your gear, practice using your EQs to get a sweeping effect by twisting the high, then high and mid, then mid and low, then low down to the bottom (or vice versa).
• A filter sweep to bring a track in can sometimes sound a lot more natural than fading it in with the volume fader.
• If you mix out by using filters, be wary of the filter not totally closing the track out; always finish a mix with a volume fader to avoid issues.
• If your mixer doesn’t have mid EQ but you need some mid-range adjustment, try boosting high and low while cutting gain or vice versa.
• Use filters for creative effect; ‘pump’ the filter rhythmically to make tracks wobble much more than an EQ tweak.
• Remember: mix the overall sound of the tracks together with EQs, and then use filters to perform sweeps and blends

Originally posted: http://www.djtechtools.com/2011/12/07/filter-vs-eq-which-when-why/

Studio Talk: GummiHz chats about some of his work

Since 2006 Alexander Tsotsos aka GummiHzhas been steadily working on his mixture of House and Techno through imprints like Mobilee records, Treibstoff and Earthrumental. With several years of classic guitar training and a couple of teenage garage bands, he was introduced to DJing which instantly became his passion. His "Sapfo" EP only recently came out on his brand new Claap imprint. Time for some studio talk with Alexander about some of his productions:

GummiHz & Nikola Gala "Sapfo" [Claap]

I must say that Nikola is one of the very few people I managed to work with in the studio as usually I prefer sending an idea back and forth so people can work on it on their own time. This one though was done so seamlessly. Nikola was visiting me in May for a week. So we thought of working on some tracks together. We had the main groove running practically within an hour or so. And I was very surprised how easily it was for us to work together. Then we had to do a bit of research so that we could find the right theme to develop over it. It was then when we decided to use something, which reflects our cultural inheritance as we are both Greek. So we looked for a few themes coming from poems written during the byzantine years. That’s around 1400 ac. We heard it and we know on that instant that it was what we wanted for the track. I am so happy we managed to use the Greek language creatively so it can work in a set even if you don’t speak the language. Nice one Nikola!





GummiHz feat. Emena "Love Call" [Mobilee]
Love call was my first attempt to sing on top of a groove and actually considering it for releasing. I enjoy a lot singing at home but never really went for a vocal of mine. It was kind of funny that at the time of production I was in quiet an upset psychological state so all of the lyrics came out in one take! Then I had to listen to the track over and over to take down the lyrics! So basically the whole vocal is pure instinct. After I played it to a few friends of mine, they were all encouraging me to keep the vocal as it really made an impression. So I decided to do so and name the singer “emena” which in Greek means myself. So if you do the maths its like GummiHz feat. Emena = GummiHz feat. Myself!!


GummiHz "High On Percussion" [Earthrumental]
This record came out in 2009. It is the outcome of some sessions I had with Bayogar. An african percussionist I met through good friend Argy. I remember Bayogar taking a whole percussive orchestra out of his trunk. I was shocked. A cup of coffee and a good discussion later Bayogar was really high on percussion. After a few hours recording and a lot of editing, High on percussion was produced. I sent it to Franck at Earthrumental and he loved it and asked me to make a couple of drum tools for the record also. Easy thing when you have the whole track ready. Having a huge love for tribal tracks, I am very proud for this record as it is was my first tribal record. And I must say I love rhythmic tracks. They are always useful for sets. I just prefer that the drums are, or sound, real rather than placed bongo hits on a grid!!

HOW TO GET A THICK ANALOGUE SOUND.

Thick Sound

Working in music or learning to, you hear a lot of "funny" words: fat, warm... thick... organic. These descriptive words often have quite different meaning from one person to the next and that makes it kinda confusing trying to decipher what you need to know. Words like these are used because, since the days of tape and big desks, through to the time of digital DAW's, we have lost something that we haven’t quite had the lexicon to explain, or an understanding of how to express what we mean. For a long time the digital purist protested it was all in our heads, and in some ways it was. We had lost an array of subtle distortions and effects that gave audio a certain texture, a certain human / organic nature. When you hear a song - and the sound just seems so thick, so physical in coming out of the speaker and sounds so cohesive and real you may wonder how that level of production is achieved. What you’re hearing there could be any number of subtle distortions and effects. We will cover a few ways of bringing these into your production in this blog.

Harmonics

Harmonics are truly wonderful; they make up the character and soul of many real instruments and hardware. They are what makes a violin and a guitar sound different, and allow us to hear the differences between different materials in the real world. (Yes, that strange place outside the studio) They are also incredibly useful when working on a mix, one of the biggest mistakes people make is hearing a track with a HUGE sub bass and slaving away trying to fit massive amounts of sub energy into their mix and ending up stuck in a mire of bogged down energy as the mix falls apart.
How do they do it? Well the trick is, they aren’t putting loads of sub in their mix, and it just sounds like they are... Sounds confusing but let me explain: if you have a strong bass and you want it to fit in and flow nicely, get hold of a distortion plugin or a foot pedal to run your bass through; what this distortion will do is create harmonics that sit higher up in the frequency spectrum than the actual fundamental of the bass, but you will find the sound is still jelled and sounds like it has a heavy sub element even when you filter or eq the subs down a bit to sit in your groove nicely. So in effect you can have less 70 Hz.....more 140 Hz but it still sounds as deep and subby as it needs to without bogging down your mix with all the low frequency energy.

Physical sound

When you listen back to older tracks, they often sound more real and by real I mean literally physically coming out of the speaker. (Not in a modern “so loud your ears bleed” way either). What’s happening here is the equipment used is all imparting its tell-tale signature on the sound. Little bits of dynamic compression, harmonics and other distortions are all moulding the sound in almost imperceptible ways. In the end all this adds up and adds gravity, power and musicality to your mix if done well. Often the beneficial effects of subtle distortions can be impossible to discern in isolation or A/B tests, but the cumulative effects are often stunning and strike a deep chord with the human part of the listener. We have grown up with these distortions not only in the old records, but in our real lives - nothing you hear is without some sort of distortion, harmonic or vibration.

If you’re looking to get a mix that jumps out of the speakers, is highly dynamic and has more presence, then subtle distortion and drive on your samples may be what’s missing. You can often bring more power to you mix by giving each sound a subtle treatment of Tape, Tube, Clipping your A/D or other types of distortion. Working this way is a good way to start stamping your own character on a production.

Warmer Audio

I spent a lot of time working on and developing a sample pack recently. When creating the drum sounds it was important that they be full of character, presence and vibe and offer producers an edge. There are a lot of digital ways to create interesting sounds, but to get a vibrant and musical sound, analogue distortion can be one of your most powerful tools. Sometimes it’s enough to use just a touch to give the sound a different edge, and affect the attack portion enough to sound pleasing.

MPC Crunch

One of the tones I turned to first was the famous MPC sound. The Akai MPC units have been making their name since the late 80's and well into the 90's through to the present day. What set them apart is an almost Lo-fi crunchy sound most often found in Hip Hop, Rap and Electronic music like House. This sound defined a genre and set the tone for a lot of full bodied and punchy sounding music. In sampling percussion through an MPC I was able to give the sound more percussive energy and interest. Just the very act of running your samples through the machine can impart a little bit of a signature on your audio through a combination of the internal workings of the machine and the A/D convertors of your Pre-Amp taking the audio back into your project. and if you’re using the right equipment this can be very musical.

Tape Warmth

Tape has been much loved for years. The word warmth may as well have been invented to describe the loveliness tape can bestow upon your music. In professional circles STUDER machines were amongst others used to record some of the timeless hits of yesterday. What tape actually does to your audio is very complex, with the machines often having many stages, magnetic heads etc. It’s no wonder it took so long for companies making digital tools to come close to offering the tone you can get from a tape machine in your computer. When working this tone is probably one of the most useful to have at your disposal - the warm vibey sound is really what house music is all about. I had the chance to work with the Studer A800 and the REVOX machines; each has its own character and offers slightly different variations due to different internal components and the way they work.

When you are producing the most important thing to have in abundance is choice. Even subtle choices between two different machines can help you blend things and get that physical sounding nature to your recordings. Often with tape you lose a bit of the high end off your recording as it affects the top frequencies. That, along with a slight compression of the audio, and, depending how hard you’re driving it, some harmonic distortion can really add a noticeable thickness to you sound.

Distortion is real

As I mentioned earlier, distortion is a natural thing, it’s a physics thing inherent in everything around us and prominent with hardware components and processes. That’s why sometimes I think, with our excellent speakers and digitally perfect sound, things can sound a little cold coming straight out of a soft synth, and that makes it sound unreal because it’s never been bent to the will of the world, is unrealistic or too perfect. A good analogy for this would be the uncanny valley theory. Even the craziest sounds benefit from a humanity and physicality. You will see a lot of soft synth makers nowadays adding in analog emulation routines and code, some quite good too! We are in an age where computers are finally becoming powerful enough to start to emulate these complex interactions.

I like to think of it like this, when audio production went digital we ended up with a metaphorical DATA from Star Trek! It looked like a human and spoke like one, but it couldn’t feel emotions, and didn’t do all the tiny little weird things us humans do, it wasnt quite human. That’s why people said digital audio sounded cold, as it was missing something. We had to learn how to program-in all those little quirks that hardware did automatically and that has taken a long time.

Subtlety is the key

When working with distortion it’s important to know what your aim is, as there are two uses. If you want to go all out and make big rock music sounds, we will cover that in the next section. For everything else, all tonal sculpting and imparting character to your audio, it’s important to know that sometimes you don’t really need to hear it much, don’t overdo it. A good technique to follow is to increase your effect till you can audibly hear it, then back it off until you cannot. The effect you’re looking for is often more subtle than you think and if your mix down is tight, the smallest changes have the biggest impact.

Creative distortion.

That said, if you want to crank it to 11 and drive it into oblivion, distortion is also your friend. This creative use of distortion can often provide some incredibly large tones to work with. A good tip if you’re working this way is to have an EQ and Filter before you go into the distortion, small changes before can be magnified by the distortion and yield massive tonal changes for more creative inspiration.

What analogue distortion offers you.

For a producer working in todays often overly clean, modern world, distortion offers you something that is sorely missing. It doesn't matter if you buy a pack of sounds that have been crafted to include this element or have splashed out on a foot pedal or even a vintage tape machine. Even the latest software emulation are getting useful on modern pcs. The most important thing is you are aware of this dimension and what it adds to your music; power, physicality, presence, warmth and it will sound more natural to your listeners so subconsciously they will find it easier to connect with your music.

Tuesdays Tech Tips: Logic Voice Sampling..

Playing Melodies With Voice Samples in Logic..

In this tutorial, producer/DJ and Dubspot Senior Logic Instructor Matt Shadetek shows you how to manipulate, re-pitch, and process vocal samples using Logic Pro 9’s ESX24 Sampler and Pitch Correction plug-in. Utilizing one of the vocal samples that comes with Logic, Shadetek slices each individual note of the sample, converts them into a sampler instrument. Shadetek delves into the ESX24 Instrument Editor, in order to re-pitch the vocal samples and make them playable across the keyboard. He then utilizes Logic’s Pitch Correction plug-in (similar to Antares Auto-tune), which he uses to refine the pitch of the re-pitched notes. At the end of the tutorial, you should have a strong grasp of how to take a sample and play your own melody with it in Logic’s EXS24 sampler.

Tuesdays Tech Tips: Ableton & Maschine video tutorials....

Tuesdays Tech Tips: Mixing & Mastering .......

Here are some tips on Mastering.... from Daniel Wyatt. For all my producers who are just starting out, my advice is never master your own music but you can clean up your mixdown with these tools...

Production Tips: Helpful all-round...

Saw This article over at nodoughmusic and thought of all the aspiring producers I know....... Heres some dope tips guys.... :-)

It’s the little things that matter most.

This week’s No Dough Music Blog focuses on the small things in a track, the little changes, instabilities and accidental mistakes which make some music great, and how extra attention to detail can really benefit your production.

Velocity & Modulation

These are both about movement, I touched on velocity in my previous blog and made quite a contentious point: that good music is "believable". I would like to clarify and expand on that idea a little.
When I referred to making your music more believable, I referred to the way our minds imagine and expect little traits found in the real world and in the way real things sound. I was not suggesting for example that all music should be comparable to something that could be done with instruments and a band.
In fact a better way of putting it would be to say, that even in the most fantastically unreal piece of music, whose sole intent is to take you to another world and sound like nothing else, even in that music we still look for the subtle variations in movement and tone that makes it sound alive and believable to us. Think of it as like the smaller details in a storybook that make the whole book's world come to life in our imagination.

Working in finer detail in terms of Velocity and Modulation can help foster an organic and fluid nature to your music. Songs that live forever as classics that you never get bored of are ALL about the small things, with an often obsessive attention to detail.

Playing Things In & Jamming.

If you have a midi keyboard this is a must, if you don’t then you must buy one. Getting your groove on and playing things in is one of the more fun ways of getting some humanity into your tracks. It Doesn't matter if you’re a virtuoso and it comes really easy to you (although that can help) or you’re new to the whole game and you find the whole concept daunting, don’t worry, even the most ham-fisted of us will find a lot of value in having a go.

Play in your percussive parts using a midi keyboard or some drum pads, record in your FX automation rather than program it in by hand. If you set up your project and your controllers in a sensible way, so as to give you hands on access to things like Delay Sends, Filter Cut-offs and Resonance, you will find things flowing more musically and just working out a lot easier and a lot quicker too, even if you do have to do some tidying up of the midi you recorded. What’s more, this improvisation can really help you stamp some individuality on your song and make it stand out. It's easy to get sucked into programming all your beats, and sometimes it’s impossible not to program them... but do take every opportunity to stamp your name on things where you can.

When working like this you will find that you automatically do a lot of things naturally without thinking, things that are incredibly musical, like varying the velocity of your percussion with the groove or subtle filter sweeps. A lot of stuff you do automatically would be incredibly complex to program from scratch. It's this you’re capturing, and it will translate directly into your music.

VINYL UNDER THE MICROSCOPE

Groove & Humanisation tools

Even on the earliest of Drum Machines there were always controls to add swing or shuffle and to Accent certain hits. It’s important to have a nice tight kick drum to drive the tracks on, but there’s something off-putting if everything is too straight and too static. Off-putting is probably the wrong word, boring is probably more apt. Even in the most industrial techno it is all about the groove, and often the groove is brought alive by some well-placed off-grid notes. Modern sequencers are a treasure trove when it comes to groove tools, often providing many different options to play around with. Do not under-use these tools. A touch of swing to your beats can be the difference between boring and engrossing, it’s as simple as that. Don’t be afraid to move notes by hand off the snap grid, or even play stuff in to find where the groove really comes together.

If you look at Abletons groove system each pre-set groove also features Velocity movements and the ability to add a little bit of Random movement in, which can be great to loosen things up a little. These controls are once again a way of replicating the things us humans do naturally.

But remember if a dead straight groove is part of your artistic direction, and you spend the time to make it sound interesting and work in your song then that’s not a crime either.

Variations & Repetitions

We all have shorter attention spans than we care to admit, and long unchanging, unemotional sections can make people literally stop listening. When listening to a demo, one of the first decisions a label's A&R guy will make is to ask himself is this interesting enough to continue listening.

Now there are a lot of elements that come together in the answer to that question, one of the main ones is the quantity and quality of variations in what’s going on in your track. Sometimes just changing one or two hits in your beat is enough; sometimes you will need to have a more extensive change in the form of a fill or a break to keep it going. Whatever you do, keep it changing, altering and moving, as the effect that change can have on how engrossing your music is can be powerful. Sometimes just moving away from the strong beat for a couple of bars and then coming back to that same beat can sound like a whole new section in itself. The best repetitive & hypnotic tracks are built on the suspense and tension built when going away from, and coming back to its main repetitive elements in subtle and less than subtle ways, or having the actual repeating element morph and change over time.

Layering

Layering is a very powerful tool if you want to build up a dense and interesting sonic "landscape" with your music. The subtle interactions and differences between 2 sounds when played together can add a bespoke sound to your music. Use filters and eq to allow different sounds to dominate different frequencies in your layered sound and create something much more complex and fresh.

Record, Jam & Improvise

As I mentioned earlier having a jam with your music, putting yourself in the position where you perform more of your music, is a great way to really add musicality and individuality to it. Sometimes once I have some basic ideas down, I will start by hitting record and doing a little performance with the Faders and the mutes, to see what kind of ideas I can get going for the arrangement. Some modern software even allows you to trigger specific elements or patterns.
By recording 30 minutes of pure improvisation in a rough form, you can often listen back and hear sections with good ideas that help you get a good foothold on your arrangement, and the ideas once again flow very naturally and musically compared to when you program things in.

The “Lucky Mistake”.

One thing that’s probably THE MOST IMPORTANT thing in music

“The Lucky Mistake”

We have all sat there, having worked for hours without much inspiration, and then suddenly we are enjoying an amazing sound coming from our speakers after accidentally knocking over a keyboard or hit the wrong key. Not really knowing how we made it but just enjoying it and then comes the flood of new ideas, buzzing around our minds.

Every single musician in the world has a story about some part in some track they made by accident and how it’s one of the parts they enjoy the most. The more you work and perform in little bits of your music, the more often you will have these inspiring little musical mistakes, if you are ever stuck on a song or you have started to feel jaded about it that’s the time to start ripping it apart and jamming with it...with record firmly switched on.
If you can't seem to find the right rhythm for your hats, record in a few minutes of you playing them in or if your breakdown and main section are not really cutting the mustard get playing with the faders and muting some parts and somewhere in there, you will find the answer...of that I am certain.