Fabfilter Pro Q3: Why is everyone in love with this thing?

hey there Jeff Manchester Manchester music welcome in this video I'm gonna talk about a tool that I have been asked to talk about for a long time it's the fabfilter pro-q 3 or the third iteration generation of this tool it's one that I see pretty much everywhere if I'm in the West if I'm in Japan Post Music Studio doesn't matter this thing always pops up on the screen people love it and when I say people have been asking me about it for a while it's because I use a plug-in from isotope called Neutron I use that EQ a lot I know it very well it's no surprise I work for iZotope so people tend to go for the things that are familiar to them that they know well that just gets the job done regardless of hype or heritage this plug-in has a lot of the fat filter one has a ton of hype so I got my hands on it and I want to talk about a plugin in this video in a very in-depth way almost kind of reviewing it walking through the critical features the bells the whistles the weaknesses and the strengths as well so let's get into it decays so beautifully the spectrum now this is the fabfilter pro-q 3 the first thing you should know about this is it is resizable it's one of the things people absolutely love about this plugin is the resize ability it's not resizable completely in that you can you know shrink it down to the size of the logo here the smallest it gets is MIDI and that's pretty small and the biggest it gets is the second biggest is extra large and the largest is fullscreen I just click that little button there to make it the entire canvas of my monitor ok it's resizable with a caveat though because if you're in logic you're dealing with a you audio units as the plugin format if you're in VST 3 you can drag and that'll kind of bring it bigger and smaller if you're an au you have to go by this little menu here so for the Cubase users out there for the Ableton users you guys can just drag this and bring it as you know as big or small as you need it to be so that's one of the things people love about this guy resizable you know elegant interface here let's talk about the interface let's talk about how we actually add nodes to the frequency scale the way that it works is you can either click on the line and drag up to add them you can double-click to add them like that and it just becomes really easy and fluid especially when you're dealing with spectra and you see something and you want to take care of it so let's do that now so I want to add a node maybe right here a double click and there's the node could hit command and fine-tune the queue so that's super helpful so you just click and add you don't click and then a node happens I'm clicking right now you can't see it you have to click and drag which makes sense right because when you're actioning stuff in an EQ you're often you know clicking and dragging because you know right away I want to boost I want to cut at 1 or whatever so that's how that works and you can kind of cancel things out by dragging making a selection and hitting X or you can just you know make a bunch of selections here let me just do that one more time and then you can go what I do is often skip out of the default and skip back to it and 0 is everything out the other thing that I think is important kind of a minor feature of the fabfilter pro-q 3 is that the node addition is context specific what I mean by this is depending on where you click in this area you will add a different kind of filter shape and this is cool because this saves you time if you're doing work from let's say 50 to 10,000 Hertz there's a good chance you're going to be just kind of doing bail stuff dipping boosting cutting you know going surgical here with the queue that sort of thing but if you're hanging out in this region there's a good chance you're going to be high passing so watch what happens when I click all the way over here on the left of the screen and start to drag it turns it into a low shelf right away and that's kind of cool if I click and drag here look at the the heads-up display that we're going to see in a moment if I click I'm just zero it up first if I click and drag here in the middle of the screen we get a bell there's a bell and there's a bell right there this is because most people when their eq includes this region from instruments that don't need to be muddy and don't need to have low end so they're gonna do a low shelf or a high pass move anyway so why not just have this automatically texts we show up as a shelf same thing is true on the top end most of the time people are going to be adding sparkle you know so why not have a high shelf show up immediately or maybe they're kind of cutting out stuff so they can do that but that's a nice way to save time and do context specific kind of note addition and the same thing is true here in the middle most of the time we're boosting cutting right so we're gonna do some bells so that is helpful and a kind of handy feature that I don't know if is exclusive to the fabfilter pro-q 3 but one that I wanted to call out now actually adding nodes we see a couple of cool little things emerge we see to HUD's what our HUDs and you could ask that question HUD's or heads-up displays and we have two of them in fabfilter we have this smaller one we'll call it a micro heads-up display and we have this larger macro heads-up display and this is a different kind of behavior for people doing parametric EQ work usually there's a line at the bottom of the screen with the filter shapes and cue and cutoff and frequency and all that stuff fabfilter it's pretty clean we're dealing with just a little heads-up display so that we have is uncluttered a kind of canvas as possible and you're just dealing with little you know little kind of widgets that control your nodes here and as you click away they kind of disappear and stuff I'm gonna turn off the help tooltips I'll click here and just turn them off with them on they will obviously populate the right side of the screen when you hover over something important and tell you what it is that it does although I can make it do it now there we go so just for the sake of this we're gonna turn this guy off click there boom now it's gone let's zero back let's talk about the HUDs so we have a mini mini kind of HUD and a macro HUD micro and macro hood so this is helpful because let's say you just want to make moves and changes from here and you don't want a lot of information on the bottom of the screen when you add a node the two of them show up but I can click away and then that one disappears and I just have this one to deal with and from here we can turn the node on and off and this is a good way to audition some kind of cut so let's just cancel out of this one I'll click on this one we'll click away so we don't see that macro HUD and let's see what this sounds like in the context of the make [Music] it's a nice way to just kind of audition a change and let's bring that up again we can change the shape so we can change from these shapes down here we have Belle we have shelves we have high cut low cut notches and a couple new little features new shapes exclusive to the pro q3 a shelf and and stuff like that and we have frequency information here as we slide around we can see those values change as we go up and down in the from left to right here in the scale tells you how many you're going up or down in decibels right and we have the Q which we can change with that kind of command thing that I showed you a minute ago we can also solo to hear if there might be some kind of irregularity some overabundance of energy or something and use this node as a kind of flashlight so I'll do that now it's kind of nice that I can just drag around from the headphone icon so that's kind of cool we can do all that from this node but if we go to the bottom macro the kind of larger HUD we have a more sophisticated set of controls we can turn things on and off like this just like we did earlier we can get a bit more of a visual and a naming structure here in the band shapes which is kind of cool so now it's a flat tilt tilt shelf bandpass notch I cut blah blah blah blah blah we can move things around from here so we can keep our mouse down at the bottom of the screen and just keep our eyes on what's happening in the spectra as we move I can bring the gain up and down as well and we can fix the Q fine-tune it narrow it cetera one of the things I like about the HUDs is if I go and go to preset for example I just clicked and it just brings you to the drums because it's alphabetical if we're doing work from the HUDs the macro HUDs I can you see this little icon here for I can click around and you'll see that we're able to go and control the nodes without actually moving and clicking on them from the heads-up display which is kind of nifty so you'll see that the color of the macro heads-up display changes to represent what node that you're working on so Green is green that's our our node here at where is it a hundred Hertz and then we can go over here now we're dealing with this kind of purple node which is kind of cool and we can make moves and it's just nice and kind of fluid inconsistent and that's pretty handy we also have that's the one thing that kind of annoys me it'll kind of jump over when you're when you mouse over so let's say we're over here and we do some work or like I want to add this and boost this and then you kind of go away and it shifts on you which is kind of annoying but whatever just keep your mouse in this field of the macro HUD and it won't do that the thing that people really love about fabfilter and I'll get to this now is the fact that you can add channel specific nodes to your track or master bus wherever you have the fat filter on this means I can click here and designate the next node that I add as an O that affects the side channel the mid channel both the left and right channels or just the right or just the left channel so here's how it works let's add a new node and we're gonna go over here and designate it as a side note so now we're just affecting the side of the sides of the site the the sides of the audio and we see the little s kind of thing emerged we won't see an icon if it's stereo it's just going to be yellow to say stereo we can make it right channel left channel and people like to do this I thought I find mid side and left right work is more for kind of surgically cueing I'm pretty good with just stereo but for the people want those options they can can get him here which is pretty pretty nice and one of those things that fat filter zq does really well and is beloved for in addition to the whole like interface and resize ability people really love that they're able to do this so let's now talk about what's we talked about what's inside right of this display let's talk about what's on the border all these controls and they're pretty pretty advanced so one of the cool things starting from the bottom left we'll work our way to the right is that we have this piano roll and this shows us where the nodes fall in relation to an 88 key grand piano and this is kind of cool if you're doing kind of specific tuning stuff you want to bring out just the part of the kick drum that's in key with the overall song you want to kind of bring that out or boost it and of course you'll see that we have blue corresponding to in this case this note here and then this kind of lighter green band six you know G 1 and then G 2 if we want to drag the nodes around to correspond very specifically to a certain note if it's on the wrong one we can just drag the node like this and then just have it kind of map and a lock on to the piano roll so that's kind of nifty now if you're so inclined to control the pro q3 from a surface of some kind you with a fader or potentiometer you want to go to MIDI learn and then you would basically click it and then roll the pot or bring the filter up and down or sorry the the fader up and down of what you want to control a node or whatever and then it'll kind of learn that and you can kind of map things to controls on your surface which is you know cool if you want to do that I never do that I'm kind of cool just using my finger and my trackpad and boosting and cutting that way but if you're so inclined there you go I'm gonna turn the help tooltips on here for the next one because we have three modes here zero latency natural phase and linear phase you'll want to go to the documentation to understand what these modes do in terms of their impact to your EQ work and just kind of read what you need and what you're going to be getting out of them because depending on the activity you're pursuing one mode one processing mode might be more beneficial than another I usually leave things on zero latency mode personally but a lot of people love linear phase although that does or that can introduce introduce a little bit of latency or pre ringing falfa fabfilter have great videos on their website about all these modes what they do and how the behavior of the eq is affected and the sound in turn is affected depending on the mode that you choose so I'm just gonna turn the tooltips off we'll leave this here on zero latency mode as that's what I kind of prefer using so here's where we get into the bells and whistles we have this thing this analyzer here and we have a bunch of different features going from left to right and this is kind of the guts of like the cool stuff of the pro q I think so first of all we have the pre and post and this is a good way for you to keep track of the changes that your EQ moves are making on your well your track or your master bus or whatever if I turn them both off and play some audio we're not going to see anything if I turn the prion we're gonna see the EQ of four or the spectra before any EQ moves are done if I turn the post on we'll see after EQ moves are done and notice how you don't see any changes right sheet this gray and then we see this excuse me we see this gray and that we see this trace outline in white representing our moves after now why don't we see any changes why does it look the same because we're not really doing anything to this EQ so let's do something let's cut here and let's boost here [Music] so now that we have our pre and post on here's the EQ spectra before we made any moves and here's after so you'll notice here that that trace is lower because we've attenuated signal to I'd say around three DB or so 2.5 DB in the low end and the trace here is higher than the great race because we've boosted the signal if you just want to see it without the context of the pre you can do that or you can turn it on and this is just a really nice way to keep track of the effect that you're boosting and cutting your gain changes are imparting on your spectra so you can see what's going on and maybe you need to narrow the cue a little bit get more focused because surrounding frequencies are being affected by your moves you know etc etc so that's that's what those mean that's what those do we you'll notice that when I started this we had external spectrum on and that's because we can take a look at something else spectra of some other aspect of the mix wherever you happen to have a pro-q and you can take a look at what it's frequency profile is in relation to the one that you're working on and this is kind of an interesting cross talk between plugins that's really cool so let's say for example I have a fabfilter pro-q throughout my piano melody right now which is up here right there so we see it sitting there so I can see what the frequency of the piano is in relation to the overall stereo out so you know it's kind of interesting right I can turn it off or turn it on I guess the violin as well so that's just the violin or we can turn off or we can sidechain something in and do that but this way we can kind of get a glance at the frequency profile of different aspects or we can turn it off so in the pro q3 fabfilter have stepped it up even more to show you a phenomenon called masking and this is when two things are kind of getting in the way of each other and they're appearing together in the same place let's say both at 500 Hertz maybe the left hand of a piano and I don't know a bass guitar when those two things collide usually one of them is going to be less audible it's gonna be masked by the other it's like two people standing for a photograph if one person is in front of the other you can't really see them so you have to move them out of the way of each other you see they can both be kind of in the frame the same thing can be true sometimes if he cueing to things get in the way we can't really perceive one better than the other but masking is not a perfect science and it's not always a bad thing but if it is happening you might want to know that it's happening and to see if it's happening you go to this analyzer and you click over here and remember we loaded in all these other EQ spectra from the violin the sustain strings and the piano melody there's no frozen highs at this moment in the song so we don't see much but now we're gonna see in red a little trace showing us where some masking could be occurring and this works a little bit better if let's say I'm going to go back to my thing I'll zero this out this works better if you're doing like a one to one thing so let's say I want to see what's happening on the piano melody here and the violin so we go to the piano melody go to the pro q3 go down here go to the violin and we'll turn this guy on and when I turn it on we see where some masking could be occurring between the piano and the violin the piano and the mid strings or the overall kind of stereo out so this can be handy so you might say you know what I'm seeing some masking here happening at around 600 Hertz so maybe I will get the piano out of the way of the violin and just make a cut there so that's kind of what that is for now the one thing I wish we could do in Feb filter that we can do in Neutron is let's say that I wanted to make that EQ change to the violin without having to go to the violin track I want to stay on my piano melody track I don't want to click over here open this fabfilter pro-q 3 and then make that move there the nice thing about neutrons you can actually do that because you can talk to the other plug-in and beyond the other plug-in while you're in this one so it's kind of one of those things kind of annoying let's say that I don't want my piano to go down I want the piano to be full for so I want the violin to go down and kind of sacrifice some of its energy you got to go to the violin open it up and then go here and then take a look what's happening on the piano and then you know cut it if you need to cut it so that's kind of one minor annoying thing but hey at least we can visualize masking and that's cool and kind of new in the the per q3 let's keep moving here to other features that are interesting down here we'll go back to our stereo out I'll click here now let's look at possibly one of the most popular features which is the spectrum grab which is this little arrow here so I'll leave it off and slowly melody I'll go here click it so now what happens is when I hover my mouse from within this spectra the pre and post spectra it'll turn purple and then it'll kind of freeze and slow down and lock itself and we're gonna see a number of areas in the EQ that maybe deserve our attention maybe areas of sonic importance that we want to look at and go okay maybe we have a bit of a buildup of energy here we have to kind of take care of things so let's start the process again go down here click this make sure it's on we'll play some audio I'll settle my mouse over the spectra and we'll see it kind of come to life so now we see that a 151 791 733 and 5.9 kilohertz these are areas that you know the plugin is telling us you might want to take a look at again it's not a perfect science but it's saying we're seeing a little bit of energy here do you want to come in and cut and you can do that like this okay you can do it like that if you want to have the spectrum grab kind of lock and stay in place while you make your moves I'm gonna just undo that and let's go again the spectrum grab all you do is you click and hold while it's kind of calibrating and in purple it'll turn blue and then just kind of lock itself down and you can make your cuts that way I'll show you how that works so done its thing I'm gonna click and hold and then it goes blue and now I can bring this down and I don't lose my grab now bring this down bring this down and there we go so I did kind of lose it really quickly and that's one kind of frustrating thing is if you click away you lose the kind of permanent state of the spectrum grab she got to be very specific with your clicking aah I messed it up that's one kind of annoying thing it is a new feature not the not to freeze the spectrum grab but that little thing showing you hey you might want to take a look at these little areas that's new and that's really interesting and probably very helpful to people who are new to e cueing and not really sure what to do it's kind of like a suggestion going hey take a look at this see if you want to see if you want to take this down so we'll click out of that we also have this snowflake which if clicked will freeze the spectra so you can see things a little bit like spectrum grabs so we'll do that now so now we see it kind of freeze and build up over time and slow down and this can give us a nice kind of energy readout of what's happening so that's kind of cool now the other really cool feature I'm just gonna skip around now is we have this EQ match and this is really cool because what we can do is record the input of an external source so something that your sidechaining okay and then you can learn that profile and then impose it and kind of match it with a combined curve on to what you're doing and then fine tune it and this is something that's really good if you have a song that you love maybe just the low end or the high end or something and you want to kind of steel its profile and impose it on to yours and kind of blend it in that's something that I think this plug-in does very well we're not really gonna demonstrate it today but I just want to call it that it is here and it works very well and it's one of the things people really love about this tool so the other thing I want to call out is that we have our global bypass which is right here toggles it on and off I kind of wish that this button was a bit more obvious it took me a little while to find it let's go to some kind of let's see here let's go to some kind of there we go go to this and we'll do some before and afters here [Music] so it's just a preset it's just enhancing the low end and the top end of the left and right channels exclusively and that you know can be something that you want to do but anyway the bypass is right here and that's kind of cool let's go back to the default now the next thing we have over here is some kind of channel operations we have polarity invert and it's good for checking to make sure things are in phase we have this auto gain feature which is kind of cool so if you're doing boosts or cuts it will compensate for the gain lost as a result of those boosting cuts and give you a kind of objective sense of you know whether something sounds better just because it is louder or not if I filter kind of admits that it's not a perfect science they're making a guess estimate of what the loudness compensation would be but it's one of those things that doesn't exist in a lot of other plugins and something that might be valuable to you to keep your kind of sanity in check if you're boosting stuff to go okay did I make that better or do I just think it's better because it's louder so that's kind of cool the other thing that's really nice is that we can bring in the output meters or hide them like this so that's kind of nice and I think this is because people really value their real estate here the screen real estate and anything that we can do to make to have fewer things on the screen moving and dancing around is is good so you can hide it or you know have it show up we have panning over here sorry output level is over here the overall output level of the plugin and we have panning as well left and right so those are some kind of interesting features now the next thing is a special new feature of the pro q3 and that's dynamic behavior of the nodes themselves so for those uninitiated when you make a node dynamic in an EQ you kind of turn it into a compressor that either expands and boosts signal above a certain amount or area in the spectra or it cuts an attenuate signal in a certain region I'll show you how this works so let's play some audio and let's say we wanted to cut right at this area here because we see it's kind of jumping out of control I could bring the node down I could fix the cue a little bit we'll just leave it looping here and now I can click and drag and I've made this node dynamic now so it's dipping and cutting that signal and we can view our threshold controls over here and have the and operate I guess more aggressively or less aggressively depending on you know how much signal is reacting to to start moving and changing [Music] so when I bring it down it's very aggressively reacting because we're flushing a lot of signal into it otherwise here she's kind of dipping every time it crosses that threshold and we can do the same thing by turning it into somewhat of an upward expander so let's say we want to bring in a shelf here and we want it to dynamically respond to signal so now we're just boosting the low-end right I mean we're kind of get out of control but it's just kind of warms things up and boost them and we see in our pre and post analyzer that we have a pretty generous boosting of signal here so it almost sounds like thunder clap it down so you can get really crazy with this and one of the things that I love is in the presets we have dynamic specific presets for drums EDM instruments the whole mix or vocals and this is kind of cool it's a good way for you to kind of control areas that are you know maybe getting out of hand like sibilants or boost stuff that's really interesting and maybe rich like the voiceover in a presenter on a podcast you want to bring up the low end a little bit dynamically you can do that and these presets are also a great way to kind of understand how to use the dynamic stuff so we can declutter for example let's say D harsh or general-purpose balancing let's see what that does of course I can drag all these in to really make these moves aggressive let's do a little bypass I mean I think it sounds better before but we're just having fun and playing around so yeah so I think that covers I think you know most of the features in this tool in a very in-depth way we can go back and forth with our move so you can instead of saving presets you can just see what it sounded like before you made some changes you can copy settings you can a be here to the default setting which is really handy this will always default I didn't realize that actually wow that's really cool so instead of having to go and switch out it kind of defaults it by clicking here that's kind of Handy alright I think we should wrap it up there and there you have it did you make it to the end what did you think comments questions do you own this plug-in do you love it do you wish it could do something a little bit better do you have a couple different eq's that you use I'd love to hear about it this is kind of my first you know entry point into this product and if there's some fad filter kind of pros out there that have some suggestions for me or things that I maybe don't know about after watching this and need to know about let me know in the comments anyway thanks take care

Channel: Manchester Music

Views: 236,918

Rating: 4.9191599 out of 5

Keywords: Fabfilter, Fabfilter Pro Q3, Pro Q3, Fa failter, Fabfilter Review, Fabfilter Pro Q3 Review, EQ Review, Fabfilter Pro Q3 IN depth

Id: _lVUxIuR_nE

Length: 29min 33sec (1773 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 14 2019