FL STUDIO | Parametric EQ 2 (Updated)

[Music] welcome in this tutorial i'll introduce you to fruity parametric eq2 equalizing or eq for short is the process of increasing or decreasing the loudness of specific frequencies and it's one of the most important effects in music production there are seven parametric frequency bands for each band you can change the width center frequency shape and even filter type however before we dig a little deeper let's start with the display human hearing covers the frequency range 20 hertz to 20 000 hertz or 20 kilohertz this is how many times per second the waveform vibrates it's important to know a sound can contain any or all of these frequencies a single frequency will sound like a note all frequencies will sound like noise you will notice the scale along the bottom covers the audible frequency range at the top there are guides to which octave notes are in or the nutritional role a sound at these frequencies plays in a mix here's a sine wave playing all the [Music] octaves looking more closely at the grid the vertical lines representing frequencies aren't evenly spaced they go in 10 hertz steps for the low frequencies 100 hertz steps for the lower mids a thousand hertz for the upper mids and then it's one big 10 000 hertz step from 10 kilohertz to 20 kilohertz on the right the segments increase in powers of 10 that is every time a zero is added plus although distances and hertz between the lines are equal they get bunched up the higher you go inside each segment what gives this is called a logarithmic scale and it's used to give finer horizontal resolution to the lower frequencies which relate to the fundamental notes of the musical scale and border more control to the highest frequencies which contribute more to the tone or texture of sounds and less to pitch the frequency analyzer in fruity parametric eq 2 has many options to help you represent your audio visually and the way you prefer but if you're starting out we recommend using the default the histogram mode this mode shows audio as a horizontal graph where the amplitude of frequencies is represented by height you can choose to monitor input or output the output will reflect the changes you've made to the frequencies while the input won't be affected by the eq changes you can also switch between mid side left and right channels for the visualizer there are some settings to tweak for the histogram itself too for example you can set a pivot slope to tilt the analysis around the center of the display or change time smoothing frequency precision and level range of the visualizer you can also enable a heat map display which instead represents frequencies as vertical orange lines and their amplitude via opacity and brightness tweaks here include enhanced frequency which does not stretch the lines horizontally in the low frequencies and high precision which updates much slower than the regular display but is far more accurate as a result for the best of both worlds you can combine these readout methods to form the ultimate analyzer when you enable both in the menu you can select where the heat map goes here let's look at the pivot slope setting in a little more detail by default this is set to 4.5 decibels per octave this means for each doubling in frequency the visual height of the spectrogram will be 4.5 decibels higher above 1 kilohertz and 4.5 decibels lower below 1 kilohertz the purpose is to visually de-emphasize low frequencies and visually emphasize high frequencies to more closely match how your ears perceive the level of those frequencies if you change the bands so the output display looks flat the final mix will often sound tonally balanced since there are more high frequencies in the scale than low there are more available to create noise and so we need to reduce the sound power above the one kilohertz and increase it below one kilohertz to make the sound more balanced finally there is an option to show the phase shift a filter introduces to your sound all standard filters accomplish what they do by shifting the phase around a cut-off frequency to add or reduce amplitude even analog filters do similar if you are layering sounds you may want the relative frequencies to have the same phase think of a speaker cone going in the same direction rather than opposite directions so they add rather than cancel if the phase line is all the way at the top of the display it's plus 180 degrees out of phase if it's all the way at the bottom it's minus 180 degrees out of phase sometimes phase rotation is a desirable effect however note that this line will not display if parametric eq 2 is in linear phase mode as in this case there is no phase rotation linear phase mode will use a little more cpu but will allow you to make a huge changes without affecting phase more on this later now that we've had the light show we can get on to the actual equalization normally an equalizer is used to make a sound fit better with or complement other sounds for example to match the frequency content of one sound with the frequency content of another sound making them more equal hence the name equalizer parametric eq does this by using filters with customizable cut-off frequency and bandwidth to attenuate or boost certain parts of the frequency spectrum the sliders are for setting band gain the leftmost slider is an output gain control for all bands you can change these by clicking and dragging on the controls or clicking on a band token and dragging horizontally to change frequency vertically to change the band's gain where that's applicable and roll your mouse wheel to change the bandwidth to change the output gain you can also click anywhere in the display that's not a band token and drag your mouse up and down or roll your mouse wheel it's important to mention that modern parametric eqs like parametric eq 2 often include many different filter types to change the filter type of a band right click its band token and select the type you want from the menu or you can also use the filter type controls in the top right click and drag them or roll your mouse wheel over them to change the filter type when you're eq'ing you'll most likely use peaking filters the most these affect a center frequency with a smooth roll off either side in parametric eq2 peaking filters have a range of minus 18 to plus 18 decibels positive slider values mean you are boosting the frequency negative values mean you are decreasing it normally we recommend cutting frequencies you don't want rather than boosting those you do since boosting too many instruments will quickly lead to a mix that is too loud in other words exceeding your maximum desired zero decibel level for the final mix you can adjust the range of frequencies around the cut-off frequency depending on the bandwidth generally smoother transitions are more pleasing to the ear use sharp transitions when you are specifically trying to affect a particular frequency a close relative are shelving filters they boost or attenuate all frequencies to one side of the cutoff frequency below in case of a low shelf or above if you selected a high shelf pass filters are next on the list a low pass or high cut attenuates frequencies above the cutoff whereas a high pass or low cut will do the opposite a common misconception is that these filters will remove audio above or below the cutoff but they don't actually do that they only turn things down progressively often this means they succeed in turning it down quickly enough to pass below the human hearing threshold and that's almost the same thing but when a lot of maximization or distortion is used afterwards even heavily attenuated signals can come back up into hearing range if you put a low pass and a high pass in series you will get a band pass filter this ends up looking a lot like a fully gained peaking filter with a difference being that the attenuation effect is much more pronounced if you put a low pass and high pass in parallel you'll end up with what we call a band stop or notch filter this is very helpful for attenuating particularly offensive frequencies like electrical hum or a ground loop in recordings all of these filter types come with slope or order settings all filters by default start at the second order which is equivalent to saying they have a 12 decibel per octave slope in the case of pass filters this means the signal will be attenuated 12 db for every additional octave doubling or halving after the cutoff frequency to change a filter's order simply right click its band token and select it from there or use the order controls up here you can click and drag these or roll your mouse wheel over them when going to the next higher filter order to 4 you can think of it as adding another second order filter in series increasing the slope from 12 decibels per octave to 24 decibels per octave setting it to 6 means 36 db per octave and 8 results in a 48 decibel per octave slope [Music] but wait what about the steep and gentle options gentle essentially adds the filters together in a different way resulting in a more transparent rounded frequency response for pass filters [Music] to avoid deformed filter shapes in the extreme high end you can choose to over sample in parametric eq 2 using this control notice how as i move this the front edge gets steeper and the back edge moves closer to the front edge this won't happen with oversampling sometimes the deformed filter is exactly what you want as it creates an even steeper slope as it approaches 20 kilohertz this does use a little more cpu so it's not normally something you would switch on unless you had a reason to there are two built-in over-sampling modes in parametric eq too legacy and enhanced legacy does not introduce latency and is low cpu but will create phasing artifacts when blending the signal with the non-oversampled dry audio [Music] enhanced gets rid of those artifacts at the expense of one millisecond of plugin latency [Music] each band in parametric eq 2 has a solo and mute switch left clicking it will mute [Music] and right clicking it will solo the band clicking the headphone icon here enables band solo on shift when enabled you can shift-click a band token to solo it [Music] you can right click the icon too adaptive will switch your band to band pass high pass or low pass depending on the band type when soloing bandpass will switch every band to band pass while soloed [Music] [Applause] while you are soloing you can change the bandwidth by dragging up and down with your mouse [Music] now we're almost done but you'll probably want to hear this when eq'ing sounds that are tightly correlated with other sounds for example in a multi-mic drum recording it can sometimes be a good idea to keep the phase response of the original audio to avoid creating any more destructive interference than a multi-mic drum kit already has that's what linear phase eq is designed to do [Music] notice how the phases of the low cutoff vary wildly [Music] note the phase plot is now a straight line as there is no phase change caused by my eq settings anymore it's important to understand that using linear phase mode will introduce plug-in latency depending on the resolution you select this is an unavoidable side effect of the process right click the linear phase button to see the options lower resolutions will have less latency but will also be less accurate in the low frequency range if i set this to the lowest available setting the high pass filter i dialed in here will start letting through a lot more low frequencies eq'ing is very similar to adding color filters on images it's not always clear what's best and so you can click the first down arrow here to save the current eq settings to a spare bank click the up down arrow control to swap between the saved bank and the main bank tweaking any parameter in the spare bank will cause it to become the main bank again use this to compare eq settings and decide if you like a change we know this is a lot of information to cover however if you remember anything from this tutorial it should be this if something sounds good it is good using an eq is no more complex than trying out changes until you like what you hear so you made it i hope that this video helps eliminate any confusion that may have been about parametric eq 2 and that you'll have a good time putting this new knowledge to use in awesome music please check out the video information below for video segments a link to the parametric eq2 manual page and the demo projects used in this video hatred [Music] [Music] uh [Music] [Music] you

Channel: FL STUDIO by Image-Line Software

Views: 105,177

Rating: 4.9739776 out of 5

Keywords: Image-Line Software, FL Studio, flstudio, official, tutorial, Image Line, Fruity Loops, Fruity Parametric EQ 2, Paranetric EQ, EQ, Equalizer, Equalization, Mixing, Mastering, DAW

Id: YrGxCRlCvQI

Length: 15min 53sec (953 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 12 2021