Many modern plugins have amazing and well designed visual displays. It is standard now for equalisers to provide a visual display showing the frequency response curve created. Furthermore, most of the these also have an analyser which shows you an animated representation of what you are processing. These are very useful features, and I am glad to have them. But still, I often find myself turning them off and recommending students to turn them off too.
The reason why is very simple: we want to mix with our ears, not our eyes. So while visualisers are an important tool, we often use them too much, or have them influence us in ways that can harm our practice. Even now, I find myself EQing things that “look” wrong, such as a peak on the frequency analyser, only to discover that it sounded best beforehand.
Furthermore some EQ moves create a curve that looks ridiculous. Massive EQ moves look wrong when using something like Pro-Q, but that doesn’t mean it sounds wrong. Many typical moves people make on a console EQ look fine on the mixing desk, but look horrible on a standard modern EQ. So is it wrong? Obviously not, given that it sounds good. Our visual perception massively affects how we hear. Even if we try our best not to be influenced by visuals, we probably will be.
So, what is the solution? Mine is to turn the displays off and save this as the default preset. That way whenever I open an EQ, all I see are the controls and not the results. The degree to which you can remove the display varies depending on the plugin. My go-to EQ, TDR Nova, lets you completely hide the display. This also has the benefit of making the plugin take up less room on the screen. Many plugins let you turn off the frequency analyser visuals, but you still can’t hide the EQ curve. This makes sense because “drawing” the EQ curve is an integral part of how you control the plugin. An obvious example of this is Fabfilter Pro-Q. In my workflow, my Pro-Q is setup normally, with all visual feedback, but my TDR Nova is setup to hide all visuals. This tends to work well, with Nova doing most general EQ work, but Pro-Q doing certain highly detailed tasks. This lets me achieve all the results I want, without visuals affecting my auditory perception.
In part, it seems that the visual feedback is part of why people use analog-style EQs within DAWs, even when a stock parametric EQ plug-in can be sonically identical in behaviour. Many (but not all) analog-style EQs available to purchase have no non-linearities, and so can be identically matched by a stock EQ with the right settings.
You would think that would make these redundant, yet these plugins are still widely used. In part, I believe this is due to the visual feedback and ergonomics facilitating workflow. The specific controls and visuals of different units lend themselves to different functions. There is value in not being able to see the actual frequency response curve created, but rather just knowing that a certain plugin produces the intended auditory result. By using the analog-style EQ, we place a visual layer between our controls and the end response, which helps prevent us from throwing away good EQ moves due to visual feedback. Furthermore, analog-style EQs often have an ergonomic advantage in that minimal controls often yield complex changes, whereas on a typical digital EQ, you would need many EQ bands to recreate the same shape.
In this way, linear analog-style EQs work like presets which help us to reach a desired result sooner. It is often simpler to create the frequency response we intend with the analog-style EQ than with a more detailed and flexible plugin like Pro-Q.
Plug-in manufacturers benefit from this, by being able to sell many different EQ plugins, which DSP-wise are identical to many stock and free plugins. Clearly, I don’t take the stance that these EQ plugins are all useless, but rather I caution spending money on sets of plugins that have identical audio processing to what you already own. Is a preset frequency response worth as much as they are charging?
Take note: this does not apply to analog-style EQs which model more than just frequency response. The best analog EQ plugins also model non-linear characteristics, such as saturation, which makes them audibly distinguishable from your clean parametric EQ.
That is all, goodbye!
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