Chapter Four: Applications; Rock Kick Drum; Vocal Air; Tape Hiss Removal - Alesis DEQ230 Reference Manual

Applications
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This section is designed to get you started with the DEQ230 by
giving some sample settings. These are merely suggested settings;
experiment and find your own once you begin to hear what the
DEQ230 does to your sound.
In a way, it's absurd to suggest EQ settings without knowing what
the source sounds like. EQ is a tool that's used to change the
timbre of a sound, and it's impossible to suggest an EQ setting
that, for example, will make all guitars sound better. So the goal of
this section is to give you some ideas for using EQ on your own
tracks.

Rock Kick Drum

A rock and roll kick drum is usually EQ'd quite a bit to make it
sound the way it does on the radio. Usually an engineer will choose
to cut some of the woofy low-midrange, while boosting the high-
end "slap" and maybe even some of the lows. Here is a setting to
try on a close-miked kick drum:
• Select all frequencies below 80Hz and boost 3dB
• Cut 500Hz by 8dB
• Boost all frequencies above 5kHz by 4dB
You may also want to apply some compression and gating with the
Alesis CLX-440.

Vocal Air

A popular effect on vocals is to boost the high frequencies to add
"air" to the vocal. This is an especially popular effect on ballads
sung by R&B divas. This effect is achieved by boosting the high
frequencies:
• Boost 16 kHz by 6dB
• Boost 20 kHz by 6dB

Tape Hiss Removal

If a recording has a lot of tape hiss, such as one transferred from
cassette, you can usually get rid of it by dropping the high
frequencies a bit:
• Select all frequencies from 8kHz up and cut them by 6dB
Adjust the gain of different bands to compromise between
keeping the high end of the recording and eliminating tape hiss.
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