Fun with Multiband EQs From Apple, Ableton & iZotope

Recently, after gorging on complex channel strip plug-ins and bizarre Traktor effects like Flanger Pulse and Reverse Grain, I got a sudden hankering for some audio comfort food. Something non-intimidating that harkens back to a simpler time.

Back in the day, everyone had an uncle or the hip older brother of a good friend who had a 32-band EQ unit for their home hi-fi. I always thought that long row of levers looked simultaneously mysterious and absurd. And I had no idea what it was for. But that was then; this is now; and the multiband EQ definitely gets short shrift in many music studios. I’m not saying it’s the most useful, glamorous, or fun tool, but rediscovering it did bring a kind of mental relief.

Here are a few things I did with multiband EQs while my brain was charging up enough to tackle audio restoration programs for an upcoming project.

Batch Processing – The ’80s to the Aughts

I’ve been on a huge ’80s kick this year, and when I DJ, I love to mix classic as well as obscure ’80s stuff with music from this century. Stylistically, the mixes work very well. However, when you A/B pop, rock and club hits from the ’80s with those from the aughts (2000’s), you hear very quickly just how much bassier and louder overall the contemporary jams are. I finally got fed up with trying to even out the differences on inferior 3-band DJ mixer EQs and decided to do something about it.

Many audiophiles have strong opinions about the differences in mixing & mastering preferences between eras. This is not about trying to say which method is subjectively “better.” The goal was to simply to bring up the ’80s tracks closer to the modern music and make it smoother to mix them together.

iTunes 10-band EQ

Starting with an iTunes playlist of all the ’80s songs I use in DJ sets, I began to tweak an iTunes 10-band EQ preset until it worked to “modernize” a large variety of ’80s tunes. Duran Duran’s “Planet Earth” initiated a second preset with less bass that worked for a smaller batch of bassier songs.

With those two iTunes presets as a guideline, I opened up a DAW to build some appropriate EQ curves with nicer-sounding plug-ins. The first two, iZotope Alloy and Ableton Live‘s bundled EQ8, are both 8-band EQs. I used them to create two settings — bassy and not as bassy — that I thought served the functional purpose of making the ’80s tracks more mixable with the modern while also sounding pretty good overall.

Judge for yourself on these clips of “If You Were Here” by the Thompson Twins. (Anyone who loved John Hughes movies loved the Thompson Twins… admit it.)

Thompson Twins “If You Were Here” original:
Thompson Twins “If You Were Here” original

Thompson Twins “If You Were Here” with iZotope Alloy EQ
Thompson Twins “If You Were Here” with iZotope Alloy EQ

Thompson Twins “If You Were Here” with Ableton EQ8
ThompsonTwins “If You Were Here with EQ8

iZotope Alloy - 80s EQ curve

My definite favorites were the Alloy presets, so the final step was to batch process my ’80s music folders with those presets applied.

Most pro audio editor programs have a batch processing capability. For example, in Apple Soundtrack Pro, you can save any series of editing actions as an AppleScript “droplet.” Then you can drag a folder of audio files onto the droplet in the Finder to begin the batch processing.

So after creating a droplet that applies the Alloy presets to an audio file, I simply dragged my ’80s folders onto the droplets and soon enough had my DJ mixing solution.

Faking an A Cappella

Concurrent with my ’80s nostalgia has been a growing appreciation of dubstep music, a warbling, buzzing, bassy electronic genre where tracks usually hover around 70 BPM. So when I noticed that Duran Duran’s “Rio” (yeah, I love them; is that so wrong?) clocked in at 140 BPM, I couldn’t help but think that a dubstep rendition of “Rio” might sound, in a word, dope.

EQ curve in Ableton's EQ8

Ideally, I would just get an a cappella of “Rio” and cut it up over my own dubstep track, but I could find no such a cappella. There’s a way to make your own a cappella if you have the original song and an instrumental version, but I couldn’t find an instrumental, either. Would it be possible to isolate the vocal with a multiband EQ? I had to find out.

Using Ableton EQ8 and Alloy again, I tried to create a sharp EQ curve that would boost the song’s vocal and cut as many of the other frequencies as possible. The attempt with EQ8 didn’t work so well.

Duran Duran “Rio” original:
Duran Duran “Rio” original

Duran Duran “Rio” with Ableton EQ8:
Duran Duran “Rio” with Ableton EQ8

The pass I did with Alloy worked out a little better, but it would still need some work.

Duran Duran “Rio” with iZotope Alloy EQ
Duran Duran “Rio” with iZotope Alloy EQ

Say what you want about Duran Duran, or ’80s pop music in general,  but a lot of that stuff was beautifully recorded. The arrangements are rich and the music is multilayered. Whereas some minimal new wave synth music might be easier to cut out a vocal with EQ, “Rio” is especially difficult because the vocals are harmonized throughout and guitar and synth lines occupy much of the same frequency range. However, I thought I could further carve out the vocal by loading the Alloy EQ pass into Melodyne Editor, which attempts to separate polyphonic material in note ranges.

Doing that, I painstakingly deleted as many audio “blobs” in Melodyne as I could without damaging the vocal. (Read more on Melodyne Editor.)

Duran Duran “Rio” with iZotope Alloy EQ and edited in Melodyne Editor
Duran Duran “Rio” with iZotope Alloy EQ and edited in Melodyne Editor

While I now had something that might be viable to use sparingly in an electronic version of “Rio” as long as other tracks masked the noise, I wondered if I could get even closer to an a cappella using the visual spectrum editing of iZotope’s new RX2 software… But that’s another story.

Single-Mic Live Recordings

All that Melodyne editing was making my brain hurt again, but luckily I had one more simple task for a multiband EQ.

Apple Graphic EQ

My band, Tomihira, had recently started recording rehearsals to see if they might be editable into occasional podcasts for our listeners. The first trial runs we recorded into a simple handheld audio recorder, the Olympus LS-10 to be exact.

It’s not the ideal way to record a full band, but nonetheless we ended up with a few things that might be usable. But first, the audio needed some work.

In the original recording, the snare is too loud and the kick drum is clipping.

Single-Mic Live Band, Raw:
Single-Mic Live Band, Raw

To keep it as simple as possible, I loaded the standard Apple Audio Units Graphic EQ that comes with every Mac computer and found a curve that smoothed over the problems with the drums and leveled them out with the rest of the music.

Single-Mic Live Band, with AU Graphic EQ:
Single-Mic Live Band, with AU Graphic EQ

It may not sound perfect, but still, the simplest of multiband EQs salvaged the recording. Just like every once in a while a PB&J on Wonder Bread hits the spot, it was good to remember that not every audio production task has to involve thousands of dollars in equipment and a night of sleep deprivation. — Markkus Rovito

Markkus Rovito plays drums, DJs and hacks away on the QWERTY in San Francisco. He has written for Gearwire, DJ Tech Tools, Remix, EM, and Mac Life, among others.

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