Fabfilter’s eq stack and collision detection is pretty sick.
But I don’t want to spend the money.
Does cubase have some kind of eq stack that shows all your eq’s? What about collision detection?
It doesn’t have a comparison for all but you can see frequency collision info in the channel eq. The Fabfilter implementation is really cool tho!
I’m not familiar with Pro Q4, but is that showing where there are overlapping EQ areas? If so, you can use the channel explorer and look at two channels at once there to get a feel for where frequencies from two tracks are overlapping, then make adjustments in one or the other of the tracks. There are plenty of other plugins that can deal with that sort of thing fairly easily, too. iZotope’s Neutron has long had features to help deal with masking, and Waves’ Curves Resolve is specifically designed to do that sort of thing reasonably automatically via a sidechain. You make the more important track the sidechain input, then it will carve space in the other track based on the sidechain input. The nice thing about that is it will only do it when the sidechain track is active, so it won’t be affecting the other track’s signal when the track in the sidechain is silent. I’ve used that a fair bit with letting a kick drum car space in the bass and vocals car space in instrumental submixes.
Yes, they call it “potentially conflicting frequencies”. Places where someone might want to make cuts in the eq. So the red areas in the picture are where it detects sound energy existing in the same places, in the same bus, or group or something (I’m just guessing from what I’ve learned so far. Never used it.)
Fabfilter is good plugins, pricey though.
I’m not finding this cubase channel explorer thing. Sounds good though. I did see where you can compare two eq’s in the channel settings but that’s a far cry from this fab filter feature.
Ya, sidechains are good too. It’s nice to see the conflicts visually though. I was hoping cubase had some kind of matrix where you had your stacks in a row. Like all your reverbs you could have in a list and it would show you which ones have reverb and how much etc.
That’s good, thanks.
Not what I was hoping for but it’s more than nothing.
Yes, this is what I was alluding to, and I see there was already a video on this when I replied (somehow missed that earlier). It only shows the two tracks at a time, and doesn’t specifically show you where the conflicts are (Neutron’s masking feature does do that if I remember correctly – haven’t used it in ages, but I think that is only for two channels at a time, too). But you can switch between tracks to do multiple tracks, just only two at a time.
I’ve often used this facility late in a mix, partly because it’s post inserts (at least by default), so it can be used on track with inserts frozen to resolve issues. (I rarely use the Cubase channel strip for my main processing, using third party plugins instead.)
Dom Sigalas made recently a video showing how you can use supervision for that matter. Not on my computer to get the link for you but you’ll find it in his YouTube channel easy
He posted it after. I found it too, before he put it up.
The conflicts is what I’m confused about. It shows the wall of sound up against the other wall of sound, but what does that mean? Is there entire thing conflicting with the other one? In a sense I think the answer is yes, but not to make any decisions from that overlap, because if we were to divide everything like that we wouldn’t have any music left.
Don’t know where fabfilter gets its red “collision detection” either. Haven’t looked into it. Not sure if anyone is acknowledging panning either. Or that the low end is more important for worrying about mudiness.
Actually that reminds me of another concern: the cpu use. I can bet the cubase channel strip eq’s are more efficient than having a bunch of fabfilter proq 4 eq plugins running. My poor cpu will give up the ghost some day if I keep abusing it like it’s a race horse. 
Ah yes, that is good too, thanks.
Problem is it isn’t directly in the place where you can do something about it. It’s just for looking at. So you have to look at the frequency number and go to your other tool to make changes. With the proq 4 you can just see the red bar and cut it right there. And you have all the conflicts lined up in the same place, not having to frog jump from one collision to another.
If you’re talking about the channel (or is it track?) explorer Cubase dual EQ video that I was alluding to, the visual just shows where both tracks have overlaps. It can’t tell you what to do about them because it really doesn’t “know” what the sources are, no less how you want those sources to behave in your project. And it doesn’t even attempt to suggest any masking, unlike the FabFilter or Dom/SuperVision video cases (and what I remember Neutron doing from early on).
Short of using some kind of AI to try and figure out your intentions (e.g. for Dom’s video, maybe deciding, based on analyzing the content, that one track is bass while the other is electric piano and having some sense of what frequencies are likely to be most important in each case, then doing some tweaks based on that – which, of course, could be totally counter to what you want to do in your specific project), you only see there are overlaps in some areas, and you’d need to use your audio engineering knowledge, experience, maybe searching the net for guidance, and/or whatever, to make the actual decisions. For example, in Dom’s video, he recognizes that the low areas where the masking is showing up aren’t all that important to the electric piano in the mix, but they are important to the bass, so he carves them out of the EP to some degree.
Of course, if it were a solo electric piano, you would want those there to make the piano sound less thin, but, in the context of the mix (at last for Dom’s example) they’re not missed with the degree of carving he does. Had he done a low-cut filter in the same area, maybe they would have been, though – it might have been too drastic.
I suspect the “collision detection” or masking is probably a relatively “dumb” thing that just says one track has a lot of frequencies in the same area as another track. Maybe FabFilter has some inter-plugin communication that lets one instance of FabFIlter’s EQ see what is on other instances? (Some iZotope plugins have something like that, so you you don’t even need to use a sidechain as in Dom’s SuperVision case. In some cases, the iZotope plugins will even let you adjust another instance’s EQ from the one you’re in.)
No doubt on the differences in the CPU use case. Plugins like Waves Curves Resolve, which automatically deals with this type of issue using lots of bands of spectral processing, can be relatively heavy. It does let you carve the frequency range into multiple regions and emphasize or deemphasize the work Resolve does in each band. To use a fairly obvious (and probably not all that useful) example, if you were using Resolve to try and deal with a bass that is masking a vocal and causing issues, you might decide to have it not do any unmasking of frequencies below some point, but emphasize the unmasking in one or two key ranges for the vocal. (In Resolve, you’d have to have the instance of Resolve in question on the bass track, with the vocal in its sidechain.)
I mostly use channel strip plugins (e.g. from UAD, Waves, and PSP Audioware) for my channel strips. Often that is at least partly due to the flavor they impart, rather than just for any specific technical needs. And, yeah, they’re probably a lot more demanding than the Cubase built-in channel strip, but I can also always freeze the track inserts if need be (and that was a constant need on my old Windows 10 system – not as necessary on my Windows 11 system, though I still do tend to do it at some point, reserving power for dealing with bus-level plugins, which are often more demanding.
This is where something like the iZotope plugins can be convenient, too. The Cubase channel strip EQ is also useful for that, though only for two tracks at a time (and it only shows the overlaps, not the any sort of threshold-based masking).
Ya that’s what I’m wondering about. Almost all music is overlapping all the time.
The cubase channel strip eq compare doesn’t have any conflict feature. So it’s just one wall of color over another one. Cool story bro. What are we supposed to do with this info?
The supervision is better, having both the comparison and the conflict area:
But I don’t know what the clashing frequency doctrine is. What is and is not a clash?
Without the plugin telling me what to do about it, at least I want to know why it thinks two frequency bands are clashing.
Ya, maybe it’s just going by most energy together in the same frequencies. That’s all it can do I guess. But without acknowledging things like panning, low end and reverb, it’s not that great of a data metric I think.
The fabfilter comparison stack is better I think because you can have all your channels in there at the same time, not having to go one by one. Because if you just made an adjustment between plugins 1 and 2, ok what about plugin 3? How do you know 1 and 3 are not clashing? What about 2 and 3?
Yeah, with your screenshot, and no clue on what the music behind it is, no less how it sounds at the moment you took your screenshot, I’d have no clue what to do with this. Should the piano be louder? (It seems lower than the guitar in the screenshot.) I’m guessing this may be chordal stuff since I’m not seeing much in the way of frequencies that stand out as there might be if there were, say a single note melody in the guitar.
That said, let me give an idea based on a snapshot from the project I just finished. For context on the screenshot, it’s important to know that it is a traditional country song (actually a cowboy song even), and the point where I took the screenshot has a Telecaster-style electric guitar playing some twangy melodic fills, while the acoustic guitars submix (the other part in the screenshot) is doing strummed chords rhythms:
That blue bump just under 200 Hz is likely the fundamental of a single-note melody. Other prominent blue bumps are likely harmonics or overtones, some of which may be helpful to let the melodic figure cut through the mix.
Of course, the first question is if there is actually a problem here, but lets assume there is, and I want the Tele to cut through the mix better and feel like the acoustic guitar is masking it to some degree. The visual might well support that because the big fundamental bump in the Tele part is in an area where the strummed acoustic guitars have a hump, but is that area important for the strummed acoustic guitars? Probably not so much. Similarly, it might help the Tele fill cut through more if there was more space up in the 2-3 kHz range. So I might do something like this:
For band 2, a wide cut on the acoustic guitar a bit under 200 kHz. The Tele fill notes will move around, and this cut helps get that part of the acoustic guitar out of the way a bit more. Then for band 2, a smaller and narrower cut around 2.6 kHz, which just makes a bit of space for the Tele to cut through a little more.
Of course, while deciding on this stuff, I’m listening to the mix while sweeping the locations and cuts around and adjusting the Q, if needed to widen or narrow the cut). Ultimately, the ears have to decide, but the visual might give some sense of where to target (since I’m definitely far from a golden ears type who knows exactly what frequencies to target from just hearing things – I might have a bit of a clue of the general territory, but that idea would have been more like “somewhere in the 150-300 Hz range” before seeing exactly where the hump in the Tele was and that the acoustic guitar also had a big hump in the same area).
Full disclosure: I’d already finished this track before trying to come up with an example, and I did not make these changes. I had, however, the -3 dB low-cut filter at 150 Hz active on the acoustic guitar submix. I turned that off for purposes of this example. (The Tele was already coming through the mix as I wanted it to with the channel strips I was used. The low-cut I used on the acoustic guitars submix had been used for a more general adjustment – I don’t recall if it was for the Tele or something else in this general frequency range.)
My guess, based on this screenshot, is that the areas flagged for masking have overlaps pretty close to the same levels of signals from each of those signals. If the levels are more different between them, they could still have frequency overlaps, but the levels at that frequency for the two signals are significantly different.
My sense is that the reason you would use these tools in the first place is because you’re hearing some kind of problem, and you’re trying to figure out where it lies – such as if the Tele wasn’t cutting through enough in my example. I might look at a whole bunch of other aspects that might be potential culprits (this might well be the thing the FabFilter plugin’s being able to show multiple potential masking areas helps on if it can show you masking areas against a bunch of tracks at the same time instead of limiting to two at a time). For example, I might look at the full instrumental submix as a starting point, then whatever other tracks were playing at the same point in the project where the issue is occurring, before narrowing things down to the potential conflict between the acoustic guitars submix and the Tele. And, of course, during that process, I might identify other areas and make adjustments along the way.
As for panning and reverb, that is part of our own background knowledge of our projects. A similar conflict in frequency ranges might not matter if the signals are panned opposite one another. But, if they’re in the same territory, it might need some intervention. And, of course, “if it sounds good, it is good,” so we might not even be looking at this sort of thing if we aren’t sensing a problem. And there is also the question of what is more important at any given time. In my example here, it’s pretty easy to consider a melodic fill needing to cut through more than strummed rhythms. (But part of the reason these signals are around the same levels in the first place is because, in the overall production, both the acoustic guitars and Tele are mainly rhythmic and textural elements. While the Tele has a few melodic fills here and there, the main instrumental leads come from the fiddle, piano, and lap steel.)
True. It certainly could speed things up, assuming of course that you’re using that plugin on all the tracks. Ultimately, though, frequency overlaps don’t necessarily matter all that much. Finding them is only a tool for trying to solve the problems they might create in a given context. This is where knowing what you want to achieve, and trying to figure out what is falling short of that, come into play. Now, if there were an AI mixing assistant that could truly read my mind, and figure out exactly what to do to make my mixes measure up, that would save me even more time than these visual tools. 
Not that tools like this aren’t sometimes useful, but in my experience I’ve yet to find a single tool like this that’s faster than just using my ears and experience.
Gonna have to listen to verify in the end anyway.
Ya, my pic is from the first video, not my own song. With two overlapping walls of frequencies, it seems most of them “overlap” in the sense of the stereo image, but if they have different tones, they are kind of not overlapping. Like how we have wifi but different bandwidths at the same time. This is why I’m talking about low end and reverb. Visually they overlap but I don’t think reality is the same as the visual.
Ya I guess the most obvious way to know problems is where the bumps are. To see two bumps at the same place, knowing those are the highest volumes, and seeing that is the most likely clashes.
But even then, if you eq cut that fundamental you’re basically transient designing it. You’re just lowering its attack, which makes it less punchy. So now you are trading less mud for less punch.
I’m thinking of a principle, that even though eq is supposed to only be a corrective tool, that it’s good to carve the instruments, giving them their own space. Not reacting to a problem but preventing problems. But then we could take it too far and weaken the beauty of the instruments.
If there is a problem. Going back to your earlier comment on panning, if both tracks were panned opposite one another, the bumps at the same place might not be a issue at all. Even if they’re at the same pan position, is that always the case or only here and there? If it always is, you might want to decide which instrument is more important in that region, highlighting that one and trimming the other, while doing an opposite thing somewhere else to make them more complementary to each other or just differentiate them.
It depends, doesn’t it? The main transient might be in an overtone. Take the guitar example, and let’s assumed it is a picked guitar. The sound of that pick is likely to be a lot higher up than the note(s) it’s playing.
Yes, certainly. This gets into the typical track processing thoughts, such as using a lowcut/highpass filter to leave more space for the kick and bass, but not wanting to go too far because it might also thin out the sound. Of course, in some cases, in the specific context of a mix, that might be okay. Strummed acoustic guitars that are mainly used for texture and rhythm are often a good example there, where, if you played those tracks by themselves, they’d sound like crap, but those parts of the signal may not be contributing much of anything to a specific mix and won’t be missed. Maybe you want electric guitars to shine through in the higher portion of what you’re cutting out of the acoustic guitars. And, meanwhile, you have to be careful not to go too high in the frequency you’re cutting out of the electric guitars to make room for the kick and bass, but you might want to cut something in areas where the vocal needs presence, but, if the electric guitar switches to doing a solo, maybe you need the areas you’re cutting to prevent masking the vocal to come back.
Those different EQ needs at different times are one reason I’ve sometimes either put guitar solos on a different track from the rest of the same guitar’s part and other times automated EQ or some stompbox settings or … But some of those types of needs can also be addressed by tools like Curves Resolve with a sidechain from the vocal in this case. That way, it only takes space the vocal is occupying out of the guitar when the vocal is actually happening, letting it shine in its full glory when it isn’t. (That’s kind of like using a compressor sidechain on a reverb or delay to duck a reverb slightly when the singing is happening, but let the tails come through between phrases.)
Ultimately, it’s all about context – i.e. what is needed for this specific mix. And sometimes that’s general stuff, while other times it’s something that seems like it goes against typical “wisdom”.
Not being a golden ears type, I often start with presets, auditioning lots of presets (and sometimes even different plugins) with the idea of, “I’ll know it when I hear it.” That might or might not get me close (it probably does a majority of the time). But then I’ll start sensing problems, and try to figure out how to deal with those while doing the best I can on any tradeoffs. A lot of times, getting close on presets will do a pretty good job of carving out space for instruments (because those presets tend to be designed by pros who know what they’ll typically do in the context of their particular genres). But those presets can’t know what will be encountered in your project or my project. Heck, even when I make presets myself (which I don’t do much), the odds of my using it exactly as is again are pretty low because every project is different.
Yeah proq has a better workflow for sure. But for masking you have options in cubase as well.
Transients are the shorter parts of sound and they tend to be higher frequencies, and the fundamental is the lowest. So lowering the fundamental doesn’t “transient design” it. If anything, relatively speaking it would probably be the opposite, that the transients are “louder” in relation to the fundamental if you lower the latter, and that could lead to hearing transients more for that instrument.
Of course, “punch” can be defined differently so if you hear a problem with lowering fundamentals that’s obviously true.
I forgot to mention; cutting the fundamental while keeping its harmonics intact; since the eq is not the generator, it’s after, the fundamental is being equalized with its harmonics, which are not all in its tune, so basically eq detunes it. The reason the fundamental is perceived as the tune is because it’s louder, but when it’s not as loud, it’s blended in with out of tune harmonics.
Scaler EQ sticks to notes to try and keep things in tune. No idea how much it matters but that’s a thing.
Sorry for nit-picking, but I don’t think you mean “tune” and “detune”.
Adjusting the ratio between fundamental and overtones doesn’t “detune” anything, the frequencies stay where they are. If the instrument is in tune it’s in tune, regardless of levels.
“in key”, not “in tune”.
Even still, I doubt that’s particularly useful unless you automate chord changes, seeing that you can easily move through different keys quickly at which point cutting what’s “out of key” ends up being cutting what’s in key.