# Do you use Kontakt's EQ?



## kimarnesen (Jun 22, 2018)

As I like to cut about 2.5db around 250 and 2.5k on every sample instrument I wonder if this is best to do in Kontakt. Does that save a lot of CPU compared to adding an eq on each aux? Many instruments don't need other eq-adjustments than this, so perhaps it's not important with a special fancy plugin for this task only. Or?


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## gsilbers (Jun 22, 2018)

kimarnesen said:


> As I like to cut about 2.5db around 250 and 2.5k on every sample instrument I wonder if this is best to do in Kontakt. Does that save a lot of CPU compared to adding an eq on each aux? Many instruments don't need other eq-adjustments than this, so perhaps it's not important with a special fancy plugin for this task only. Or?



I think the cpu savings would be the same as a stock daw eq and easier to access but each case is different and how you are using it. I just don't like getting into Kontakt for the eq is I don't have to. in a template situation that would be different though.


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## kimarnesen (Jun 22, 2018)

gsilbers said:


> I think the cpu savings would be the same as a stock daw eq and easier to access but each case is different and how you are using it. I just don't like getting into Kontakt for the eq is I don't have to. in a template situation that would be different though.



This is for a template, yes.


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## Tod (Jun 22, 2018)

kimarnesen said:


> As I like to cut about 2.5db around 250 and 2.5k on every sample instrument I wonder if this is best to do in Kontakt. Does that save a lot of CPU compared to adding an eq on each aux? Many instruments don't need other eq-adjustments than this, so perhaps it's not important with a special fancy plugin for this task only. Or?



A lot depends on how and where you use an EQ. I don't think I'd ever put an EQ on an Aux unless there was a really special reason to do so and, off hand I can't think of any for my projects or workflow.

Kontakts EQs work pretty well, small adjustments can make pretty big differences. In Kontakt there are a lot of locations you can put them, but for EQ I usually use either "Group FX" or "Bus FX".

As gsilbers alludes to, I also use my DAWs EQ a lot.


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## asinclaire (Jun 23, 2018)

As a set it up and forget about it thing, why not. Depending on which EQ you use otherwise. There are some pretty light EQs around.


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## aaronventure (Jun 23, 2018)

kimarnesen said:


> As I like to cut about 2.5db around 250 and 2.5k on every sample instrument



That's odd. Do you check it on headphones and compare to other music? If you're mixing on monitors, it might just be a peak in your room. 

If it's a personal preference, that's fine. But _every_ instrument needing makes me wonder. I'm really curious.


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## kimarnesen (Jun 23, 2018)

aaronventure said:


> That's odd. Do you check it on headphones and compare to other music? If you're mixing on monitors, it might just be a peak in your room.
> 
> If it's a personal preference, that's fine. But _every_ instrument needing makes me wonder. I'm really curious.



Well, it's not something I've figured out myself but learned from what Jake Jackson and Alan Meyerson does. They do it on nearly all samples and it does seem to help with harshness especially on strings and brass samples, as well as muddiness from the rooms.


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## aaronventure (Jun 23, 2018)

kimarnesen said:


> Well, it's not something I've figured out myself but learned from what Jake Jackson and Alan Meyerson does. They do it on nearly all samples and it does seem to help with harshness especially on strings and brass samples, as well as muddiness from the rooms.


Ah, alright. If you do it on every sample, you can just set up an EQ on the master channel and be done with it. Then, if you have an instrument you _don't_ wish to do it for, you can just dial in the reverse (same frequency, opposite gain value). 

Much less work that way. I slightly boost highs on almost every track, and instead of doing it per-instrument, I just do it on the master.


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## kimarnesen (Jun 23, 2018)

aaronventure said:


> Ah, alright. If you do it on every sample, you can just set up an EQ on the master channel and be done with it. Then, if you have an instrument you _don't_ wish to do it for, you can just dial in the reverse (same frequency, opposite gain value).
> 
> Much less work that way. I slightly boost highs on almost every track, and instead of doing it per-instrument, I just do it on the master.



From what I learned from someone else, I think it was Marc Jovani, who said that it has to be on each instrument, as it's "too late" on the master as it has built up so much at that point. But I haven't tested that.


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## GtrString (Jun 23, 2018)

I do use Kontakt fx to get the right sound in the mix context, but I don't like to limit myself too early by cutting out frequencies. I route tracks out to the daw, and mix from there. There I can EQ on single tracks ect. before it goes to busses and master.


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## pderbidge (Jun 23, 2018)

kimarnesen said:


> Well, it's not something I've figured out myself but learned from what Jake Jackson and Alan Meyerson does. They do it on nearly all samples and it does seem to help with harshness especially on strings and brass samples, as well as muddiness from the rooms.


Well, I hate to disagree with folks who are more expert composers than myself, but I'm going to. I would NEVER treat any instrument, samples or real, as a blanket approach when it comes to mixing, which using EQ in this way is a part of the mixing phase, even if it's done early on. Each instrument should be treated individually using both your ears and perhaps looking at a Real Time Analyzer to see which frequencies are peaking. Perhaps you're misunderstanding what they are saying? They may be just giving some tips and tricks as something to"try", but still use your ears, rather than just try without listening to the results? Just my two cents.


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## kimarnesen (Jun 23, 2018)

pderbidge said:


> Well, I hate to disagree with folks who are more expert composers than myself, but I'm going to. I would NEVER treat any instrument, samples or real, as a blanket approach when it comes to mixing, which using EQ in this way is a part of the mixing phase, even if it's done early on. Each instrument should be treated individually using both your ears and perhaps looking at a Real Time Analyzer to see which frequencies are peaking. Perhaps you're misunderstanding what they are saying? They may be just giving some tips and tricks as something to"try", but still use your ears, rather than just try without listening to the results? Just my two cents.



For sure, for sure. But to quote Meyerson himself: “Sampled sounds almost always have a bump at 250 Hz and 2.5kHz, that I take off.” And Jake Jackson does it on nearly all samples on the Thinkspace course and the shorter YouTube video with Christian Henson, and Marc Jovani uses it on all instruments, explained in this video:



So use your ears, but I also trust mixing experts and what they are doing is working.


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## pderbidge (Jun 23, 2018)

kimarnesen said:


> For sure, for sure. But to quote Meyerson himself: “Sampled sounds almost always have a bump at 250 Hz and 2.5kHz, that I take off.” And Jake Jackson does it on nearly all samples on the Thinkspace course and the shorter YouTube video with Christian Henson, and Marc Jovani uses it on all instruments, explained in this video:
> 
> 
> 
> So use your ears, but I also trust mixing experts and what they are doing is working.




I definitely understand the reasoning behind trusting mixing experts as I'm a big believer that most of the great achievers (in sports and everything else, etc..) have started out copying their idols to the "T" until they themselves became great. There was a book written about this, based on a 2 or 3 year study/observation of the best talents in the world and how they got there.Great read and I highly recommend it, called "The Talent Code".

Having said that, my own personal experience in working with mix engineers and studying other pro mix engineers have said to treat every instrument individually which is why I raised an eyebrow to this, however these mix engineers I'm referring to do not mix orchestral compositions, let alone sampled ones.

I'm watching the video now and I can see what he is saying. Say you record a band (guitar, bass, drums, keys, vocals)- you have individual frequencies to mix and deal with,but if you have an orchestral recording then the situation is a bit different as they can share the same space/Hall and when you start to stack those orchestral sounds recorded in the same space then you get something he calls "frequency stacking" which is something you don't necessarily deal with, at least as intently in a band mixing situation because they are usually recorded in a dry space with very little frequency build up other than the frequencies that each instrument might share. So essentially he is saying that if you take care of those common frequencies individually before they build up then you can circumvent having to try and deal with it later. So taking care of the common harsh frequencies usually around 2.5k (also can be up to 4k by the way) and Mud (250hz to 500Hz) then you can reduce the harshness and mud that can build up by treating them individually first. Very interesting and it makes more sense than what I assumed from your post. I'm ok with this as long as I can see the logic behind it and there is logic behind this. Thanks for sharing.


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## pderbidge (Jun 23, 2018)

I would argue, however, that you don't need to do this in Kontakt if your workflow is such that you render each instrument to it's own track in your daw and eq the tracks individually. That's essentially the same thing as doing it inside of kontakt. If you render multiple tracks to one stem and then mix from there then using Kontaks eq for each instrument would be more necessary.


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## JohnG (Jun 23, 2018)

I use it sometimes, mostly to roll off rumble.


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## kimarnesen (Jun 23, 2018)

pderbidge said:


> I definitely understand the reasoning behind trusting mixing experts as I'm a big believer that most of the great achievers (in sports and everything else, etc..) have started out copying their idols to the "T" until they themselves became great. There was a book written about this, based on a 2 or 3 year study/observation of the best talents in the world and how they got there.Great read and I highly recommend it, called "The Talent Code".
> 
> Having said that, my own personal experience in working with mix engineers and studying other pro mix engineers have said to treat every instrument individually which is why I raised an eyebrow to this, however these mix engineers I'm referring to do not mix orchestral compositions, let alone sampled ones.
> 
> I'm watching the video now and I can see what he is saying. Say you record a band (guitar, bass, drums, keys, vocals)- you have individual frequencies to mix and deal with,but if you have an orchestral recording then the situation is a bit different as they can share the same space/Hall and when you start to stack those orchestral sounds recorded in the same space then you get something he calls "frequency stacking" which is something you don't necessarily deal with, at least as intently in a band mixing situation because they are usually recorded in a dry space with very little frequency build up other than the frequencies that each instrument might share. So essentially he is saying that if you take care of those common frequencies individually before they build up then you can circumvent having to try and deal with it later. So taking care of the common harsh frequencies usually around 2.5k (also can be up to 4k by the way) and Mud (250hz to 500Hz) then you can reduce the harshness and mud that can build up by treating them individually first. Very interesting and it makes more sense than what I assumed from your post. I'm ok with this as long as I can see the logic behind it and there is logic behind this. Thanks for sharing.



It’s indeed very interesting and new to me until just a little while ago. I didn’t explain why I did this in my first post since I wasn’t sure this was something “everyone” here does already anyway  

Also interesting to see that Jake Jackson does this on the Spitfire libraries as well, which he recorded and mixed himself.


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## aaronventure (Jun 23, 2018)

kimarnesen said:


> From what I learned from someone else, I think it was Marc Jovani, who said that it has to be on each instrument, as it's "too late" on the master as it has built up so much at that point. But I haven't tested that.



Unless you have additional processing after that EQ that reacts to signal volume like compression or saturation, it doesn't matter in today's floating-point systems. If you do have compression or saturation after, turning off the EQ and then placing it on the master will yield different results, because the compressors and saturators will behave differently (even though the difference is minimal).

But if it's just an EQ that you have, *it's exactly the same* as if putting just one one your master channel. Down to a T.

I won't ask you to take my word for it, you can try it out yourself. Take a Kontakt instance and load it with random instruments and make them all play. Then route each one out to its own separate output. Then also send (from Kontakt) each one to one track where they sum up (so making changes to the sum track doesn't also change the individual instruments). Now just take an EQ, place it onto one of your instrument tracks and dial in whatever. Copy it to the other 4 instrument tracks. Now also copy it to the Sum Track.

If you now invert the phase of the sum track, you will get absolute silence. 0. Because all of the audio gets canceled because it's *exactly the same.
*
So save yourself some time and some CPU cycles. It might have mattered or it might still matter when working analogue, but in a DAW it's just myths and CPU overhead


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## robgb (Jun 23, 2018)

I use it all the time. I tweak all my libraries. Just makes life easier.


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## AllanH (Jun 24, 2018)

Just for kicks, I added a Neutron 2 Equalizer to my master bus for an orchestral piece and let it "learn" the EQ curve: It came up with a 2.5db cut at 68Hz and a 2.5db cut at 3.1 kHz. Trying different parts of the piece, it always picked two cuts at 2.5db but placed them generally 70Hz to 150Hz and 1.5K to 3.5k.

So whatever algorithm it uses, it appears to have been coded with the 2.5db as "optimal".


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## Joël Dollié (Jun 24, 2018)

pderbidge said:


> Well, I hate to disagree with folks who are more expert composers than myself, but I'm going to. I would NEVER treat any instrument, samples or real, as a blanket approach when it comes to mixing, which using EQ in this way is a part of the mixing phase, even if it's done early on. Each instrument should be treated individually using both your ears and perhaps looking at a Real Time Analyzer to see which frequencies are peaking. Perhaps you're misunderstanding what they are saying? They may be just giving some tips and tricks as something to"try", but still use your ears, rather than just try without listening to the results? Just my two cents.



This. I was honestly shocked when i first saw this quote a few months ago.. Still wondering if it wasn't taken out of context.

"sampled instruments" aren't more prone to having frequency problems than raw live recordings, in fact all libraries are more or less EQ'd out of the box. Some definitely need some help in these frequencies but in lots of libraries the 250 is already taken care of and the 2.5 k isn't too much. You might need all of it if you want forward sounding strings or brass, for example.
Sure it's a good frequency to cut if you need a smoother sound but you shouldn't blindly do this for every instrument. 
Makes no sense. I've heard so many tracks with overscooped low mids because of too many 200hz cuts, its bad.


I would say, if your library really sounds bad out of the box and you know what you want to make a permanent change for that specific patch, go ahead and use a kontakt EQ and save it as a separate nki, otherwise leave it raw and adapt your mixing to every track with a separate plugin.


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## pderbidge (Jun 24, 2018)

LionsHeartProd said:


> This. I was honestly shocked when i first saw this quote a few months ago.. Still wondering if it wasn't taken out of context.
> 
> "sampled instruments" aren't more prone to having frequency problems than raw live recordings, in fact all libraries are more or less EQ'd out of the box. Some definitely need some help in these frequencies but in lots of libraries the 250 is already taken care of and the 2.5 k isn't too much. You might need all of it if you want forward sounding strings or brass, for example.
> Sure it's a good frequency to cut if you need a smoother sound but you shouldn't blindly do this for every instrument.
> ...



Once I watched the video I understood what he was saying. He was referring to frequency build up of similar instruments in the same room, but that is something that any mix engineer should watch out for and not just for instruments that share the same room but even the same frequency. The decision always has to be made as to what instrument gets the spotlight over another in a certain frequency range, and it may change throughout the composition thus the need for dynamic EQ's or other tricks, but I also understand that if you have a number sections of divisi violins stacking up recorded in the same space that there can be some room build up where it would make sense to go back and perhaps treat each divisi with eq individually but you're right, I would personally never do this as a blanket approach to every mix. Use your ears and watch the spectrum analyzer and make an objective call as to how your going to deal with it.


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## kimarnesen (Jun 24, 2018)

LionsHeartProd said:


> This. I was honestly shocked when i first saw this quote a few months ago.. Still wondering if it wasn't taken out of context.
> 
> "sampled instruments" aren't more prone to having frequency problems than raw live recordings, in fact all libraries are more or less EQ'd out of the box. Some definitely need some help in these frequencies but in lots of libraries the 250 is already taken care of and the 2.5 k isn't too much. You might need all of it if you want forward sounding strings or brass, for example.
> Sure it's a good frequency to cut if you need a smoother sound but you shouldn't blindly do this for every instrument.
> ...



This is the entire quote: "_For me, its is always about the imaging. If the imaging isn’t right, it isn’t really possible to clear things up with EQ or Compression because you are trying to clear a crowd rather than spreading it. In that respect, it is important to understand to keep only what you need. So, if there are a lot of things fighting in the lower range, I remove stuff to see what makes it clean. Sometimes, masking would make you feel that there are other frequencies that are not being heard and you would be eqing the wrong instruments. For example, a gentle roll off on the highs of the tympani would give you a good space for the high hats if they play at that region. Sampled sounds almost always have a bump at 250 Hz and 2.5kHz that I take off. So I get the space for the frequencies to reside. I then balance the elements amongst them to get it right." - Alan Meyerson
https://film-mixing.com/2016/07/28/film-score-mixing-with-alan-meyerson
_
And I always listen to each instrument, of course, as the bumps vary but they are usually there.


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