FabFilter’s Pro Q3 has achieved something quite remarkable in a short time, Pro-Q3 and its predecessor Pro-Q2 have taken the ubiquitous workhorse EQ as found in every DAW and lifted it to a new level of sophistication and capability. As a result, it is rightly popular but so many of us, including me until relatively recently, have been perfectly happy with our stock DAW EQs. They work well. They sound as good as any utility EQ, we know them inside out and we are safe in the knowledge that anyone who uses our DAW of choice will have access to the same EQ. That is the undeniable advantage of staying with stock plug-ins.

However, it occurs to me that, if such data were available, we’d find that Pro-Q3 is so popular that its ubiquity is approaching that of stock DAW equalisers. I’d be surprised if Pro-Q3 wasn’t the most popular third party EQ out there. It might not be but I would be surprised if it weren’t.

So Many Good Alternatives To Stock EQ Plugins

There are lots of really excellent third-party equalisers out there. I don’t mean character EQs which recreate Pultecs and Neves but offerings from the likes of GML, Sonnox, DMG, Waves and iZotope which are fantastic tools. If you can’t mix with these the problem is you, not your EQ. But the Pro-Q3 still seems to be the one to beat. Why?

If You Haven’t Tried Pro-Q3 Yet, Here Are Five Reasons You Should

There are lots and lots of reasons you need to check this EQ out if you aren’t already a user. Rather than try to talk about all of them today I thought I’d highlight five. Not all of them are big, attention-grabbing features, for example, I don’t talk about the undeniably slick Match EQ function or the Dynamic EQ, but the five I’ve chosen are things I use and value every time I use this powerful EQ plugin.

1 - More Filter Shapes

Pro-Q3 has up to 24 bands of EQ, it opens with none and to create a filter you just double-click. The default filter shape is a bell filter, a parametric band with a default Q of 1. Interesting shapes can be created by changing the filter slope to a value other than the default of 12dB/Oct but I suspect that most users stick with the default bell filter for most of their work. A low cut and a high shelf might get used, even a notch filter but there are some really useful alternative shapes available if you dig a little deeper.

The Flat Tilt option is deliberately inflexible but the ability to tip the overall spectral relationship within a mix one way or the other without changing the internal relationship between frequencies in the audio is something you can’t easily achieve using stock EQ. Similarly, the Band Pass option can be achieved using a pair of high and low pass filters but the dedicated filter type achieves everything a pair of filters achieves with more convenience and controllability, and of course, the steep filter slopes, up to a preposterous 96dB/Oct, can band limit your guitars or BVs as hard (or as gently) as you like.

Exotic filter shapes aside, a much less often discussed area, when it comes to filter shapes, is Q/Gain dependency. The way Q changes, or doesn’t as gain increases in either positive or negative directions makes a big difference to the “feel” of an equaliser. The masters of this are Sonnox but FabFilter are one of the few other companies who offer any choices around Q/Gain dependency.

2 - Band Solo

Band Pass mode, holding Control and Shift or Start and Shift on a PC when using Pro Tools’ stock EQIII plug-in has been one of the reasons I stayed with it for so long. Being able to solo a band of EQ to find offending frequencies rather than using a swept peak is so much better. The Band Pass mode in EQIII works well enough but the solo behaviour doesn’t change with the filter type so if you are soloing an HPF it solos the area around the cutoff frequency in the same way as it would if it were a bell filter. The same goes for shelf and notch filters. This isn’t the most helpful information to present.

Pro-Q3 does things in a more logical way:

• Bell, Notch, Bandpass - Solos audio either side of the frequency according to the Q, Holding CMD or Ctrl on a PC and dragging up and down can change the width while auditioning in Solo

• High and Low Cut - solos the audio above/below the cutoff

• High and Low Shelf - Solos audio being boosted or cut

• Tilt and Tilt Shelf - no effect

3 - Piano Display

Relating frequencies to note names is something most of us aren’t particularly fluent at. There is an artificial separation, which exists between the audio engineer thinking in cycles per second and the musician thinking in notes and intervals. Many of us have our ready reckoners from which we work out the note a frequency relates to (A above middle C is 440Hz, bottom E on a bass guitar is 40-ish etc). Displaying this very non-trivial information right where it matters is so important that is really should be available on every workhorse EQ. It’s not unique to Pro-Q3 but it’s not nearly as common as it should be.

4 - Spectrum Grab

This is genius! It’s enabled by default so it’s read to go. As long as you have the spectrum analyser running all you have to do to find and tame a peak (or a dip) is to leave your mouse pointer under the spectrum for a few seconds and it will turn purple, freeze to a maximum setting and display frequencies for the biggest peaks. Grabbing any peak will automatically create a new EQ band with a bell filter set up to the appropriate Q. Ringing snare drum? Body resonance on an acoustic guitar? Easily dealt with and so quick!

There is an additional mode - Permanent Spectrum Grab. In this mode, accessed by clicking and holding in the spectrum until it turns blue, the spectrum is locked in this frozen state until you click the spectrum background.

5 - Overlay More Than One Spectrum In A Single Window

There is far too much to say about the spectrum display in Pro-Q3 but one fantastic feature which echoes one of our predictions for 2018 was more communication between plug-ins. While some of the plug-ins from iZotope have taken this a long way, incorporating elements of AI with inter-plugin communication, this feature in Pro-Q3 is just enough to fulfil a need for me. As well as being able to display pre and post EQ spectrums of the audio being processed, it is also possible to display the spectrums (spectra?) from other instantiations of Pro-Q3 within the current session. An example of where this could be useful is in assessing the overlap or lack of overlap between the kick and the snare, or any groups of instruments. There is also a feature which highlights potential collisions between information in the current channel and the other channels being monitored using this external Spectrum feature.

Try It, You Might Like It…

There is so much to like and so much more to say about Pro-Q3. It’s capable of replacing every EQ I have. It won’t of course, for all the same reasons that I have so many compressors (don’t ask…) but while there will always be a place for the various character EQs I like and I’ll always use the Oxford EQ precisely because it doesn’t offer a spectrum display. But in spite of all my loyalty, I have to confess that I don’t use the stock Pro Tools 7 band EQIII as my default EQ any more. These days it’s a case of Pro-Q3 or something else. If you’re already using it I don’t have to say anything but if you’ve heard about it but haven’t felt the need to try it because there’s nothing wrong with your stock EQ, just try it…