KAUSTHUB RAVI & SIVANESH NATARAJAN
MAKING
PROGRESS
FabFilter Pro - Q3 | EQ Plug-in
TIME TO UPGRADE!
O
ne of the most
popular and
versatile EQs has
a new version and this
one is absolutely armed
to the teeth. It's hard for
an engineer to pick up
and get used to a new
EQ plugin as its one of
those staples that people
get picky about. The pro
Q3 seems to make quite
a convincing case for
people looking to update
or move on. For starters,
the amount of features
on this EQ is insane.
The biggest addition
is easily the dynamic
EQ feature. Rather
than looking like a multiband compressor with an eq on top
like most dynamic EQs, the Pro Q3 adds it into the interface
subtly. It fits snugly around the gain knob. It's extremely
easy to use with the auto feature that automatically moves
the threshold. While I've had some trouble getting this to
work exactly as i want, the manual mode opens up a small
threshold slider that works remarkably well. Workflow is
extremely quick and intuitive. The other super innovative
feature is the “show collisions” feature. It allows you to
throw multiple instances on different tracks and monitor
the spectrums on different tracks by overlaying them on top
of each other to look for colliding frequencies. For example,
you can have a kick drum and bass track and have the plugin
overlay each of the spectrums on top of each other to show
where they overlap. While any good engineer will most
likely not use it, its great for amateurs and I must admit it
does save some time in some cases. The tilt function was
40
The
Score Magazine
highonscore.com
also something that
we found super useful.
It quite transparent
and smooth. One of
the lesser mentioned
features but one that I
really appreciated was
the brick wall filter
in the HP and LP. It
worked really well and in
linear phase mode, was
extremely convenient
for mastering. The list
of features on this thing
is extremely exhaustive
and will take quite a
few pages to get to. But
to be honest, I have not
found a use for a lot of
them, some of them just
seem like interesting gimmicks that no-one will probably use.
For example, the spectrum grab freezes the spectrum and
highlights peaks when you hover over the graph. While this
may sound great, it sometimes encourages lazy eq moves that
you probably wouldn't have done.
In conclusion, this is an absolute great plugin with tons of
features. Whether most of them will end up being used in the
real world scenario by most people is something that we shall
find out with time. But it's nice to know that they are there.
And the features fit nicely into the corners of the GUI so as
to maintain the slick and simple overlook so that its just a
simple functioning EQ when you need it to be. As someone
who was really not a big fan of the GUI and node based bands,
the Q3 has made it into my list of goto tools thanks to the
dynamic eq, brick wall filter, tilt function and linear phase.