RP-EQ

EQing is one of the most important operations in music productions. Notice that most people in the business prefer the term “EQ” to “equalizer” because the process rarely implies any actual equalizing of the frequencies. When you EQ a track or mix you usually have to boost certain frequencies, cut and filter others, and sculpt your sounds until you’re satisfied with what you hear.

Any digital audio workstation will offer you at least one decent EQ to start working with. But as you probably know by now, some plugins are better than others, so at some point, you’re probably going to start looking for a more powerful EQ to work with. When that time comes, you could give RP-EQ a try.

RP-EQ allows you to shape your tracks with the help of a maximum of eight bands. Adjusting frequencies for each band is an easy and straightforward operation, while the results can be viewed separately in the plugin’s spectrogram. Even if these were all its features, RP-EQ would still be a plugin that was easy to recommend. However, there are many other features that you can play with.

First off, separating the spectrometer from the EQ is a great choice, because you can thoroughly adjust the way the spectrogram is displayed, and thus eliminate the need for an external plugin for just this purpose. Then you also get a saturation knob, an air section (which works like an additional band that you can use to give those high frequencies some room), and a filter section that offers you many options. Finally, you can use the mono/stereo split filter whenever to need to turn those bass frequencies to mono.

While RP-EQ is a fairly intuitive plugin, it also comes with plenty of presets which serve specific functions. You can start from there and change the settings as you go along. You can even try playing with the XY-pad and let the EQ modulate your sound.