I love Dynamic EQ for ducking …

[Sundown]

Hey all,

 

I’ve sidechained compressors before to create some space around dialog or vocals, but I’m liking Dynamic EQ better for this purpose. I recently set-up a “valley” or band-stop filter and made both shelves dynamic, and it creates a lovely space in the guitar part around the dialog. I also manually pull down the fader a bit to create some more space.

 

I couldn’t do a screen grab of the ducking in action, so I just grabbed a static screenshot and drew-in a dotted line to show the effect it has when the side-chain is active.

 

The frequency spread might seem a bit broad for ducking the human voice (and I used a whopping -9 dB of range), but in action it works great. Since it’s side-chained and fluctuates based on input signal, it never really hits -9 dB.

 

I can’t take credit for any of this technique … I learned it from Craig’s latest book on EQ. 

 

Todd

 

P.S. The screen grab was taken when I had it set to -6 dB. I got better results with -9 dB with this particular piece.

 

[Anderton]

I'm glad you enjoy that technique! It's worked well for me.

 

After the book came out, I came up with a variation on that technique. I'll be including it in version 1.1 of the equalization book. To summarize, you insert the dynamic EQ in your master bus while mixing, feed its sidechain from your vocal track, and adjust the dynamic EQ to reduce the vocal frequencies in the stereo mix. When done subtly, it makes the voice stand out more, because the mix behind it stands out less.

 

The difficult part is you can't feed the vocal into the master bus and use it to duck the EQ in the master bus, because then it would end up ducking itself. So, you need to create an auxiliary main bus. This illustration shows the routing. The Pro EQ is Studio One's dynamic EQ.

 

 

Also, there are multiple stages of EQ involved because the object is not to obliterate the background, but just poke the occasional holes in the response that correspond to the vocal.

 

For a complete rundown of how this works and some cool-looking screenshots, here's the blog post that features the technique. It goes into a lot of detail about how to choose the right EQ stages and amount of cut. The goal is for any ducking not to sound like ducking is taking place.