Waves Curves AQ

With personalised spectral target curves, static and dynamic options, and a handy side‑chain function, Curves AQ’s tonal shaping tools are intended for engineers of all skill levels.

Another day, another AI‑powered plug‑in: meet Curves AQ, the second plug‑in in Waves’ Curves Spectral Series, following on the heels of their Curves Equator resonance suppressor. The literature claims that you feed the plug‑in your audio, and it will then do most of the hard work of EQ’ing for you. Depending on how much control you like to exert over your mixes, this prospect could equally be promising or terrifying!

While we’ve seen ‘smart’ EQs before — notably Sonible’s smart:EQ — Waves describe AQ as “the world’s first autonomous EQ”, and suggest that what sets Curves AQ apart from the rest is that it creates spectral targets that are specific to your audio. For them, this makes factory presets with descriptive names like Bright Acoustic Guitar or Delicate Female Vocal a thing of the past. Now, it’s all about personalising EQ curves based on the information you feed into the plug‑in, followed by suggestions in the form of five unique EQ profiles that the plug‑in generates based on analysis of your input signal. So just how autonomous is Curves AQ, what kind of result can it deliver, and how much control do you have over the outcome? Let’s find out...

Overview

The GUI is clean and easy to understand, as is the process of getting started. Insert AQ on an individual instrument track or a mix bus, play your audio, and click on the ‘Learn’ button. Once AQ has generated its five personalised EQ curves, you select the one you like and then tweak as required. Making manual adjustments to the boosts and cuts is simple, whether globally or on a per‑band basis. A slider with colour‑coded bars (red for boost/blue for cut) appears at crossover points that you can slide up or down to change the intensity of the boost or cut. You also have the option of inserting ‘nodes’ at any frequency across the spectrum to further adjust the shape of the target curve — it’s similar to the controls in a traditional EQ, where you click to add a point at a frequency of your choice and then manually adjust filter type, Q and gain.

The Dynamic/Static slider allows you to choose a combination of how static or dynamic you want the EQ to be. Different jobs will call for a different approach, as while dynamic EQ allows you to be more targeted, static EQ often delivers more consistent results. For example, I found the Dynamic mode worked well on a piano patch with vinyl effects, letting it breathe, in a sense, because it was reacting to the track only when certain frequencies became too prominent. The Static approach to cuts and boosts seemed better suited for the synth sub I applied it to, because the ‘breathing’ of the Dynamic EQ that had worked so well on the piano patch before made the bass pump unflatteringly. The plug‑in also offers four tonal frequency ‘anchors’ for further control over the low end, fundamental, harmonics, and high‑frequency (‘air’) components of the sound source.

A Smart Tilt control is useful for when you’ve got your low, mid and high points in place but want to nudge the entire curve towards a brighter or darker sound. Adjusting the Tilt knob keeps the balance and shape of your overall settings while tilting everything in favour of more highs or more lows. Offset is a neat touch: this shifts the spectral target curve horizontally on the X axis, allowing you to adjust the fundamental of the target curve. Another useful add‑on to the already plentiful EQ controls is MixSense, AQ’s external side‑chain function, which works smoothly and with good visual feedback on where conflicting frequencies lie.

In Use

If the buzz around this release left you with the impression that there’s a ‘set and forget’ quality to Curves AQ, let me dash those expectations — that’s most certainly not the case! For all the talk of AQ being “intentional”, “cognitive” and “subjective” in its tone shaping, rather than matching your signal to supposedly rigid factory presets, I find that it’s best to think of the suggested EQ curves as the handiwork of a good assistant: they’ve tackled some of the obvious problems, but you still have to adjust the result to taste to get it exactly right for the production in question. The assistant might sometimes be a little heavy handed, but their intention is clear, and a global processing knob allows you to tone down the intensity of their overall processing.

In other words, what Curves AQ does very well is to serve up a good starting point. You can let it loose on your track/mix, and quickly do an A/B comparison of the original against multiple options. This can work especially well to highlight problem areas of your mix that can be hard to identify quickly by listening alone. It can also spark creative ideas — like the time it suggested a reggaeton target curve for a distinctly synth‑heavy rock track I ran through it! It might not have been perfect, but AQ’s shape of the tone of the mix led me down a path I enjoyed and would not otherwise have explored.

Curves AQ is really good at fixing muddy low end. I needed to do very little tweaking to those settings...

One massive plus point is that Curves AQ is really good at fixing muddy low end. I needed to do very little tweaking to those settings — it leaves almost every track sounding ‘cleaner’, and that generally benefited the whole mix.

Verdict

So, while Curves AQ will do its thing with very little user input, the end results is not really about what Curves AQ intends, but about the intention of the person using it. Put another way, you get to decide what part of the EQ’ing job you are outsourcing to it. Do you want a quick assessment of what the sound needs? Are you unsure of the target tonality that you’re going for and are looking for guidance? Are you an absolute beginner, with no clue about what will make your guitar tone sound good? Or do you simply want to try out a variety of curves because you’re stuck in a rut and need ideas? Curves AQ allows adjustment of so many parameters that, even if the suggested target curves are not to your liking, you could still EQ your track manually within the plug‑in to achieve the desired results. So seasoned tweakers needn’t compromise, while for inexperienced engineers, such as artists putting together their own demos, it’s a good sketchpad that could help you find your sound through trial and error. As for whether it is truly ‘autonomous’ or not, well it could be, to a point — but really that’s an individual assessment that each mixer will have to make, depending on how well it fits into their workflow.