One of the most influential plug‑ins of our time receives an impressive makeover.
When we think of products with a revolutionary impact, we tend to focus on the past. It’s easy to see that the Minimoog, the DX7 and the SSL console represented turning points in music technology. Identifying products that are making a comparable difference today is harder — but FabFilter’s Pro‑Q must be a pretty strong candidate.
When it appeared, back in 2011, the contrast between Pro‑Q and other equaliser plug‑ins was stark. This wasn’t so much to do with the way it sounded as with its radical user interface. Even if they weren’t actually emulating hardware EQs, the large majority of plug‑in equalisers retained many of their design conventions: there would be a fixed number of bands, and although you could sometimes move nodes around on a frequency plot, the primary means of interaction was to click and turn virtual knobs. Pro‑Q wriggled free of this straitjacket, reimagining the plug‑in equaliser using the principles of good software interface design instead of preconceptions inherited from hardware. It was efficient, intuitive and powerful, and it also sounded very good.
With the benefit of hindsight, success seemed assured, but perhaps not to the degree that it actually happened! Pro‑Q quickly became something like an industry standard, and has probably been referenced more in SOS’s Inside Track articles than any other plug‑in. Its distinctive interface design has inspired numerous imitations, and FabFilter themselves have continued to develop and add new features to Pro‑Q. Version 2 enhanced the interface even further, while adding new EQ shapes and an EQ ‘match’ function, and version 3 introduced dynamic EQ bands alongside many other improvements. And it’s fair to say that the new version 4 leaves the conventions and limitations of hardware EQ even further behind. As before, it’s available in all major native formats for macOS and Windows, and is authorised using a simple licence key.
Quick On The Draw
Once again, FabFilter have been tinkering with the user interface, and the Pro‑Q 4 colour scheme is noticeably more sombre than that of version 3. The window can still be resized or toggled to full‑screen view, while there’s a new enhancement in the form of a Scaling option. Whereas the Size settings change the area of the window without altering the dimensions of the text or of controls such as sliders and dials, Scaling applies to everything. Higher than default Scaling values are particularly helpful when engaging with the ‘expert’ pane that can be opened up when you put EQ bands into dynamic mode, making the otherwise minuscule controls much more accessible.
FabFilter have also added a new method of creating EQ settings. As before, the Pro‑Q window is empty by default. Hovering the mouse pointer over the centre line will cause a yellow blob to appear, and clicking will turn this blob into an EQ band. So far, so familiar, but in Pro‑Q 4, you can also create an arbitrarily large number of EQ bands in a single mouse motion.
The paintbrush icon in the lower left of the window puts Pro‑Q 4 into ‘sketch’ mode. The idea here is that you can simply click to the left of the frequency graph and drag left to right across the window. As you do so, Pro‑Q 4 will track any vertical movements you make and adapt them into EQ settings, creating multiple bands that interact to replicate the shape you’ve sketched. There are other EQs that allow you to ‘draw’ curves, but the Pro‑Q implementation is rather different from what you’ll find in something like Harrison’s AVA Mastering EQ. Your mouse moves are treated as a loose guide rather than a precise template, and you’ll typically end up with only two or three bands created from an entire sweep. It does take a little practice to get the results you want, especially as the entire line remains ‘live’ even as you get towards the right‑hand side; given how simple it is to create bands the...
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