One last thing, and some producers might disagree with me here and say that the sound is the only important thing, but don’t underestimate the importance of an attractive and intuitive interface. Of course, this is arguable: it totally depends how you approach your productions. There’s also the factor common to all aspects of modern/digital music production: sometimes, too much flexibility can be a hindrance rather than a help. If you’ve read any of the other posts on GTPS, especially The 10 Principles Every Producer Must Know…, you’ll probably have gathered that I’m a proponent of keeping things simple: having a slightly wider range of tools at my disposal that are each designed to do a more specific job extremely well I find generally preferable to tools that try to cover a lot of bases.

One of the key things that differentiates EQ plugins from each other is how well they process boosts at particular frequency ranges: for example, applying a significant boost to the high end will produce more or less ‘smooth’ or ‘gritty’ results depending on the EQ used. Our selection here aims to highlight options for every EQ situation: For example, are you looking for a processor for sweetening and bringing out or adding character to instruments are you looking to gently tame parts or mixes with broad and smooth cuts and boosts, or are you after the audio equivalent of a surgeons scalpel for highly focused, precision adjustments? These clean, ‘digital’-style EQs offer the sort of flexibility, accuracy and, usually, a transparency that engineers in the 1950s could only dream of, working as they were with imperfect analogue components. However, when it comes to pure sonic character and musicality, analogue and analogue-modelling EQ is still hard to beat. Nowadays, we all have pretty amazing EQ functionality by default built into our DAWs. As soon as it became possible to record and transmit audio electrically, and then electronically, engineers and music-makers also began developing various ways of sculpting the sound by boosting or cutting specific parts of the frequency spectrum independently from the rest of the signal.

The equaliser is one of the longest-serving and most fundamental sound processing tools. To celebrate the release of the Get That Pro Sound Ultimate Guide to Equalisation, we’ve put together this run-down of the very best EQ plugins available in the world.

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