BILL HOLLAND: Welcome back to Gearwire.Com. I’m Bill Holland and we are looking at the Ozone 3. Today, we’re looking at the equalizer. Now, if you remember from last time, I showed you the presets. Here’s the preset window right here, and in this case we selected a “Rock Master Four-Band with Excitation and Widening” preset. I clicked OK, and now I’ve turned all of these off except for the equalizer. So, were going to take a look at the paragraphic equalizer.

The goal of an equalizer, for those who don’t know, is to achieve tonal balance within the mix. A parametric EQ provides the greatest amount of control per band. In Ozone, there are actually eight sets of arrows which represet eight bands of equalization in what’s called a paragraphic equalizer, meaning it’s a graphic representation of a parametric equalizer.

First, we’re going to look at the center frequency band. There are eight different center frequency bands. The center is this little circle here, and it decides where this particular band rests in the mix. So, let’s say I take it up a little bit, I can move it left to right, and let me show you what that effect does if you’re moving it about on a track.

[BILL HOLLAND PLAYING A TRACK IN LOGIC WITH THE IZOTOPE OZONE 3 ENGAGED, EQ BEING MANIPULATED]

So, you’re moving between the different frequencies. In this case, this is at about between 1.2 and 2.6 kHz. I’m going to leave it there for now.

Now, the Q or bandwidth is the width of the band, in this case represented by brackets. Low Q will affect a narrow range so it’s a very small range with that effects, and then if I widen it, we have a wider Q, a very, very large curve. Now, let’s see what the difference between those two is.

[BILL HOLLAND PLAYING A TRACK IN LOGIC WITH THE IZOTOPE OZONE 3 ENGAGED, EQ BEING MANIPULATED]

Now, gain determines how much each band boosts or cuts the sound at its center frequency. I already showed you how to adjust the gain by bringing it up or down on the equalizer.

There are eight filters that can be applied As well. In this case, there can be a low pass, a peak filter, a high pass and more. You go to show info and you can select your node. You can turn the node on or off, see if the node is right here appearing and disappearing, and I can set it up to be low shelf, high shelf, low pass, high pass, or bell curve. I’m just going to leave it at bell curve for now. But if you look and you want to roll off these highs for example, I can go into show info, select eight, and have it be a low pass there. So, now we’re rolling those highs off at the very end.

[BILL HOLLAND PLAYING A TRACK IN LOGIC WITH THE IZOTOPE OZONE 3 ENGAGED, EQ BEING MANIPULATED]

Now one great -- One of the other great features about Ozone 3 is the ability to take snapshots of a waveform. You can actually match to a waveform. So, if I want to compare my opening of my song to the later section where it gets louder, I can go to the opening, play it back [PLAYS BACK TRACK BRIEFLY], and take a snapshot. I can make it any color I want. In this case, I’m going to pick white.

[BILL HOLLAND PLAYING A TRACK IN LOGIC WITH THE IZOTOPE OZONE 3 ENGAGED, EQ BEING MANIPULATED]

Notice how the curve has changed compared to how the music has changed. Now, I can actually take another snapshot here, go to snapshots, pick another one of these.

[BILL HOLLAND PLAYING A TRACK IN LOGIC WITH THE IZOTOPE OZONE 3 ENGAGED, EQ BEING MANIPULATED]

Now, if I go back to these, I can actually go to my white, I can decide what that shows. So, if I go here for example, I can pick it to show source, target, or both, and I can turn it on or off.

This is very useful for two different things I personally like to use it for. It’s when I’m trying to match to a commercial waveform that’s similar to the song I’m doing. Especially with bass and highs, these are very critical things to do, and especially when to try and bring it up in the mix.

Another thing that it’s really useful for is for trying to balance your monitors out against the subwoofer because you can actually take a microphone and take the prerecorded waveform of the same track and match the two so that you get the best response possible. This is a really good way to balance your monitors if you don’t have a more sophisticated means of doing so.

Now, this also can be changed over to digital. What this means for the person using the EQ is that the analog will react more like a true analog EQ.

[BILL HOLLAND PLAYING A TRACK IN LOGIC WITH THE IZOTOPE OZONE 3 ENGAGED, EQ BEING MANIPULATED]

Besides the fact that digital would be a more precise Q, analog also imparts character and color onto the sound that is not normally present in a digital EQ. To do this, the developers at iZotope actually studied these original analog EQs to determine how they could reproduce that in the software and they have created algorithms that allow you to do that.

Now let’s use the EQ to balance tonality within this mix.

[BILL HOLLAND PLAYING A TRACK IN LOGIC WITH THE IZOTOPE OZONE 3 ENGAGED, EQ BEING MANIPULATED]

Now keep in mind as well that for your highs and for trying to create a bigger bass sound, you’re not necessarily going to want to do this in the EQ. This can be done better in both the multiband dynamics control and the multiband harmonic exciter, but we’re going to get to those in a little bit. So, stay tuned to Gearwire.Com when I look at the multiband harmonic exciter and how to add sparkle and punch to your mixes. I’m Bill Holland and this is Gearwire.Com.