Apply Intelligent EQ to Your Mix

The world of music production would not be the same without the continually evolving art of equalizing. In the following tutorial, we will cover an audio plugin with a different approach to audio content equalizing.  

Let's Start

As usual, we will start by opening a new project in our SoundBridge: DAW and apply this piece of audio processor across a couple of audio sources while introducing you to its interface and possibilities.  

Gullfoss by Soundtheory

The name of the plugin is Gullfoss, and Soundtheory develops it. It is basically an instant balancer. It gives a precise definition, and it even gives depth and cohesion to sound. The beautiful thing about this plugin is that it does all that automatically. Of course, you will be tweaking a few knobs, but the system will balance the frequencies. Talking about the way it works, we can say that the plugin figures out which elements of the frequency spectrum are competing for the attention of the human brain. It uses advanced and sophisticated technology, which you can find more in the manual. In this plugin, there are only five main parameters that you can adjust. Those are Recover, Tame, Bias, Brighten, and Boost.  

Main Parameters 

• Recover - Finds out which parts of the frequency spectrum are masked, and it brings those parts out.
• Tame - Brings down the parts of the frequency spectrum that are too prominent.

If we try to explain in a more straightforward matter what those two parameters are doing, we would say that Recover is going to add to the sound, and Tame is going to take away from the sound. Consequently, depending on what that particular sound needs, you might need to lean more towards one or the other. In most cases, you will need a little bit of both.

• Bias - Whether Gullfoss prefers to recover or tame in borderline cases is controlled by Bias. Positive values favor recovering, whereas negative values are biased toward taming.
• Brighten - eighter brightens or darkens the sound
• Boost - Is doing more-less the same thing as Brightness but for the Low-End

Other than main controls, Gullfoss has standard controls for Bypass and Gain, followed by selecting the specific frequency range on which you want to apply the process. This range can be set by dragging the red lines, which can be seen on the far left and right of the interface.  

Audio Example

For the sake of this tutorial, we have chosen to apply Gullfoss on the master channel, but it is equally applicable to any single instrument. Let us hear the difference between unprocessed and sequence processed with Gullfoss.  

~Full Mix - Unprocessed  

~Full Mix - Processed with Gullfoss