 What's the best free EQ plug-in? I'll give you my top five for 2020. Hi folks, I'm Mike and I hope you're well. Now EQs are one of the most important tools you'll use in the process of creating your masterpiece. And thankfully in 2020 there are heaps of free EQ plug-ins available to help us improve our sound. And in today's video I'm going to be running through my top five free EQ plug-ins for you to make the decision for yourself. I'll be finishing off with my absolute favourite but in honesty all of these are worth downloading and trying out because they all have different advantages. So please do stick around for all of that but before we do get started if you like this kind of content all about home recording, DAWs, gear reviews, plug-in reviews, that kind of thing then please do subscribe and ring the bell on YouTube so that you are notified about my future videos. Now let's get stuck into some EQ-ing. So in at number five I have a slick EQ from Tokyo DAWn and those of you who have watched this channel before will know that I'm a bit of a fan of Tokyo DAWn stuff. I've got all of their free plug-ins and all of their commercial plug-ins as well. And what I really like about them is they always give you some kind of a surprise there, something really really useful. And this is no exception, this has got a couple of surprises. But first of all let's take a look at the basic operation. So it's a three band EQ so we have controls for the low, mid and high bands here. Now there's no graphic display there of what's going on. There's no spectrum analyzer and you can't push nodes around like you can on some other EQs. This is much more like an old-fashioned analog style EQ. Now if you're put off by that, if you find that confusing to use, I encourage you to download something like this or even specifically this and give it a go because it's really going to train you to use your ears rather than use your eyes all the time when you're doing EQing. Now the basic thing that you need to do is select a frequency like I would select something like a hundred here and then you can either boost or reduce that particular frequency using the gain control. Now also for the low and the high frequencies here, we've got a couple of different types of slope here. There's a shelf here and then there's also a bell curve here so they've got a different nature to them and then you also have this high pass filter for the bottom end here so you can cut out that low rumble. You just select a frequency and it will slope off and cut off things below that frequency. So those are your basic controls so you would be say listening to some drums like this and you might want to boost the high frequencies somewhere in the high frequencies. We'll have a listen to that. That's really pulling out those hi-hats. Let's give that kick drum a boost. Okay so that's the basic operation but what are the extras? Well first of all there are different modes to this EQ. You can see if I flick through now we've got this American one here, we've got the British mode, we've got the German mode and we've got the Soviet mode and all that does is it changes the nature of those curves. There's lots in the documentation about this which gives you a bit more detail but essentially it changes a lot of the nature of the slope, how steep those curves are, the nature of the curves. So that gives your EQing a different characteristic. The other extra thing that you get with this particular plug-in is some saturation control so you can switch EQ saturation on here. Now it's only going to add saturation if you've boosted something so if you've done nothing it's not going to add any character to the sound at all but when you do start to boost frequencies it'll start to add some saturation and you've got some different types of saturation to choose from over here. Linear, silky, mellow, deep and funky. Now I warn you that it's very very subtle if you know don't be worried if you sort of listen to these different modes and you think I can't really hear any difference. You do have to listen very very carefully it is very very subtle so that's my number five pick slick EQ. So in at number four we have the Voxengo Marvel GEQ and if you've heard the name Voxengo before it's probably because you've seen me use their span plug-in another awesome plug-in but today we're looking at their graphic equalizer and it's really straightforward to use for its basic use. We have these 20 bands of EQ here and if you want to increase a certain frequency range then of course you simply slide that slider up there to increase it and down to decrease it. You can also use your mouse wheel which I think is a really nice tactile way to do it and feels much more organic and you can also go to the numbers at the bottom and then you can sort of drag up and down to increase or decrease from there. So I'm going to go ahead and do some EQing on this drum key. Let's have a listen. Take out some bottom end. Okay so you can see the basic operation there. There's some handy little features if we use this feature here and drag up and down we can see we can actually just scale our changes there in the EQ and we can also hit the inverse button to do this. You might be wondering why we want to do that. Well that leads me nicely on to another feature they have here which is the group feature and I'll show you what I would use the group feature for. This had me a little confused at first because I couldn't see what difference it was making when I moved to a different group and that's because in order to make a change or hear the change for a different group you have to set up the routing. So you go to the routing at the top and what I'm going to do is for the first sort of group here I'm going to set it to group 2 for this output here C which happens to be one of the outputs here which is my left output. Then I'm going to set group 3 to output D which is my right output. So now I can use this equalizer to equalize the left and the right channels differently which is actually quite a handy feature especially when you're working on widening the sound of a stereo track. So let's go ahead for example I'm working on group 2. I'll make the same kind of changes I made before. I'll play so you can you'll be able to hear this will only be happening in one side so I recommend using headphones or decent speakers. As I did before I'll just reduce some of the bass frequencies. Okay so it starts to make it sound a bit wider. Now one of the things I quite often like to do is to make it opposite one side to the other. I do this when I'm widening guitars for example or sometimes when I'm thickening up vocals and I've recorded extra vocal tracks. So I'll go to the second group there group 3 which of course is affected by is affecting my right speaker. Now I'll go back to group 2 and I'll copy it over to 3 using this feature. So now we go to group 3 it's the same and I'm just going to invert it there so that we get an opposite effect. I'll play that. Now in the real world I probably wouldn't be using it on a full drum kit like this but it is a feature that I would find quite useful and if you like graphic EQs for manipulation then I'd go ahead and download this one. So in at number 3 we have Blue Cats triple EQ. Now this plug-in comes in three different flavors one for mono sources one for stereo sources and this dual plug-in here where we can adjust the left and the right channels separately which we saw was quite handy earlier on. Now there's something unique about this particular plug-in and that is the range of adjustment we can do. We're here in the 20 decibel mode at the moment meaning we can actually reduce frequencies by up to 20 decibels or increase them by up to 20 decibels. That's already a massive range of 40 decibels but if we go to this 40 decibel mode then we have a massive 40 in reduction 40 of increased decibels there a massive range of 80 decibels. Now before you to go ahead and make changes particularly so on the low end like this I would make sure you have the auto gain feature switched on which I will switch on now. That's going to ensure that you don't wreck your speakers or your eardrums. There we can make those massive adjustments and you can see that it's adjusting the gain on that right channel as I make the change to the right channel there. So you can see there that as I adjust the low frequency there it's got a shelf type curve to it the same for the top end if we adjust that it's got a shelf type curve and in the middle it's got a bell type curve as you can see there. We can adjust the cure of that with our mouse wheel so I'll just go ahead and do that there. So all fairly straightforward but as I say you can make separate adjustments to the left and right channel. What I really like about this is a particular mode where you can link the channels and then make so they're now linked but instead of them have doing the same thing I'm going to put it in mirrored mode so if I make a change in the upward direction on one side it's going to make a downward change on the other side. I find that quite handy for making adjustments to stereo images where I want to create a bit more width again. So that is the triple EQ from Blue Cat Audio. So in at number two we have the M equalizer from Melda Productions and it's there at number two because it's so feature rich but before we get stuck into the features I just want to quickly explain that the version you're looking at on your screen right now is the paid version because that's what I have on my system. The only difference with the free version is they show a banner down at the bottom somewhere here and as long as you can put up with that banner you'll get all of the same features you do in the full paid version. That's nice of them isn't it? So let's get stuck into the main features of this. We have six nodes here to adjust different bands in the frequency ranges so we can turn them on by double clicking on them like so. Just go through and turn all six on and then we can drag them around as you'd expect. We can adjust the cue with our mouse wheel like so or we can move these lines in and out. In addition to that if we right click on a node we get lots of options there for different types of curves and all that kind of thing. Now if I've got one criticism of this plugin it's the way they've kind of hidden this away there. I think they could have put in some of these options on the main interface but it's free after all so I won't complain too much and I'll close that off. Now this is the first one that we've actually seen where it actually has an analyzer on it so I'll switch that on and play my drums and you can see the difference there with that analyzer which the adjustment of that fourth node has made. So it's nice to get that visual cue. We also have a sonogram over here. I'll switch that on, switch the analyzer off. Not something I use much but you may use it. I'll switch the analyzer back on. Some of the other features that we have are things like the areas feature so if we switch that on and go to drums we get this kind of a map there of where the different drums lie in the different frequency ranges so that's kind of handy if you're just starting out and one thing I really like is the auto listen feature. I'll switch that on and then as you drag a node around and you're playing your music it solos that node. Let's have a look at that. So that's really handy for being able to hear exactly what frequency ranges you are adjusting and last we have some saturation so if we've made some adjustments with our cue like so we can go ahead and add in some saturation see if you can hear the difference. So that's a number two pick M equalizer from Melda Productions. So in at number one is Nova from Tokyo Dawn again. I really do love their products and I've chosen this one because it's got a particular feature which I really do like on this and we haven't seen that on the other plugins. We'll get to that in a moment but let's look at the basics first off it's got four bands here in the main that you can adjust and as you'd expect you can just drag them around like so or you can change them down the bottom using the knobs like so to adjust the gain there the cue or the frequency. You can also adjust things like the cue with your mouse wheel like so and you can also either change the type of curve using your right mouse button to cycle through them like so or you can also do it down here as well. So there's a couple of different ways of kind of using that interface as well as those four bands there we also have a high pass filter and a low pass filter which I'm switching on there you can drag those around like so and you can also adjust things like the slope so we'll make it really aggressive there like so really really handy things to have as well as well as that we also have an analyzer so if I switch the analyzer on and we play some music let's have a look and make some changes again. So that's really handy if you like that kind of visual cue there as well. So what I really like about this particular plugin is the fact that it's a dynamic equalizer now if you don't know what that is it means that we've actually got a compressor on each of these nodes that we've got here now it's a little bit like a multi band compressor but a little bit more detailed as well I'd say in some ways I find this feature really really handy but first of all let's take a look at how we use it so if we take a node like this we'll just pop it up there like so and I'm just going to turn the threshold button on there and that turns on the dynamic EQ for that node so just like a compressor we can start off by adjusting the threshold now I'm going to play the song all the drums you can see on some of those snare hits there it starts to compress that frequency a little bit let's have a look again now if I want to make it more aggressive I'll increase the ratio there and then I've got things like attack and release so if I wanted to grab it and then release it quickly then I'll lower that attack down there and I'll lower that release so you can see for example is on those snare hits that it's grabbing it and it's suppressing it and what's really handy about that is that you can say well I want to accentuate that frequency there for the overall drum kit but when that frequency gets out of control like it does with those snare hits I want to suppress it so that it doesn't sound too harsh and that's a really sort of good use of multi-brand compressors I really like to use it for example on an acoustic guitar when say I want some of the higher frequencies those sort of glistening features to be there but you know somebody might be slapping the strings in between strums or things like that and that can get a little bit harsh so you can use a dynamic EQ to sort of grab certain frequencies and then compress them when they get out of control a really really handy feature really nice looking plugin really simple and straightforward to use and free can you believe it I love it so did you find that useful if you did you can let me know by hitting the like button if you didn't find it useful and you don't like getting cool stuff for free hit the dislike button twice if you've got any questions whatsoever ask in the comments down below also let me know which is your favorite of these five and if you've got any EQs which are not on this list which you really like to use let us all know in the comments down below don't forget to subscribe if you like this kind of content and do make sure you ring the bell on YouTube so that you're notified about my future videos and I'll see you in the next video