 It seems like every serious producer uses this award-winning plugin, and over the past few years it's become the benchmark for EQ. I think it has some killer features you should be using in every mix. Yet, if you already own it, you still may not be aware of these. So in this video I'm going to be asking, what makes this plugin so great? Hi folks, I'm Mike and I hope you're well. And the plugin we're looking at is a legendary FabFilter Pro Q3. It seems obvious doesn't it? A beautiful design. But Pro Q3's design is really about function. Let's take for example the fact that we can have up to 24 EQ bands. Many other popular EQs will have this kind of arrangement. A space at the top where we can manipulate EQ bands by dragging with our mouse. And alternative fixed controls at the bottom which essentially perform the same functions, but in a different way. The problem with this is, there really isn't much room for anything more than just a few bands of EQ. Then again, on the many occasions when we just use one or two bands, it feels overcrowded and cluttered. This is where Pro Q3's HUD or Heads Up Display comes in. The HUD is context sensitive, meaning it's only going to show the controls you need for the band you're working on. It even moves around as you select each one to make sure it's never too far away. At the same time, if you are focusing on a band but quickly want to disable or change the filter shape of another, you can do that on what I'll call the Mini HUDs. These handy little things even contain one of my favorite features, the solo button. But we'll get back to that later. But simply, the HUD gives us all of the advantages of other EQs, that being more than one way to manipulate bands without the limitations. It even makes the fact that we can resize our interface more logical because we can gain screen real estate without actually changing the size of the controls. Clever. So it definitely seems that FabFilter's core focus at times has been how can we make things easier for you. For example, of course we can add a new band just by double clicking where we want it and it will appear there with the standard bell shape. But if we do that near the left side, a band will appear with a low cut shape or on the right side with a high cut shape. Why? Because that's what you'll mostly need there and they wanted to make things easier for you. By the way, let me know in the comments down below if you've been using Pro-Q3 for ages and you didn't know that. And they certainly wanted to make it easier for you when finding problem areas. Hitting that little headphone icon with a band allows you to solo it and dragging it around makes it super helpful in identifying specific frequencies. Oh by the way, dragging the mouse up and down while you do this adjusts the volume of the isolated frequencies. Likewise, holding control or command on the Mac while you do that adjusts the queue. And that's not the only way we can find problematic frequencies. With Spectrum Grab enabled we can hover our mouse over the spectrum analyzer and after a few seconds Pro-Q3 will identify, well, let's call them frequencies of interest. We can then grab these and drag them creating a new band. Of course, all of these features so far just make this a really good plug-in and if you were watching a video about this plug-in you'd probably like it, right? Right? Thank you. But for this to be a great plug-in it has to over deliver and I think FabFilter have done this with two features which in my opinion you should be using in almost every mix. One of these features addresses a phenomenon called masking. When two instruments or sounds occupy too much of the same frequency space it can have the effect of cancelling one or the other out. This is why some instruments seem to just disappear in your mix. Actually whilst in Pro-Q3 we can see many spectrum analyzers for all other channels where we have it inserted and if we click on one we can see it as a comparison in our larger view, handy in itself. But how do we see where this masking may occur? To do that we enable show collisions and immediately we can see problematic areas with these red highlights. This happens in both the main area and in our mini-view as well making it super easy to identify any other tracks where this could be an issue. I'm not going to pretend that that's some kind of magic solution but I do think it's a great example of FabFilter identifying a mix issue which we all face and providing an elegant solution to combat it. And I really do think that it can raise your mix to the next level but it's not my favorite feature. That would have to be Dynamic EQ. Most EQ moves if we put them in plain English would be something like reduce this high frequency by three decibels. Dynamic EQ is like saying reduce this high frequency by three decibels except when it gets really loud then reduce it by six. In other words we can adjust the band depending on how much signal it receives. This is essentially a simple compressor confined to specific ranges. We can adjust the threshold to determine at which level it kicks in and then use the Dynamic Range Control which is a little bit like ratio to determine how much decrease or increase will occur. I like to use this to attenuate things like percussive hits on acoustic guitars or even control some weird resonance in a singer's voice. Let me know down below how you would use a Dynamic EQ. To be honest with you I've hardly scratched the surface of this plugin. It has other great features such as mid-side processing, side chaining, EQ matching, MIDI learned features and the piano roll feature as well. The list goes on. So why do people love this plugin so much? Why do I think you should have it in your collection and what makes this plugin so great? Well I think the answer is really obvious. It's a perfect combination of form and function. Yes it looks beautiful but it never sacrifices its function for the sake of just looking good. It also delivers delivers delivers on all fronts. That's why I think you should have this plugin in your collection and if you haven't already check out the link in the description down below. Now one of the great uses of EQs is for vocal processing and if this is something you struggle with or you're just getting started with it I think you should definitely check out this video right here where I go through my complete signal chain for vocal processing.