How to cut boominess and harshness from some amp/cab/mic combinations

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hurghanico
Posts: 123
Joined: Fri Apr 06, 2018 11:23 pm

How to cut boominess and harshness from some amp/cab/mic combinations

Post by hurghanico »

Today's modeller cabs are equipped with LOW CUT and HIGH CUT parameters, POD cabs are equipped with LOW CUT but not HIGH CUT.

However there is an EQ block called MID FOCUS EQ that can be used for the same purpose and which contains both the High Pass filter and the Low Pass filter which function as LOW CUT and HIGH CUT respectively..

the MID FOCUS EQ for this particular purpose should be placed just after the amp model or mixer block..

Image

its controls are:

the "Q" parameters which set how steep are the cutting curves of the filters, at 50% (default value and the most used in this case) they reach their maximum steepness, going further high the cutting frequency starts to resonate by itself thus obtaining a certain emphasis..

the GAIN control which could be set more than zero when the MF-EQ is used instead as a Booster before the amp or the overdrive (different use I will describe in another article), therefore for the purpose of this topic it should be simply set around zero, or not more than 10%..

the LP FREQ which serves to cut the extreme high frequencies..

at 100% the LP FREQ doesn't affect the signal at all, often a value between 62 - 70% depending on the cab/mic chosen should be fine, generally you should choose the highest value that completely eliminates the harshness/fizzyness without affecting/cutting the basic sound..

the HP FREQ which serves to cut the low end/boominess, at 0% it doesn't affect the signal at all, my advice would be not to use a big value here, something around 12% should be more than enough in most cases.

I don't know if you have ever noticed that with the latest firmware some factory presets have been re-built applying also this low/high cut eq technique on the cabs.

Reported below here there are several samples of the MID FOCUS EQ (used as cab low/high cut) values used in those factory presets, so you can deduce a sort of usage statistics:

Image

However even if the above table could be interesting as usage statistics nothing works better than your ears to choose the low/high cut values which are right for your patches.
Last edited by hurghanico on Tue Mar 16, 2021 5:16 pm, edited 26 times in total.
Eriko77
Posts: 5
Joined: Wed Apr 18, 2018 6:36 pm

Re: Adding warmth by removing harshness/boominess

Post by Eriko77 »

Awesome trick I'll try to replicate it. How ever, this can be mixed with another EQ too?
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hurghanico
Posts: 123
Joined: Fri Apr 06, 2018 11:23 pm

Re: Adding warmth by removing harshness/boominess

Post by hurghanico »

Eriko77 wrote: Wed Apr 18, 2018 10:33 pm Awesome trick I'll try to replicate it. How ever, this can be mixed with another EQ too?
Yes, sure.
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