Does this make sense? I have a track with Spectre on it doing some saturation. Spectre only boosts as there is no cut feature presumably because thats not how you’re supposed to use saturation. I found that if i send the track to a send and flip the polarity i get a null when mixed with the original signal (that is expected), but what I didn’t expect is when i put a Spectre on the send track and started boosting the frequencies I didn’t like, it acted as a cut. I have to adjust the level of the send to get the right sound but it seems to work. I just want to make sure that its not just some placebo effect. Is there any merit to doing this as apposed to regular eq? Im looking for opinions, thoughts on this. Thanks!

 

That sounds interesting. I'll check that out.

 

It does make sense. Your inverted boost will act as a cut if it's an exact out of phase signal to what's there. I used to be able to take things out of a completed mix by taking a solo track of what I wanted to back off and flipping the phase and doing the same thing. Doing what you're talking about seems a little surprising I'm not really familiar with what Specter is or what it does) but if you're adding something that's an opposite to something that exists already in the track I see how it would work in theory... of course that said I don't know if it's the best way to approach what you're doing or not

 

The idea was to use it like an eq but using the harmonics that the saturation produces to make a bunch of cuts to the unwanted frequencies instead of a low pass or big cuts in eq. I also wonder if this bypasses the phase rotation that a eq filter band introduces when not in linear phase mode.

 

For a lot of complicated reasons, I'd say it's pointless, and the harmonics will still add, but half in power at the affected area that is already low in overall volume. If Spectre at its 50% default mix, it get even lower and more pointless. Parallel EQ (which is what this is technically) can only give additive result. While what you heard is cut, it's actually a boost on the not affected area but some of the overall volume gone because of phase cancellation so you'd perceive the result as a cut, if it makes any sense. For LPF or HPF it will become shelves when mixed back other than 100%

 

Last edited: Aug 14, 2024

In that Mix With The Masters with Jaycen Joshua and Dave Pensado, the Spectre plugin comes up. Jaycen Joshua said his Fabfilter Pro-Q3 instance on some part sounded "like sh*t", and Spectre made it way better. Then he calls it a "Turbo EQ". So of course, I have not used it since.

 

I agree with stevie

Spectre is an amazing tool, pretty unique to use in parallel, but also tricky because the mix knob + in + out work in a particular way, they are very sensitive to the level of the material and phase issues are very common. I think it would be a complicated exercise to use it for taming frequencies with phase cancelation

its more useful doing it for example sidechaining a ring modulator more than a saturator

 

Thanks for the explanation. I appreciate the insight.