There are a lot of EQ plugins. A lot of them are very good. So when Eric Valentine sat down to walk through the MPEQ-1, he opened with the obvious question: why does anyone need another one?
His answer was to skip the feature list and show the three things the MPEQ-1 does that other EQs don't. The first one isn't an EQ move at all.
The segment above is the snare/overhead phase fix. Watch the full 53-minute deep dive here.
The problem: two mics that are neither in nor out of phase
Eric recorded a drum kit for the demo with every mic placed on purpose, including one bad decision made deliberately. The mono overhead was positioned so it landed 90 degrees out of phase with the snare mic.
"I intentionally placed the overhead so it would be perfectly 90 degrees out of phase. If you look at the snare drum waveform, you can see it going up and down, and then here's the overhead, and the peak of this wave is showing up right about at the crossover point of the other one."
That's the frustrating version of a phase problem. Flip the polarity button and nothing obviously improves:
"It changes character a little bit, but it's not this dramatic, obvious difference where one is really obviously in phase and one is really obviously out of phase. And that's the problem."
Most of us know what happens next. You pick the less-bad polarity, lose some low-end punch in the blend, and then boost the lows back in with EQ. It works, sort of, but it never sounds the same.
"The kind of punch that you get when the microphones are actually all pushing or pulling in the same direction at the same time. You get a punchier sound."
The move: a notch filter with the gain all the way up
On the snare channel, Eric put a low band in notch mode and turned the gain fully up. In notch mode, full gain leaves the frequency response flat. Halfway creates a cancellation up to 70 dB deep. All the way up, the response comes back flat again, except for one thing: at the center frequency (117 Hz in this case) the signal is now phase-reversed 180 degrees, and the phase shift tapers back toward zero on either side.
"Right in the peak of this shape is 180 degrees phase shift. It will start traveling back to zero degrees phase shift until you get up here, and along the way there'll be somewhere around a 90 degree phase shift."
The snare's low-end fundamental sits around 200 Hz, so that gradient puts roughly 90 degrees of shift right where it's needed. Blend it back with the overhead and the fundamental range is now in phase. Flip polarity and it's now obviously out of phase, which is how you know you've found it.
"We're not EQing. We're just making sure it's in phase."
Same trick, bass DI and amp
Later in the session, the same move rescued a bass blend. One polarity gave the low-mids but scooped the lows; the other gave the lows but canceled the low-mids. Instead of choosing, Eric reversed phase in just the low-mid region on the DI.
"Now all of this stuff is in phase and the low-end information is still in phase. I don't think there's anything else that does that. There's these new automatic fix-my-phase plugins, and that's great if you want to trust an algorithm. I like to use my ears. I like to know what I want to fix and only do that. Don't mess with the rest of it."
Try it
- Put the MPEQ-1 on the close mic (the one that covers only part of the source).
- Pick a low band, switch to notch mode, gain fully up.
- Sweep the frequency while listening to the blend. You're hunting for the spot where the polarity button suddenly matters.
- If you want, nudge the gain back from full to taper the effect.