I provided some screenshots for you to follow along with. There are four images, and each corresponds with one of the following paragraphs: (link is only visible to registered users)
When setting the low pass filter of the Curve to it's highest slope, which is 48dB/oct, you will notice that the filter brings down your target cutoff frequency by roughtly 10 dB when the Q is set to 0.71 (the default). In this example, my target frequency is 60 Hz. (view image one)
We can fix this by setting the Q to 1.0, which doesn't add or subtract volume to our target frequency. However, we end up with a 6 dB boost in the higher frequencies above it, which may not be desirable. (view image two)
To counteract this, we can use a notch filter to cancel out this peak. First, we target the peak's center frequency. I discovered that a good approximation of this is our original frequency times 1.5. It's important to use a ratio for this because Curve's graph uses logaritmic frequencies. In our case, our peak center frequency is 60 Hz * 1.5 = 90 Hz. (view image three)
Once we have found our peak frequency, we can use our enabled notch filter to bring it down -6dB, while leaving the Q setting as 1.0. This will give us a fairly flat EQ curve with a sharp cutoff slope that begins at out desired frequency (or very close to it). (view image four)
Note: I could have chosen a more accurate ratio for the peak frequency, but I felt that the simple ratio of 1.5 is easy to remember and is an acceptable approximation for the peak frequency. It also works well with the default Q for the notch filters.
Hope this helps!
3 Comments
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Thanks for writing this up.
Add: keep in mind that filters introduce delays. Lower frequencies and steeper filter curve produce longer delays. Depending on the filter type all frequencies are delayed equally (FIR) or the lower frequencies are delayed more than the higher ones (IIR).