Question Regarding "Vintage EQ" - Please Help The Clueless ;-)

[WJF]

I just grabbed MF 1.4 and have been playing with it some ... I like it very much so far, as they've dumbed the EQ down for a pinhead like me by giving me knobs to turn like those I had on my old Mackie mixers. I have a question though ...

On the old Mackie mixers that I've used in the past, EQ was typically available as follows:

High Shelving: ±15db @ 12kHz
Mid Peaking: ±15dB, sweep 100Hz–8kHz
Low Shelving: ±15db @ 80Hz
There was also a Low-Cut button available for reducing sonic garbage on non bass or kick channels

Using the Vintage EQ I know that I can mimic the Low-Cut button in MF 1.4 by turning on the HPF and setting the Freq to 80Hz. I can set the Frequencies on the Low, Mid and High knobs (I'm thinking here of using 60Hz, 1.6kHz and 10kHz respectively) to get me close to the frequencies used on the old Mackie mixers (as described above) BUT ...

Do I set the "Q" to 'wide' or 'narrow' to get the vintage EQ as close to the way the old stuff worked as possible. My guess is that I'd set it to wide but so many of you guys here are WAY smarter about this stuff than I am that I figured I'd be nuts not to ask for your help.

Thanks!!! If I can mimic the old knob twisting way that EQ worked on my previous Mixers I may gain some confidence using this mixer yet!!   

[RoadRanger]

"Wide" would be my guess. "Narrow" is better if you need to be more "surgical" such as pulling 350 Hz out of a kick drum or SM58 vocal mic. Easy enough to mess about with both settings . BTW I generally HPF the vocals higher than 75 Hz to eliminate the typical PA "boominess". I'd try the 160 Hz setting on the vintage EQ.

[CyberHippy]

I would guess "wide" as well, for the same basic reason - on a standalone mixer without Q adjustments your changes are meant to be general in nature - "a little more upper mids" is more likely than "a little more 4k"

[RoadRanger]

Actually if you change something in Vintage mode it seems you can switch to Modern mode and see exactly what you did . "Wide" equals a Q of 0.5 and "Narrow" equals a Q of 1.0 . This also implies that you can use Vintage mode to get close and switch to Modern mode to "fine tune" .

[RoadRanger]

I'm reminded that the Vintage EQ, Gate and Compressor are not merely skins on the Modern ones and are only loosely "mapped" when switching from one to the other. It's quite probable that you will hear some audible difference if you switch from one to the other "on the fly".

[WJF]

Hi Guys -

THANK YOU for the helpful information!! Good to know that my 'guess' was a good one ... there may be some hope for me yet!  ;-)

I think that being able to switch between Vintage and Modern will have benefits beyond ease of use for me. I can dial in some decent sounding EQ using Vintage mode and then switch to Modern to "see" what I've done in more detail. Over time, I imagine that this kind of insight and feedback will help me to better understand the cause and effect involved in getting good results with EQ overall.

And RoadRanger ... thank you for the tip on using 160 as a frequency for HPF'ing vocals. I'll give it a try!!