TL;DW: Baxandall is a killer general-purpose EQ.

Baxandall.zip(369k)

This was going to be next week, but Compresaturator2 was broken. Sooooo… we’re gonna skip ahead and do THE killer EQ of 2020, before 2020 is actually here!

Baxandall is a configuration of analog parts for making a flexible and great-sounding EQ, noted for very gentle musical slopes. It’s said that in digital, Baxandall is nothing more than a type of Q, much like Butterworth, and every one is like every other one.

And that would be nonsense, because this is Airwindows Baxandall, and it wipes the floor with other things bearing this name, because it does lots of weird and wonderful things under the hood that make it quantitatively different. And people can do as good as this… by taking the open source code under the MIT license and crediting me. I don’t believe anyone can get close using ordinary filter-designer textbook stuff, no matter how they dress it up or what distortions they add to be ‘analog’. (Airwindows Baxandall doesn’t distort.)

Baxandall starts with a two-band filter that, zeroed out, subtracts an inverse lowpass from a lowpass and gives you bit-identical, perfectly transparent sound. That’s if you’re being subtle. If you boost or cut, lows or highs, it gives you the gentle broad boosts you expect, centered on the vital midrange. As you get more intense with the boosting, it gets more extreme, to where if you’re doing double boosts to get an intense exaggerated sound, a mids notch will naturally develop to accentuate the boosting. The whole voicing shifts to accomodate what you want to do with it, and you can play bass against treble or vice versa to get really wild voicings, such as for extreme EQ treatments (in terms of lows or highs)… but using the same natural Airwindows Baxandall tonality, so it won’t sound ‘filtery’, it’ll sound like it was meant to be that way.

Airwindows Baxandall uses my interleaved biquad filters (original, purest form, not meant for rapid automation) that run inside a Console5 instance to deepen the sound of the filter. It is truly unlike any other digital filter, ‘Baxandall’ or otherwise. It’ll be one of the first picks for when I start putting together curated lists of ‘use these ones’ plugins, one of the first things I’ll grab for if I’m livestreaming ITB mixing to show people how I’d approach that, one of the most important plugins in the whole collection.

You can have it. Merry Xmas and happy any and all other holidays.

If you’d like to give me anything to celebrate us all getting to a new year, there’s always Patreon. I hope you like Baxandall as much as I do :)