Empress Para EQ

Absolutely. Its a versatile parametric that is particularly 'musical' in its sound.

 

Yes I do. Love it. But I am not trying to act like Im a frequency master but a parametric will give great results if done carefully. It to me is very different from a graphic and a slight turn can change everything. If you decide to buy it, and you are not liking it, keep working with it ( A lot of its in that sentence ). But you need to really work with it for weeks if you never used a parametric excessively. I use to use an old Ashly and I liked it but it was a rack system which i don't use any longer. Pedals have come into its own recently and as a pedal this unit is very successful. Also Empress is a very good company. Made well and last. I have never used their help but I hear is a class act. I use their compressor also and arguable the best there is in a pedal. As with their ParaEQ.

 

Best. Purchase. Ever.

Fix any weird room boom, make any weird sounding backline work about 10x better for your sound, and a clean boost for soloing to boot.

I typically use mine for subtractive EQ, mainly with the notch/narrow Q setting. find and remove the boomy bass freq, find and remove the ganky midrange and add a little wide Q airy treble. Its like a mastered bass tone on the fly.

I also use their comp and its just fantastic. Love me some Empress.

 

The platinum words! A mega advice.

 

It's been the best investment I've made as a player who gigs lots of weird rooms that weren't designed for bands. I've tried a ton of ways to cut resonant or boomy notes, and the Empress ParaEQ is the first thing to eliminate the problem while still maintaining the full bass sound. I use the boost a fair amount, as well. Super solid pedal.

 

I think the Empress is much more effective than the Boss Graphic EQ pedal for this kind of surgical notching. The Q setting is really narrow, so you can remove junk without affecting the frequencies next to it, which means big improvements in clarity and tone without major changes to the instruments sounds.

I had a gig last night in a nightmare venue. Majorly boomy and no clarity to my rigs sound. 3 minutes ringing it out with the para EQ made all the difference. toggling it on and off it wasnt even funny how much more pleasant and usable my sound was with the ParaEQ. Buy one. thank us later

 

Absolutely love mine. So musical and sweet sounding. Best EQ I've ever had...and I've had a lot.

 

the caveat is that you HAVE to know how to use parametric EQ. I finally convinced an acoustic guitarist I play with to get one to deal with his instruments finicky relationship with his amp and the room and high stage volume, and he never took the time to make it work for him. For a while I would set his for him at every gig, but the takeaway is that there is a slight learning curve that you have to be willing to get through in order to make it shine for you. It aint rocket science though, and its mostly just using your ears and knowing what the controls do.

 

I grew up understanding that tone controls were generally for tone shaping, and parametric eqs were used for removing defects.


I have two TC Electronic Dual Parametric Equalizer pedals. Sadly, no longer made. It’s buffered, and can get the Q as tight as 1/10 of an octave. I can remove just about any sort of defect like feedback, boom, resonances, howls, wolf tones, etc. And it adds no noise or hiss. Dead quiet. It also has a clean boost knob and a treble shelving knob at 10kHz.

But as mentioned, few musicians, or even hi-fi enthusiasts understand how parametric equalizers work.

 

This is what kept me away for so long. I even built my own para EQ from a BYOC kit and couldn't get any use out of it and got rid of it because I couldn't get past the parametric learning curve. But then I read some more on here about the Empress and decided to take the plunge. Turns out Empress has a brief, very user friendly overview in the first page of the manual that made everything click for my non-knob twiddling brain. Given the engineering effort that's going on in this box, they do a great job of breaking it down into core goals and give you a good starting point on each. That tight, narrow Q is the business for room fixing. Love this thing.

 

the nice thing about the Empress (the way I use it) is that you dont have to "remember" any settings, as every room and stage will dictate different frequencies to cut. Its usually in the same vicinity but sometimes the bass node is a little higher or lower than expected. The method is purely driven by narrowly boosting a band, sweeping around and finding the junk. then cutting it slightly (or not so slightly depending on how f'd the room is).

This method yields dramatic improvement in tone and clarity every time I take the time to do it.

 

Parametrics are used for general EQ shaping as well as notching problem frequencies.

That's a bit of an over statement. You have to spend some time understanding how they operate and their proper application. However, they're simply not 'that' complicated.

'Generally' you boost with a wide Q and cut with a narrow Q.

 

I have learned not to calibrate my expectation of a musicians grasp of technology based on my own. The cats I play with, even the best players around here, most of them are not savvy enough with the technology, and honestly, a lot of them feel like they just can’t be bothered. Self-defeating, yes but that’s just how a lot of people roll. So in closing, to me it does seem like parametric EQ is above a lot of players heads, even though it feels relatively straightforward to me and you.

 

worth saying that aside from the functional difference and extra control of having a parametric EQ v. 7 band graphic, the sound quality of the Empress is a big step up from your Boss pedal.

 

Well here's the manual. It may help some - others not. Plus there are tons of videos on the web on how to use a parametric.

Empress ParaEQ Manual