Exciters & enhancers

Exciters and enhancers add sparkle and depth to sound in ways that are impossible to achieve with standard EQ. Mark Cousins sees a brighter future…

For many of us, exploring the world of recording and mixing, we seem to be chasing an almost impossible ideal: vocals that jump out of a mix and demand the listener’s attention, crisp percussion and acoustic guitar, earth-rumbling bass lines and so on. In an effort to achieve these qualities, an engineer’s first choice of sonic weaponry is often the EQ unit, to accentuate that ‘must-have’ characteristic of any given sound. But all too often in these situations, EQ doesn’t deliver quite the right results – its effect being to highlight weaknesses in the original recording rather than to add weight or sparkle. Ultimately, an EQ has to deal with the material it’s presented with – it can’t add harmonic material, it can only re-balance it.

This feature first appeared in Music Tech Magazine issue 22
Filed under Ten Minute Masters, Guitar Tech

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