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Corrective EQ: Automatic Room and Mic Correction, Plus a Redesigned EQ Editor

Anthony Berens
Updated

Voloco 9.19 brings two changes to EQ that get your vocals sounding more professional, whether you're already a studio engineer or you're recording music for the first time.

Getting a vocal to sound like it was recorded in a studio usually means fixing the specific ways your room and your microphone color your voice. Room resonance and microphone quirks are almost always the biggest reasons home recordings sound amateur. But hearing exactly what went wrong and knowing which frequency to fix takes trained ears and expensive gear.

If you already use Manual EQ, nothing about how it works has changed. You keep using it exactly as you do now. What's new sits alongside it: a live spectrum display for Manual EQ, and a new tool called Corrective EQ that analyzes your room and mic and corrects for them automatically, before you touch a single fader.

Both are free and available to all Voloco users.


The EQ you already know, now with visuals

Manual EQ works the same way it always has. Nine vertical faders in total: a low cut, seven individual bands, and a high shelf, each with up to ±12 dB of range. Reset to Flat whenever you want to start over. None of that has changed.

What's new is that you can watch it work. The redesigned editor adds a live spectrum display, so your frequency curve moves in real time as you record or play back, instead of relying on your ears alone.


Introducing Corrective EQ

A raw vocal almost always needs some EQ before it sounds professional. Usually that means trimming some low-end rumble and bringing some high end forward, in whatever combination your specific room and mic call for. Knowing exactly what to trim, and by how much, is the hard part. It's also the part most people either skip or get wrong.

Corrective EQ does that analysis for you. Run it on a vocal you've recorded, and it applies correction aimed at getting you closer to what a commercial vocal recording sounds like. Corrective EQ is custom tuned to what your specific room and mic did to the signal. The Amount slider controls how far the correction goes, from a light touch to the full correction.

Think of it as autocorrect for your recording space. It doesn't touch your creative decisions. All it cleans up is the part of your sound that was never a decision to begin with, the coloration your walls and your microphone happened to add along the way.

 

How Corrective EQ and Manual EQ fit together

You don't have to choose between Corrective EQ and Manual EQ. They sit at different points in the same audio chain. Corrective EQ is early and automatic, Manual EQ comes later and is custom.

Here's the order, start to finish:

  1. Noise reduction. Voloco's built-in processing, always on. Separate from Denoise Voice, the optional per-clip tool added in 9.18.
  2. Corrective EQ. Analyzes and corrects your raw vocal right after noise reduction, before anything else touches it.
  3. Main FX
  4. Low cut. Lives in the Manual EQ tab, but it's applied here, immediately after Main FX. Cutting rumble at this point keeps it from reaching the compressor.
  5. Compressor
  6. De-esser
  7. The rest of Manual EQ. The remaining seven bands and the high shelf, where you shape your tone by hand.
  8. Delay
  9. Reverb

Corrective EQ corrects what your room and mic did to the raw signal, early and automatically. Manual EQ is where you make the artistic calls, later and by hand. Neither replaces the other.

Voloco signal chain showing Corrective EQ before the effects and Manual EQ later in the polish pipeline
Corrective EQ analyzes your raw vocal and corrects it before any effects
Low cut and Manual EQ both in the Manual EQ tab, applied at different points in the chain



How to get to the redesigned EQ

Manual EQ and your existing presets work exactly the way they always have. You can open them from a clip in Edit View, or live in the performance view while you record.

Corrective EQ works a little differently. It's only available from a clip in Edit View, not from the performance view. Once you've recorded a vocal, or opened a project that has one, here's how to reach it:

  1. Switch to Edit View
  2. Tap the vocal clip you want to work on
  3. Select EQ from the clip's menu
  4. Tap Corrective EQ in the toggle at the top of the panel
  5. Adjust the amount slider to dial it in
     

Quick answers

What is Corrective EQ? A Voloco 9.19 feature that automatically analyzes a recorded vocal and applies EQ correction for your specific room and microphone, with no manual adjustment required.

Do I have to relearn Manual EQ? No. The nine faders, the ±12 dB range per band, and Reset to Flat all work exactly as before. The only change is a new live spectrum display.

Does Corrective EQ replace Manual EQ? No. They're sequential stages in the same signal chain. Corrective EQ corrects the raw vocal early. Manual EQ shapes tone later, by hand.

Where does Corrective EQ sit in the signal chain? Right after Voloco's built-in noise reduction, before your Main FX.

Is Corrective EQ the same as Denoise Voice? No. Denoise Voice, added in 9.18, is an optional per-clip noise reduction tool. Corrective EQ is a new EQ tool that runs after Voloco's always-on noise reduction.

When is this available? Available now, free for all users.
 

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