FabFilter

I've grown accustomed to using Pro-Q as a visual aid using its 3, 4.5 and 6 dB/oct tilt slopes and I was thinking I might be able to use the new Flat Tilt to achieve the same for other plugins.

For example, the native Spectrum and EQ Eight devices in Ableton Live have spectrum graphs but don't have tilt settings. I've also come across spectrum analyser plugins that apparently do have a tilt slope implemented but just don't tell the user.

Pro-Q 3 mentions that its tilt sits at 1 Khz and I remember Izotope's Ozone having an "overlay line" that was just a simple straight downwards slope from 1 Khz onwards, so I did the following:

– Played White Noise and added two instances of Pro-Q 3; the first to adjust the tilt, the second to monitor with the tilt set at the desired slope.
– Afterwards I checked 3dB/oct against Pink Noize and 6DB/oct against brown noise.
– When I found what I believe to be the right settings, I inverted the gain to be able to apply it to 0 db/Oct devices.

I found the following tilt settings to be pretty much exact:
– 0dB/oct to 3dB/oct tilt (aka White Noise to Pink Noise): Flat Tilt shelf with 15 DB gain at 1 Khz.
– 0dB/oct to 4.5 db/Oct tilt (I don't believe there is a specific noise color for 4.5): Flat Tilt shelf with 22 dB gain at 1 Khz.
– 0dB/oct to 6 db/Oct tilt (aka White Noise to Brown Noise): Flat Tilt Shelf with 30 dB gain and another one with 3 dB gain at 1 Khz.

In Ableton Live you can now create an audio effect rack, name it "Tilt settings" and create 4 chains which you name:

– "0 dB/Oct (passthrough)". Leave this channel unmuted and add Spectrum and/or EQ Eight. This channel sends your audio through, the others stay muted because otherwise you'll have the effect of the tilt in your audio.
– "3 dB/Oct". Mute this channel and add the Pro-Q 3 3dB preset, then add Spectrum, EQ Eight or any other analyser without tilt settings.
– "4dB/Oct". Mute this channel and add the Pro-Q 3 4.5 dB preset, then add Spectrum, EQ Eight or any other analyser without tilt settings.
– "6 dB/Oct". Mute this channel and add the Pro-Q 3 6dB preset, then add Spectrum, EQ Eight or any other analyser without tilt settings.

This is not really useful when you want to use EQ Eight (unless you do some mapping where you connect both EQ eight's controls to macros and work from there, but that seems a bit much even for me), but it could be useful from a purely visual standpoint.

This is probably not for everyone and people will rightfully say "jeez just use Pro-Q 3", but I use Spectrum a lot and I like things to be uniform so I'm digging this approach. Also, I was nerding out a bit trying to see if this could work and learned some things in the process.

It would be great if the guys at Fabfilter can confirm whether this is indeed how it works and if I'm not missing some vital piece of information on how the tilt setting is implemented.

Typo: "4db/Oct" naming should be 4.5.