Ableton Forum

Why are we confined to 12, 24 and 48 dB/octave in Ableton filters, why isn't it be possible to go in between?

I am no more privy to the internals of the Live EQ8 than you are, but I presume that this is because Ableton, like pretty much everyone else who designs an EQ nowadays, use a cascade of biquad filters. Each of these biquads provides two poles (and two zeroes), which means that a cascade of them in series inherently provides you with rolloffs in steps of 12 dB/octave. (Each pole gives you 6 dB/octave of rolloff.)

If for some reason you truly want a filter with a rolloff of, say, 14.3 dB/octave, you can attempt to create your own using the filterdesign object in Max, but it wouldn’t be anywhere near as easy as you might think. If you are truly interested in pursuing the idea, however, I can heartily recommend the book ‘Digital Filters for Everyone’—which isn’t at all for everyone—by Rusty Allred.

I feel the lack of a shallower one, such as a 6 DB or even 3 DB.

It would be useful to roll off excessive bass or highs more gently

3dB is definitely one I've always wanted as well. I like the sound of EQ8 a lot, but you need to be careful sometimes if you want subtle.

Tarekith wrote: ↑

Sun Aug 13, 2023 4:33 am

3dB is definitely one I've always wanted as well. I like the sound of EQ8 a lot, but you need to be careful sometimes if you want subtle.

There's another issue IMHO, about subtlety

The scaling is too wide, and you are led to boost cut higher / lower than necessary.
a 4db of boost/cut is a lot, but visually, on eq8, it seems a tiny tweak when actually it isn't whatsoever.

If you did several 1-2db boost cut along all the spectrum, visually it seems you did barely nothing, when sonically you did.

In order to help the user to be more precise, it should be given the possibility to restrict the range of EQing shown on the display.
say +3-3; +6-6; +10-10; +20-20

I agree, another thing I wanted to add is the ability to see the curves of each individual filter within the EQ.