Never in my life have I seen this done, but here we are. Musician Andy Brewer quite literally made an entire song – melodies, textures, percussion, everything – only using phase-cancelled pink noise and the Fabfilter Pro-Q3 EQ.
To call this impressive is still an understatement. Not only did Brewer have to come up with all the music and then parse out where exactly all the melodic and percussive content fell on the EQ, but he had to automate the whole thing. Absolute insanity, and it sounds amazing!
On how he came up with the idea, Brewer explained: “The truth is, I watched a sound design short from the @Cableguys channel about using EQ to pull tones out of white noise, and I just couldn’t get my brain off the idea.
“I had the feeling it would be possible to make a song using just EQ. After all, I’m essentially working with a 24-voice poly sine synth. The real challenge, however, was making something that actually sounded good. And I guess I’ll let you guys be the judge of that.”
And if you want just the song itself, here it is. As for mixing a song this complex, Brewer said it was pretty much exactly as hard as you’d think it is.
“How about the mixing? Well, trickier than you might think. Usually you’d have faders to control the levels of each individual element, but everything you are hearing is only one track of pink noise with an EQ on it. A mixer’s nightmare…
“Any mixing adjustment had to be manually automated on the plugin parameters but thankfully some [Xfer Records OTT], [Devil-Loc from Soundtoys], and [Gullfoss from Soundtheory] came to the rescue. They turned this whole song from a resonant disaster into a properly balanced mess instead. I can’t stress how helpful Devil-Loc was. Its saturation effect really filled in a lot of gaps in the frequency spectrum. Oh, and some delay and reverb helped too.”
