It doesn’t matter what your jam is, even if you’re in a math rock, what moves you isn’t numbers, it’s music. It’s really easy to lose sight of that when you’re looking at all the numbers that go along with making a beat. Those numbers are grounded in music and they become a lot friendlier if how to decipher them.
We find a fabulous example of that in an EQ or an equalizer. Middle C on a piano rings at 261 cycles a second. Let’s just call it 250.
An EQ lets you boost and cut at musical frequencies. This one’s 250. It’s middle C.
The octave above? 500. 1500.
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- The width of a filter is also measured in octaves.
We call this a Q. This filter, centered at 500, has a Q of 1. It extends up to 1000 and down to 250.
12 notes in an octave, a Q of 12, focuses on one note. Even a filter’s slope is spelled out in octaves, and it says so right there. This one is 6 dB per octave.
Every time you boost or cut 6 dB, you double or halve the power. So in this case it means that an octave below 100, or at 50 Hz, this signal is going to be 5 times quieter. Despite all the numbers, isn’t it helpful to remember we’re in it for music in the first place?
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