New Software Review: Pro-Q 3 by FabFilter

One would be hard-pressed to find a feature that isn’t available on FabFilter’s Pro-Q 3. Can this versatile EQ become your new go-to?

Few would dispute that EQ plays a key role in achieving a professional sounding mix.

Poor EQ can be a dead giveaway for amateur work, so budding producers and mixers need to not get caught with their pants down here.

But as fundamental as EQ is to good-sounding productions, EQing is also hard.

Something as simple as placing your monitors a couple inches to the left or right could cause buildups or dead spots in your frequency response, leaving you chasing your own tail up to the 11th hour before delivery to mastering.

With many young musicians, producer and mixers cutting their teeth in thrown-together setups rife with acoustical imperfections, skewed playback is a real threat that can often cause them to work in circles.

While an EQ plugin is not going to fix all that, using a good one sure makes the process a lot more efficient than it would otherwise be. If you’ve gone to the trouble of tuning and treating your room, you’re already one step ahead. Once you’ve got that settled, knowing what to do with your signal is key, and EQ is one of the most powerful and underrated tools at your disposal there.

With a reputation for putting out well-designed plugins with distinctive stylistic flare—that are also easy to use—FabFilter‘s popularity only continues to steadily climb. Thus far in my arsenal, I’ve found their products can hang with the best, so their Pro-Q 3 is certainly worth a look. Though released back in 2018, my recent acquaintance with their distortion module Saturn2 sucked me into FabFilter’s orbit, and now I don’t want to leave.

Let’s see what their Pro-Q 3 has to offer.

Features

As seen throughout much of the FabFilter line, the Pro-Q 3 has an attractive and simple GUI based around a large, interactive dynamic frequency display as a backdrop. There’s a hefty 24 bands available here, selectable for bell or shelf at any slope. Pro-Q 3 offers per-band Mid/Side or Left/Right processing, and a list of key new features, some of which include super-steep brickwall low- and high-pass filter slopes, an added Flat Tilt filter shape, and external spectrum visualization with frequency collision detection.

With Linear Phase, Zero Latency, and Natural Phase Modes, switchable dynamic EQ for any band, spectrum grab and EQ match functionality, full surround support, auto-gain, and a customizable spectrum analyzer, it’s likely you’ll need not reach outside of the Pro-Q 3 for much. That is, unless it’s for sheer preference or stylistic demands.

A full and detailed list of the Pro-Q 3’s new features and improvements can be found on the product page, or in the easy-to-locate user manual PDF on the FabFilter website.

I think it’s safe to say there are probably more instances of EQ in my sessions than any other type of treatment. Anyone who mixes or produces knows of course that there are plenty of reasons that dictate the style of EQ you reach for. Typically when I bring up a fader, I try to listen for the things I don’t like about what I’m hearing first, and clean up the signal a bit. This first step, which usually consists of both filtering and subtractive EQ, goes a long way in getting me a cleaner mix down the line when compounded over an entire session’s worth of tracks. I also find it makes me apply less overall processing in the long run, likely reducing my tendency to treat something with a heavy hand, since it’s already been cleaned up.

And thus, everyone needs a good surgical EQ at the ready. To me, it’s double-cool when these surgical tools also have a color and palpable sonic footprint to them. Companies like PSP have put forth a killer effort with offerings like their MasterQ2 and Neon HR—both powerful solutions that offer precision and impart major mojo alike.

Something tells me the Pro-Q 3 might have some of the same in store.

In Use

The minute I opened my first instance of the Pro-Q 3, the user experience felt fun and intuitive. Drag and click around the spectrum to build your settings; hover over top of the color-coded curve to tweak your parameters to great detail. I find numerical value entry to always be helpful, and the Pro-Q 3 makes quick input of frequency, gain, and Q values a breeze. More or less, it’s almost completely self explanatory to navigate this plugin. Clicking around the various settings for bands reveals thoughtful touches like “Invert Gain”, “Make Dynamic”, etc.

It didn’t take me long to start fiddling with the dynamics settings within the Pro-Q 3. I immediately found the inclusion of the dynamics feature to be invaluable. It’s one thing to make the conscious decision that you are going to apply multiband dynamics treatment to a source; it’s another thing to be EQing your signal as you would regardless, and make a quick dynamic EQ adjustment, and move on speedily.

Simply clicking on the bell curve icon on any given band will reveal nine options for EQ shape (Shelf, Bell, Notch, Band Pass, etc.), and I found the Tilt options to be extremely useful, particularly on drums.

Taming a cymbal-happy drummer in a bright and reflective room is no task for the faint of heart, and despite having honed my multiband compression chops fairly well in this regard, it was a pleasure to tackle this with the Pro-Q 3. I found the Tilt Shelf setting to get me 90% of the way there, with some simple finessing of the center frequency and gain to bring it all the way.

I then spent some time running various guitar and bass related source material through the Pro-Q 3. I tend to do a lot of poking around for problem frequencies and sweet spots alike on these instruments, and the realtime scalable GUI was a pleasure. As you grab and drag frequency points, the gain range in the frequency spectrum display adjusts from a 12dB to 30dB range, should you cross that threshold. Mega helpful.

The actual sound of the EQ thus far has been in line with my personal tastes; it’s not transparent, but at the same time not overly characteristic. It sounds good, kind of old, but offers the flexibility of a modern device. The highs were clean and airy, the lows precise and easy to control, especially with the dynamics enabled.

I found it quite easy to get away with surprisingly large amounts of added gain without encountering issues down the line—in some applications 12dB and up. On paper this looks cringeworthy but this EQ sounds very smooth, and it seems to know the exact qualities to accentuate as you apply more and more gain. And the inclusion of an output gain trim (in the lower-right of the GUI) is appreciated when an EQ sounds good enough to push this hard.

The onboard presets were helpful, especially when I arrived at vocals. Vocal EQ tends to be a very touchy thing, and I always make triple sure an insert is absolutely necessary in order to commit it to the chain. With 24 available bands there should be no reason to stack EQs unless it’s for character; the Pro-Q 3 has flexibility here for days. Diving further into the presets revealed some incredibly helpful starting points for vocals (and more) which utilize the dynamics functionality, and the ability to isolate bands via the headphone icon is crucial in pinpoint-accurate frequency sweeping.

In a real world vocal mix application, I would feel confident using the Pro-Q 3 as my initial surgical EQ before a second instance of a more characteristic and stylized EQ to follow. This is a humble yet valuable role in the vocal chain.

And finally, I believe the Pro-Q 3 can compete with my go-to’s with respect to the mix bus, which typically would be reserved for something by Waves or PSP. This is usually my last stop for EQ, where I’ll apply (hopefully) minor and broad strokes for final touches and sweetening. I like a bit of character here, but I’ll usually try and pull most of that from a tape or saturation module, however this task is welcome from an EQ in moderation. The Pro-Q 3 fills this role nicely, and provides me with the flexibility I need for such a crucial role in the mix. And again, the dynamics function helps here too.

To Be Critical

If I wanted to have my cake and eat it too, I would ask for attack and release settings for the dynamic EQ portion of this plugin, but then we are getting to multiband compression territory.

And on the flip-side of that, it’s helpful to have a quick and dirty solution for frequency-dependent attenuation built right into your EQ. Why have to pull up a CPU-sucking multiband compressor if you don’t have to?

Summing it Up

The Pro-Q 3 comes highly recommended for any EQ task. If you can’t contour your signal to perfection with this tool, you might be the problem. It can easily be your every-channel first insert for utilitarian EQ duties, yet its multiple phase modes, resolution settings, and comprehensive frequency analysis capabilities render it a worthy contender for major tasks like mix bus and mastering applications alike.

Purchased on its own, the Pro-Q 3 is priced at $179; savings are available if bundled with other attractive FabFilter offerings. You can also download a free demo here; I would highly suggest giving it a try.

Dan Gluszak is a producer, mixer, and engineer based in Los Angeles, California. He also doubles as a touring and session drummer.

Please note: When you buy products through links on this page, we may earn an affiliate commission.