EQ Match

> Capture the average spectrum of your source, pick a target curve, hit Apply — and Outboard-EQ writes the matching EQ moves directly into up to six bands. No second plugin, no reverse engineering, no

Capture the average spectrum of your source, pick a target curve, hit Apply — and Outboard-EQ writes the matching EQ moves directly into up to six bands. No second plugin, no reverse engineering, no curve traced by hand.

How it works

EQ Match runs a 16k-FFT Welch-averaged power spectral density over a 10-second ring buffer of your source. When you press Capture, the running PSD becomes the source curve. Pick a target (built-in or any captured source), set Amount / Resolution / Smoothing, and the Greedy Allocator finds the most useful per-band moves to bend the source toward the target — then writes those moves into your EQ bands.

Walkthrough

1. Start playback

Play the source material you want to analyze. The 10-second ring is constantly refreshing.

2. Capture

Open the Match popover in the header → Capture. The current Welch-averaged PSD is frozen as the source.

3. Pick a target

Four built-in targets ship with Outboard-EQ:

Pink Noise — perfectly flat spectral density per octave. A neutral reference.
Bach Orchestral — averaged spectrum of a classical orchestral recording. Warm and balanced.
Hip-Hop — averaged spectrum of a contemporary hip-hop master. Heavy lows, controlled mids.
Modern Pop — averaged spectrum of contemporary pop production. Bright, scooped mids.

You can also pick Capture as target to use a captured spectrum (e.g. a reference track you played earlier) as the target.

4. Set the three knobs

Amount (0–2) — how strongly the match is applied. 1.0 is a 1:1 match, 0.5 is half, 2.0 is double.
Resolution (1–6) — how many bands the allocator may use. More bands = closer match; fewer bands = more obvious shape.
Smoothing (1/3 to 1/48 oct) — how the source-vs-target difference is smoothed before the allocator picks bands. Wider smoothing produces broader EQ moves.

5. Apply

Press Apply. The allocator writes the result directly into up to six APVTS bands as Peak filters with appropriate freq/gain/Q. The remaining bands (if any) are left untouched.

You can press Undo in the header to revert if you don't like the result, or run Apply again with different settings.

Tips

For a "make this drum bus sound like a reference" workflow: capture your drum bus, set Capture as Target to a reference drum bus you captured earlier, and apply at Amount around 0.5 to 0.8. The match nudges your bus toward the reference without taking over its character.
The allocator is greedy — it picks the move that closes the biggest gap first, then the next, and so on. So Resolution 3 gives you the three most important corrections; Resolution 6 fills in the smaller refinements.
Pink Noise target plus a 1/3 oct smoothing is a great "flatten the tonal balance" pass. Hip-Hop or Modern Pop target plus 1/12 oct smoothing is a "make this sound like the genre" pass.