The voice on the frequency axis
Click or hover a band on the chart, or tab to the band buttons below it, to see what lives there, what too much or too little sounds like, and the standard move. Nothing plays and nothing records; this chart is a map, not a meter.
The dots are the three bands every new Patchd EQ starts with, in the app's own band colors: a High Pass at 80 Hz, a Peak at 3 kHz, and a High Shelf at 10 kHz. The peak and the shelf sit flat at 0 dB until you move them.
Rumble and plosives
20 to 120 HzHigh-passRoom rumble, desk thumps, chair creaks, traffic, and the burst of air from p and b plosives. A speaking voice carries almost nothing useful below about 80 Hz.
Too loud
The channel sounds thick and muddy, plosives pop, and meters jump on energy you cannot even hear as tone. That same energy trips gates and compressors before your ears notice it.
Too quiet
Nothing to miss. Cutting below 80 Hz costs a spoken voice almost nothing.
The standard move
Filter it rather than cutting with a gain band: a high-pass at 80 to 120 Hz. A new Patchd EQ starts with a High Pass at 80 Hz already in place.
Some bands overlap on the chart because they overlap in real voices, and every voice and mic is different. Treat the ranges and dB numbers as voice-centric starting points, not laws.
The chart tells you where to look; your ears decide whether a move is needed. For the full workflow on your own voice, including the sweep trick for hunting down a problem band by ear, see how to EQ your microphone.
How to read the chart
The band edges are fuzzy on purpose. Presence runs up to about 6 kHz while sibilance starts around 5 kHz because real voices do not respect tidy boundaries: a deep voice carries its fundamental lower, a bright voice pushes its sibilance higher. These ranges are voice-centric starting points drawn from common mixing practice, not laws.
The dB numbers follow one logic everywhere: cut narrow, boost wide, stay small. A 2 to 4 dB cut fixes most problems, and if a band seems to need more than about 6 dB, the real fix is usually the mic, the distance, or the room rather than the EQ. If bands, Q, and shelves are new territory, start with what an EQ actually is.
The three colored dots under the axis show where Patchd starts. A fresh EQ in Patchd ships with three bands: a high-pass at 80 Hz already filtering rumble, a peak band parked flat at 3 kHz ready for a presence move, and a high shelf at 10 kHz ready for air. That is the shipped starting curve for the three most common voice moves; sibilance gets its own tool, a de-esser whose detection frequency defaults to 6.5 kHz.
Make these moves in real time
Patchd is a Windows audio mixer with a real parametric EQ free on every channel, which starts with an 80 Hz high pass and a peak and a shelf ready for the other moves above, plus a de-esser, gate, compressor, and AI noise suppression. It is in open beta now, and the waitlist is how you hear about the public release.