Getting a song to sound professional comes down to two simple things: how loud each part is, and how the EQ fits together. If you nail that balance across your vocals, music, drums and bass, the track just works. If you don't, you can spend hours struggling. CARBON Q is designed to control the EQ balance and volume relationships across your entire session from one easy to use window, while giving you some really fast starting points to inspire you and set a great foundation for your mix.
This is the full manual. If you just want to get up and running, section 1 will get you there.
1Quickstart
CARBON Q is one EQ spread across your whole session. You put a MIX instance on your master output and CARBON agents on your vocals, music, drums and bass. They instantly connect, and from any instance you can see every one of them at once and control them all without touching another plugin window.
- Put a CARBON Q instance on your master output channel and select MIX.
- Put an instance on your vocals, music, drums and bass, picking the matching role for each. They'll instantly connect and show up along the bottom of your window.
- Loop the busiest, most representative part of your song, usually the final chorus or the drop. Hit play, then hit ANALYZE. A tray drops down where you pick which instances to analyze, and the button becomes GO. Press GO and CARBON Q listens to your song and builds a custom starting point from your actual audio.
- Click through the Smart Presets to find the EQ and volume balance that fits your track best. Or open the reference tracks tab, drop in a song you love, and let CARBON Q turn that record into a custom preset for your whole mix.
- From there you're in total control. Drag nodes, adjust volume levels, dive into Mid/Side mode, or turn on Dynamic Mode to keep specific channels held neatly in place.
Run ANALYZE before you touch anything. Try a few presets, or a reference track, to see which direction feels right, then trust your ears to refine it. The analysis gets you most of the way there so you spend your energy on the last stretch instead of the first.
2Mix & Agents
It all revolves around five roles. The first thing you do on a fresh instance is pick one from the five tiles.
The one that runs the session. Put it on your master output channel. It sees every agent, calculates the Smart Presets, and can analyze the whole session in one go.
Goes on your vocal channel or vocal bus.
Goes on your instruments, backing or music bus.
Goes on your drum bus.
Goes on your bass channel or low-end bus.
You get one MIX per session. CARBON Q also reads your DAW track names, so if the track is called "Vocals" or "Bass" the matching tile glows to save you a decision.
The agent tray
Each track gets its own live tile in the agent tray along the bottom of the window. The tray appears in every instance, not just the MIX one, so you can see and control your whole session from whichever instance you happen to have open.
Move a node in one of these smaller agent windows and it updates on that individual track in real time. Change it on the channel and the tray follows.
Click the expand icon on any agent tile to edit that channel full size. Press Esc or hit minimize to drop back to the main view. One agent at a time can be expanded.
Changing a role
Click the role name at the top left of any agent tile to swap it to a different role. The MIX instance keeps its role for the life of the session, because everything else keys off it.
Track properties
The small i button next to an agent's role name shows you which DAW track that agent is sitting on, including the track name and color where your DAW passes them through. Handy when you have four agents in the tray and want to be sure which is which.
The instances connect locally across your computer network, so your operating system might ask for permission the first time. Rest assured, your audio never leaves your computer. If you say no, each instance still works on its own, but the agent tray will stay empty and no instance will be able to see or control the rest of your session.
3Reference Tracks
Importing reference tracks is where the magic happens.
CARBON Q lets you use any song you love as a complete blueprint for your mix. Drop a reference track straight into the plugin. It literally stems that record, separating out the vocals, music, drums and bass, then figures out the tonal balance of each one, the tonal balance of the mix as a whole, and how loud each part sits against the rest.
All of that information is converted into a preset. Select it, and CARBON Q applies the changes needed to give your session the same EQ and volume balance as your reference track, at a click.
Adding a reference track
- Click the preset bar to open the preset browser, then go to the reference tracks tab using the icon on the left, or press Tab.
- Drag your audio files straight in, or hit + and choose Upload mix. WAV, AIFF, FLAC, MP3 and the usual formats all work, and you can select several at once.
- Wait for the progress readout. Separating the stems is the long part, so give it a moment.
- The track appears in your list with its own tonal and width tags. Click it and your session moves to match.
Ways to use it
- The whole picture. Pick one reference and let it set the volume and tonal balance across the MIX, vocals, music, drums and bass together. This is the fastest way to find out how far your mix is from the record you have in mind.
- One channel. Only want the vocal to sit like the vocal on your favorite song? Unlink the VOCALS agent and choose the reference there, so the rest of your session stays put.
- Mix and match. Use the drums from one track and the bass from another. Unlink the agents you want to treat separately and give each its own reference.
- Audition. Load as many reference tracks as you like and switch between them instantly. Each one points your mix in a slightly different direction, and hearing three or four in a row tells you a lot about which one is right.
Rename a track by clicking its name, and hover a row for the delete button. Star the ones you keep coming back to and they collect in Starred Presets. Reference tracks also show up in the Smart Presets when they are a close match for what you analyzed.
Hit + and choose Upload stems to give CARBON Q one file per role instead. Drop in files named after their roles and it sorts them for you.
A reference is simply a target to fast-track your foundation. It tells you where a record you trust sits. It doesn't tell you your mix is wrong, and you're still driving the final sound.
4The EQ
Each instance features eleven carefully tuned frequency bands covering the full spectrum: 20, 30, 60, 120, 240, 480 and 960 Hz, then 1.92, 3.84, 7.68 and 12 kHz. You get a low shelf at the bottom, a high shelf at the top, and smooth bell curves in between. Range is ±9 dB per band.
The frequencies don't move, which is deliberate. It keeps you working on tonal balance rather than hunting around for exact frequencies, and because every channel shares these same core frequency points, it's incredibly easy to see how your tracks interact. If your vocal and your music are fighting for space around 2 kHz, you can spot it immediately and fix it across both tracks in one window.
Working with the nodes
- Drag a node up or down to adjust its gain.
- Scroll over a node to tighten or widen its Q bandwidth.
- Click and drag across the curve to select multiple nodes and move them together.
- Double-click a node to reset that band back to flat.
- Double-click off the nodes to reset every band on the curve you're looking at.
Nodes only move vertically. There's nothing to drag sideways and nothing to hunt for, so the move you make is the move you meant.
The scale expands when it needs to
The display runs ±9 dB by default. Individual bands sum, so a few boosts next to each other can push the resulting curve past that. When they do, the scale doubles to ±18 dB automatically so you can still see the shape of what you have built, and shrinks back when the curve fits again. You do not have to do anything.
Level matched as you move
Our ears naturally think "louder" means "better." It's one of the easiest traps to fall into, and it leads to EQ tweaks that are really just volume adjustments in disguise.
When you tweak an EQ curve in CARBON Q, it automatically level-matches the change in real time. The overall volume stays consistent, so the only thing you hear is the actual change in tone. Push 240 Hz up 4 dB and you hear a warmer channel, not a louder one. Pull it back down and you hear it clear, not drop.
The same is true when you switch presets. Each one is matched to its target loudness as it lands, so stepping through ten of them compares ten tonal balances rather than ten volumes.
Level matching covers your EQ moves only. The Gain slider is yours and does exactly what you tell it, and anything Dynamic does to the level is the point of Dynamic, so that is left alone too.
Gain
The vertical slider on the right of the EQ is the instance's output gain, ±9 dB. Hover it for a readout, and click the readout to type an exact value. Level matching leaves it alone, so what you set here is what you get. It is also the control CARBON Q uses to dial in your overall volume balance when you select a preset or a reference track.
Transparent by design
Under the hood, CARBON Q uses our Mastering The Mix max quality linear phase filters. That means boosting or cutting frequencies changes the tone without smearing your sound or killing your punch. When you boost the high end, transients stay sharp. When you clean up the low mids, the kick drum keeps its tight impact.
Most EQs are minimum phase. They add no latency, but boosting or cutting shifts the phase around the frequencies you touch, and that smears the timing of your transients, most audibly in the low end. A linear phase design keeps every frequency time aligned so nothing smears, and the price has always been latency. CARBON Q gives you the linear phase result while minimizing the latency.
We matched CARBON Q against a market leading linear phase EQ on a deliberately extreme move, a +8 dB low shelf under 100 Hz. The two responses track within ±0.13 dB from 18 Hz to 2 kHz, and on a transient CARBON Q produces the same clean, symmetric, phase coherent shape as that EQ at its maximum resolution linear phase setting. It gets there at 41 ms of latency, 1,820 samples at 44.1 kHz, instead of 1,509 ms.
You get exceptional, crystal-clear transparency across your entire mix without the heavy latency usually found in high-end linear phase plugins. That matters more in a CARBON Q session than it does on a single band, because you have an instance on your output and one on each of your buses. Every move stacks. Small phase shifts pile on top of each other until a mix starts sounding a bit wishy-washy, and transparent filters in all those same places stack up the other way.
CARBON Q reports its latency to the host, so your DAW compensates for it and everything stays in time. If you are recording and need low latency monitoring, use your DAW's low latency mode or leave CARBON Q off the input channel until you are mixing. These are the same filters we shipped in MIXVAULT, and the full measurement, including the impulse response plots, is in MIXVAULT vs a Leading EQ.
The visualizer
A live spectrum paints behind the curve so you can see what you are working on. In Mid or Side mode you get two traces, with the one you are editing filled in and the other outlined. Tilt, decay speed and resolution are all in Settings, and you can turn the whole thing off if you would rather work on the curve alone.
5Dynamic Mode
A standard EQ curve only sets a fixed average. It can't adapt when a bass note booms too loud in the chorus, or a vocal suddenly spikes on a hit. Dynamic Mode is the answer to that, and it is built around the target you already set.
How it works
When you run an analysis, CARBON Q doesn't only learn the tonal balance of your audio. It also measures where the sudden peaks happen. Turn on Dynamic Mode and it sets a threshold at those peak levels on every band. If a signal pushes past that target, CARBON Q automatically pulls it back into line in real time, then smooths out the moment the peak passes. The rest of the time it does nothing at all.
The result is that your audio holds its tonal balance far more consistently. A preset or a reference track sets where you want the mix to sit, and Dynamic keeps it there through the loud sections instead of only on average.
We tried the other direction as well, lifting a band when the audio fell below its target. It sounded unnatural, the way upward processing usually does. Pulling peaks back into line sounds like the mix was played that way, so that is what Dynamic does.
The controls
Click the Dynamic button at the top left of the EQ to turn it on. The band row underneath the curve then becomes the amount control, and you can work it two ways.
- One amount for everything. Link the bands and drag a single value, 0 to 100%, across the whole frequency range.
- Three bands. Unlink and you get separate amounts for the low, mid and high ranges, so you can hold the low end firmly and leave the top end alone.
At 50%, Dynamic gently clamps down on runaway peaks and acts as a safety net, holding your mix to the tonal balance a preset or a reference put it at. Push it further toward 100% for tighter, more aggressive control over your track dynamics. Below 50% it eases off, so you can have just a touch.
Fine-tuning the bands
The three band crossovers can be adjusted, so you decide exactly where the low, mid and high ranges start and stop. Each band also has its own attack and release, so you can set how quickly Dynamic reacts to a peak and how quickly it lets go afterward. Faster settings catch short spikes, slower settings ride longer swells without pumping.
The moving curve is drawn under the static one, so you can see exactly which bands are working and how hard. Dynamic has its own settings for Mid and Side, and it is saved with your preset and your session like everything else.
Start at 50% across the whole range on the channel that keeps escaping, usually the bass or the vocal, and listen to the chorus. If it is still stepping on something, split into three bands and raise only the range that is causing it.
6Stereo, Mid & Side
In Stereo mode, your EQ tweaks apply across the entire left and right signal. Switch to Mid/Side mode for more detailed control and an even closer match to your reference tracks and presets.
Mid/Side splits your signal into two separate curves: one for the center of your mix, and one for the outer sides. Clear the low mids out of the sides without touching the center. Open the top end of the sides for air without making the vocal harsh. That kind of thing.
Jumping between the two curves
Both curves stay visible on screen at the same time. The active curve is highlighted, while the other sits dimmed behind it. Just click the dimmed line to switch instantly, or use the Stereo / Mid / Side selector at the top of the EQ. No trip back to a menu, no losing your place.
Both curves stay active the whole time. Anything you dial into Mid keeps working while you are editing Side, and the other way round.
Setting every instance at once
Right click or shift click the Stereo / Mid / Side selector to set every instance in your session to that mode in one go. And because you have an instance on every bus, that gives you full mid and side control across your entire mix from a single window.
You can also choose your preferred default processing mode in Settings, so new agents start in the mode you actually work in.
Analyze in the mode you intend to work in. A Smart Preset calculated in Stereo is looking at the whole signal, and one calculated in Mid or Side is looking at each half separately, so you get a more relevant starting point by picking the mode first. Reference tracks carry separate mid and side targets too, so a reference lands correctly whichever mode you are in.
7Analyze & Smart Presets
The ANALYZE button builds custom EQ curves and volume balance targets from your actual audio, not a stored curve. So if you select a bright modern rock preset, CARBON Q applies the changes needed to achieve that sound on your track, which will be completely different to the changes it makes on a dark hip hop track.
How to analyze
Loop the busiest, most representative part of your song, usually the final chorus or the drop, hit play, then hit ANALYZE.
A tray drops down under the button with one icon for every instance in your session, and the button itself changes to GO. The tray is where you choose what gets analyzed. Press GO and it runs.
Choosing what gets analyzed
Every icon in the tray is a toggle. Click one to arm it or leave it out.
- Gold means that instance gets analyzed.
- Grey means it sits this one out.
- Dim red means this instance can't analyze it, because that agent is locked or has unlinked itself.
The line under the icons tells you what a press of GO would do, something like "3 OF 5 WILL ANALYZE". Hover any icon and it tells you about that one instead, including which flag is in the way when it's red.
You don't have to touch any of it. The tray opens already armed the way the button behaved before it existed. Press ANALYZE in an agent and it arms just that agent. Press it in the MIX instance and it arms itself plus every agent that's linked and unlocked. So open the tray, press GO, and you get what you always got.
Two buttons sit along the top of the tray:
- ALL, top right, arms everything the MIX instance would analyze.
- LINK ALL, top left and only in the MIX instance, turns link on across the whole session and arms whatever that frees up. It's one undo if you change your mind.
The tray opens in every instance, so you can analyze any combination of channels from whichever window you have open. Arm the MIX and two agents from your bass channel and those three get analyzed, and nothing else.
Press Esc or click outside the tray to close it without analyzing anything. If nothing is armed, GO won't do anything, so arm at least one instance first.
What happens next
CARBON Q collects 20 seconds of audio while the transport rolls, ignoring silence, then narrows in on the loudest, densest part of what it heard.
The button walks through ANALYZE, ANALYZING... and ANALYZED, with a progress bar across it. Hover it once it is done and it offers RE-ANALYZE, which is what you want after you have changed something upstream. If you press it while it is still buffering, it starts the 20 seconds again from scratch, which is useful if you jumped in at the wrong part of the song.
The analysis is also what Dynamic works from. It records how far each band peaks above the average, and that is where Dynamic puts its thresholds, so re-analyze if you make a big change to the arrangement.
Smart Presets
Once the analysis is in, CARBON Q compares your song against world class reference mixes, ranks everything it has including your own reference tracks, and brings up the ten closest Smart Presets tailored specifically to your audio. They are marked with a lightbulb wherever they show up in the lists. If nothing is loaded yet, the top match is applied for you so you have something to react to. Usually you'll find the perfect baseline within just a few clicks.
Smart Presets are calculated in the MIX instance and shared out to the agents, which is one more reason to have a MIX instance in the session even if you are not doing much on the output channel.
8The Preset Browser
The preset browser is clean and simple: three columns for Role, Category and Preset. Your Smart Presets and starred favorites sit right at the top, followed by Reference Tracks and the factory genres (70s, 80s Pop, 90s, Classic Rock, Country, Dance, Electronic, Hip Hop, Metal, Modern Rock, Pop, Singer Songwriter).
Click the preset bar to open the browser, or step through presets with the arrows either side of it. The two icons on the far left switch between the presets and the reference tracks tab, and Tab does the same.
Reading a preset name
Every preset name gives you a clear description of what to expect, tagging both tonal character and stereo width, so 80s Pop 12: Full-bodied & Balanced Width tells you what you are about to hear before you click it.
- Tonal balance: Bass-heavy, Full-bodied, Dark, Warm, Balanced EQ, Bright, Piercing.
- Stereo width: Mono, Narrow, Focused Width, Balanced Width, Wide, Very Wide.
Hover any preset row and a star appears. Star the ones you keep coming back to and they collect in Starred Presets.
How the presets are numbered
Remember, a preset in CARBON Q covers your whole session. It sets the volume balance and the tonal balance for every role at once, taken from a mix that already works.
The presets in each genre are numbered, and each number is one complete song. So Pop 1 is one record across all five roles, and Pop 2 is a different one. That is why the tags change from role to role. In Pop 1 your mix might read Bass-heavy & Narrow, while the vocal in that same preset reads Pop 1: Full-bodied & Balanced Width. They are describing different parts of the same record, so they already work together.
Select one in the MIX instance and every linked agent takes its own share: the vocal agent takes the vocal target, the bass agent takes the bass target, and each one sets its Gain so it sits at the right level against the mix. The curves glide to the new shape rather than jumping.
On a stem or mix setup, CARBON Q handles the tonal relationship between your vocals, music, drums and bass before anything downstream tries to glue it together. Clean resonances first with RESO, set width with STEREOVAULT, shape tonal balance with CARBON Q, then hand it to FASTER MASTER for transients, compression and loudness. Check the result against a reference with REFERENCE, and quality control the file with EXPOSE.
9Lock, Link, Bypass & Mix
These four sit together at the top right of every instance and every agent tile.
| Control | What it does |
|---|---|
| Lock | Freezes a channel once you're happy with it. The EQ becomes read-only, it ignores preset changes coming from the session, and nothing else in the session can analyze it, so it shows dim red in the analysis tray. Use it when one channel is exactly where you want it and you want to keep working on the rest. |
| Link | Keeps an instance connected to the session-wide preset. Change preset anywhere and every linked instance follows. Turn it off if you want to assign a unique reference track or preset to just one channel. Switch it back on and the agent snaps to whatever the MIX instance is currently on. An unlinked agent also shows dim red in the analysis tray, because only its own instance can analyze it. |
| Bypass | Bypass on the MIX instance turns off processing across every instance at once, giving you a clean, honest A/B comparison of your whole mix. Bypass on an agent turns off just that channel and dims its tile, so you can see at a glance what is off. |
| Mix (%) | Blends your processed sound with your original dry signal, 0 to 100%. Drag it, or double-click to type a value. The dry path is fully phase-aligned for smooth parallel processing. |
10Toolbar
The toolbar runs along the top of the plugin and holds the global controls. Every adjustment is completely undoable, so you can experiment without losing your place.
| Button | Function |
|---|---|
| ANALYZE | Opens the analysis tray, where you pick which instances to analyze. The button then reads GO, and pressing it runs the analysis on whatever you armed. |
| Undo / Redo | Steps back and forward through your edit history. |
| A | B | Two independent states so you can compare a heavier approach against a lighter one, with a copy button to duplicate one into the other. B starts as a copy of A, so both begin from the same point. |
| Bypass | Bypasses processing. On the MIX instance this bypasses every instance in the session. |
| License | Your licensing settings, including activating and deactivating this machine. |
| Help | Takes you to this manual and our support resources. |
| Settings | Opens the Settings panel. |
| RESET | Bottom left. Resets this instance back to defaults and clears the A/B states. Undoable, like everything else. |
11Settings
The gear icon in the toolbar opens Settings. The panel lets you customize your tray layout, toggle tooltips, adjust the visualizer, or check your plugin version number if you ever need quick help from our support team. Everything here is about how CARBON Q looks and behaves, not how it sounds.
| Setting | Details |
|---|---|
| Agent tray expand mode | Auto, 1 row or 2 rows. Controls how much room the agent tray takes and how tall the window gets. Auto goes to two rows once you have more than two agents. |
| Default processing mode | The mode new agents start in: Stereo, Mid or Side. Changing it does not touch agents already in the session. |
| Tooltips | On or off. On by default. |
| FFT visualization | Turns the live spectrum behind the EQ curve on or off. The obvious one to turn off if you want to save a little CPU. |
| FFT tilt | 0.0, 1.5, 3.0, 4.5 or 6.0 dB per octave. 3.0 by default, which is the one that reads closest to how you hear balance. |
| FFT decay speed | Very slow through to Very fast. Slow by default. Slower is easier to read for tonal balance, faster is better for catching transients. |
| FFT resolution | Low, Medium, High or Maximum. High by default. |
| OpenGL rendering | Windows only. Draws the window with OpenGL, which can look smoother and use less CPU. Off by default. Close and reopen the window after changing it. |
| Restore defaults | Puts all of the above back to defaults. It does not touch your audio settings or your presets. |
Settings also shows your version number and build date, which is the first thing our support team will ask for.
12Keyboard Shortcuts
| Key | Action |
|---|---|
| Cmd Z | Undo. Ctrl Z on Windows. |
| Cmd Shift Z | Redo. Ctrl Y on Windows. |
| Esc | Close the preset browser or the analysis tray, or minimize an expanded agent. |
| Tab | Switch between the presets and the reference tracks tab. |
| ← → | Previous and next preset when the preset bar has focus. |
| Right click / Shift click | On the Stereo / Mid / Side selector, sets every instance in the session to that mode. |
| Double-click | On a node, resets that band. Off the nodes, resets the whole curve. |
| Click and drag | Across the curve, selects multiple nodes so you can move them together. |
| Scroll | Over a node, adjusts its Q. |
13System Requirements & Installation
The CARBON Q interface is fully resizable, so you can scale it to suit your screen and workflow. Drag the bottom right corner.
| Requirement | Details |
|---|---|
| Operating System | macOS X 10.15 or higher. 64-bit AU, VST 3 or AAX host (Intel and Apple Silicon). Windows 10 or higher. 64-bit VST 3 or 64-bit AAX host. |
| Plugin Formats | VST3, AU (Audio Units), AAX |
| Host Application | Any VST3 or AU compatible DAW |
| Sample Rates | Up to 192 kHz |
| Network | Local network access, so instances in the same session can see each other. Nothing leaves your machine. |
| Reference tracks | Reference track analysis, including stem separation, runs on your machine. Your audio is never uploaded anywhere. |
Three posts cover the thinking behind CARBON Q in more detail: The Volume Balance Blueprint on getting your levels right before you touch the tone, Full Mix Relative EQ on shaping the relationships between your channels, and The Mid/Side Workflow I Always Wanted on treating the center and the sides separately.
CARBON Q won't mix your song for you, but it gives you a massive head start toward a clean, professional sound, so you can spend less time fighting your mix and more time being creative. Load it onto a session you know well, use your favorite tracks as your baseline, and see how much faster your mixes come together.