Reverb and EQ are fundamentally different processes. EQ has no time component. Reverb is a time-based effect.
this post was submitted on 18 Jul 2025
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Music Production
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What if it is automatically modulated alongside the playback rate?
What would you like to modulate in the EQ?
To be honest it sounds to me like you're trying to figure out a way to put a square peg in a round hole, to use a hammer when you should just use a screwdriver.
Each tool in music production is going to have its strengths and weaknesses as well as use cases that are just not appropriate for a specific tool.
If you need reverb, use a reverb. There's multiple different kinds to play with.
Try not to over complicate things. You'll just end up wasting a lot of time.
No.
Yes and no. Consider the concept of impulse responses (often called IR files) which are a finger print of how over a length of time for a given frequency how long the reverberation sustains.
https://wiki.fractalaudio.com/wiki/index.php?title=Impulse_responses_%28IR%29
An EQ can emulate the impact of certain frequencies getting boosted or nullified by a space which are particularly apparent in claustrophobic spaces where the distances of the space roughly correspond to the wavelengths of sound our hearing is tuned for.
Interestingly one of the ways that humans deduce the directions of sounds are Head Related Transfer Function.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Head-related_transfer_function
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=yY798BVah9Q
This can be thought of as an instinctual knowledge of how high frequency sounds tend to be muted/EQ'd by our head as we rotate it, thus allowing humans to better localize where sound is coming from.
Where EQ can't emulate a reverb is an actual sustainment of the sound. Cutting our boosting a signal does not fundamentally change its relationship to time, on the other hand Reverb fundamentally is a feedback of an older version of a signal into a newer version creating a new signal that may build or cancel at different frequencies. This may create a relatively simple static cutting or boosting effect, but it also may lead to much more varied phenomena such as echoes and sympathetic vibration.
What if the time is also dynamically altering, like during acceleration or deceleration or ritardando or whatever?
Well, then it becomes a different phenomena because some aspect of the signal alteration is now dependent upon time and is being actively modulated in some sense over time.
To use another example a purely digital compressor with no color distortion is nothing more than a volume knob automated to change over time, nothing magical was done to the volume knob to turn it into a compressor, rather a set of complex automation parameters were defined so you don't have to sit there with a fader at a mixing board and manually raise and lower the volume of tracks to an obsessive degree. If I sound like I am bashing digital compressors I am not, this is what makes digital compressors so powerful and ubiquitious.
From a digital production sense, you don't really alter time ever, the production of the song you are making must all be unified to a single click track/specification of time passing. Altering time like you say would be something like playing a sample faster or slower.. but you are always altering a sound's relationship to your established sense of time, never speeding up or slowing down the clock in your DAW because that would break the whole system at a basic level. The high fidelity digital music production provides is possible precisely because a computer can keep a clock running very consistently, and an entire music production process can be stacked on top of that single clock/perspective on time.
Right but in an aural sense in terms of how a human would perceive it changing time, not necessarily in a technical objective computer sense
I mean, give me an equalizer and super fast jazz hands and I can emulate any purely subtractive effect upon a signal using just the equalizer and modulating cuts and boosts.
My favorite practical tool for this kind of thing is Toky Dawn Record's Nova Vst. There is a great free version but the paid version is still a massive bargain for how good the signal processing is. The basic idea of Nova is a visual equalizer that you can turn static cuts and boosts into dynamically responding cuts and boosts... i.e. the equalizer becomes a compressor.
https://www.tokyodawn.net/tdr-nova/
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=1CHFv4mWQYM
In general, the philosophy of seeing the creation of sound as taking a process of taking a rich signal and removing from it in one way or another is called "Subtractive Synthesis" and there is a very good reason it is one of the most prolific and celebrated kinds of digital synthesis techniques. It is a very powerful way to look at the process of synthesizing sound.
EQ can simulate some limited subsets of effects of some reverbs, but, it cannot, even with modulation in time, cover what they do fully. The thing with reverb is that it introduces new sound. Some forms of reverbs are similar to delays with short delay times. If you look at spectrograms, both reverb and delay introduce new waveshapes to the picture. And EQ can only alter existing waveshapes, if that makes sense. (Not sure how to word this better).
Edit: adding delay here makes this all easier to understand, because if you take delay with long time, like 3 seconds, it is quite obvious that no amount of EQ can copypaste the sound into the time moment 3 seconds later right? And reverb basically has similar nature. It introduces soundwaves where they were not present before, so no amount of EQing can create them.
Most effects can be categorized by whether they modify a signal in time, in frequency, or some blend of the two. Reverb is predominantly a time domain effect while equalization is almost purely frequency domain. You can't really fake one with the other.
Reverb and delay are pretty closely related, however, so you could get a reverb-like effect with a delay and vice-versa.
Again, I encourage you to grab a book or take a course on audio production. You'd probably really enjoy it.