Control

Tone Control

Tone control is a high shelf from -10 to +10 dB. Learn how darkening hides stretch artifacts, when to brighten sped up edits, and values by style.

Open the free editor: upload MP3, WAV, AAC, OGG or FLAC, adjust speed, reverb, bass, tone, width and space, then export MP3 or a ZIP of many tracks. Everything runs in your browser.

Tone decides whether an edit sounds like it is coming through a wall or through a window. It is a high shelf with a range of -10 to +10 dB and a default of 0 dB. Negative values darken the top end, positive values brighten it. On a slowed track Tone almost always goes down; on a sped up track, as in the Lift preset, it almost always goes up. The reasons are different in each direction, and understanding them is what separates an edit that sounds intentional from one that sounds like the playback speed was changed by accident. This page covers how the filter works, what it does to stretch artifacts, how it shapes the reverb, and where to set it for each style in the slowed reverb maker.

What Tone does in signal terms

The editor applies a biquad high-shelf filter with its corner at 2600 Hz. Everything well above that frequency receives the gain you set; everything well below is left alone; the region around 2.6 kHz transitions gradually. At -10 dB the content above the corner is cut to about a third of its amplitude. At +10 dB it is roughly tripled.

What lives above 2.6 kHz: vocal consonants and breath, sibilance, the attack of hi-hats and cymbals, the pick noise on guitars, the air on synths and pads, and the hiss or grain from the source file. What lives below: fundamentals of almost every note, the body of the vocal, the kick, the bass, and most of the warmth. Tone shifts the balance between those two worlds without touching either one's internal mix.

Tone sits after Speed and the bass shelf and before the reverb split, so it shapes both the dry signal and what feeds the reverb. That second part matters more than it first appears.

Darkening to hide stretch artifacts

Slowing a song with Preserve pitch off is a clean process in principle. The samples are read more slowly and no algorithm invents new material. In practice two things get exposed.

Source compression artifacts. Every MP3 or AAC file has small errors in its high end, where the encoder spent the fewest bits. At normal speed they are masked by the music. Slow the file by 15% and those errors stretch in time while shifting down into a range where the ear is more sensitive. The result is a faint grain or swirl above a few kilohertz. A Tone cut of -3 to -6 dB pulls that region down enough that the grain disappears behind the music again.

Stretched transients. Cymbals, hats and sibilant consonants are made of short bursts of high-frequency noise. Slowing them makes each burst last longer, so a hi-hat that was a tick becomes a hiss and an "s" becomes a hush. The music does not have more treble, but the treble lasts longer and reads as harsh. Darkening tames it.

There is a third, musical reason. Slowed + reverb is meant to sound distant and remembered. Distance in real acoustics means less treble, because air absorbs high frequencies over distance. A negative Tone is the simplest way to say "far away". The Haze Chamber preset uses the full -10 dB for exactly this.

With Preserve pitch on, darkening also helps, because time-stretching introduces its own phasey artifacts that live mostly in the upper mids and treble.

Brightening for sped up edits

Speeding a song up pushes every frequency upward and shortens every transient. You might expect that to make the track too bright, and sometimes it does. More often the opposite problem shows up: a sped up edit sounds thin and small, because the body of the vocal and the weight of the drums have moved up out of their natural range and the whole thing feels like it is coming from a smaller speaker.

Brightening does not fix the thinness directly, but it leans into the style. Nightcore and sped up content is meant to sound glossy, energetic and slightly artificial. A +2 to +5 dB high shelf makes hats sparkle, consonants pop and synth leads cut through on a phone speaker. The Lift preset ships at +3 dB for this reason, and the nightcore maker page goes further into the style.

The limit is harshness. Bright pop masters already have a lot of energy above 2.6 kHz, and +5 dB on top can turn sibilance into a whistle. Set Tone on the brightest section of the song and back off until the "s" sounds stop hurting.

How Tone shapes the reverb

Because Tone comes before the reverb split, it colours what the convolver receives. The reverb tail already darkens on its own: the synthesised impulse response sweeps its high-frequency cutoff from 9 kHz down to 1.2 kHz across the decay. A negative Tone darkens the tail further, which usually sounds good and is part of why dark presets feel smooth. A positive Tone brightens the early tail, which can make a long reverb mix sound hissy.

This gives you a trick. If a reverb sounds splashy or metallic, lower Tone by 2 dB before lowering the mix. The tail will smooth out while the dry signal barely changes. And if a long decay is turning to low-mid rumble, raise Tone by 2 dB to restore some definition before shortening Space.

How Tone interacts with the other controls

Bass. The two shelves tilt the spectrum from opposite ends. Lowering Tone while raising Bass produces a steep tilt toward the low end, which is the classic deep sound. Raising both produces a smile curve that can sound hollow. Lowering both makes the track quieter and smaller, which is rarely wanted.

Speed. Slower speeds move source grain down into audible range, so the darker you want to go, the slower you can go without the artifacts showing. At 0.75x expect to need -5 dB or more just to keep the top end clean.

Reverb and Space. Covered above. Darker Tone, smoother tail.

Width. Wide settings emphasise the stereo reverb, and reverb tails carry most of their stereo information in the mid and high frequencies. A bright Tone with a wide image can sound airy and open; a dark Tone with a wide image sounds enveloping.

Recommended Tone by style

The last two rows are the reminder that the source matters as much as the style. A dull 1970s recording slowed to 0.85x may need no cut at all, while a modern master at the same speed may need -5 dB.

Setting Tone by ear

1. Set Speed, Bass and your reverb first. Tone is the finishing move.
2. Play the busiest, brightest section. Usually the final chorus.
3. For slowed edits, start at 0 and move down 2 dB at a time. Stop when hats and "s" sounds stop being distracting. Go one step further if you want the distant feel.
4. For sped up edits, start at 0 and move up 1 dB at a time. Stop just before sibilance becomes painful.
5. Flip to the Dry preset for a few bars and back. If the edit sounds dull next to the original rather than darker, you went too far.

Mistakes with Tone

• Using it to fix buried vocals. Darkening hides hiss and grain. It does not un-mask consonants from a reverb tail. If words are lost, lower Reverb.
• Maxing it at -10 by default. -10 dB is a deliberate extreme. On a bright source it may be right; on a warm one it makes the track sound like it is playing in another room with the door shut.
• Brightening a slowed edit to "add clarity". Slowed grain lives in the treble. Boosting it makes the artifacts louder.
• Setting it on the intro. Intros are usually sparse and dark on their own. The chorus is where the hats and sibilance live.
• Ignoring it on sped up edits. A sped up track at 0 dB Tone often sounds unfinished. Even +1 dB helps.
• Expecting it to be a de-esser. A shelf cuts everything above 2.6 kHz evenly. It will tame sibilance but it will also dull the hats. There is no narrow-band EQ in this editor.

Tone and the export

The export is MP3 at 96 kbps and 32 kHz, encoded in your browser. The 32 kHz sample rate caps the output at 16 kHz, and MP3 encoders spend most of their bits on high-frequency detail. A darker Tone therefore makes the format's job easier, and dark slowed edits encode very cleanly at 96 kbps. Bright sped up edits are the hardest case for the encoder, so start from a lossless or high-bitrate source when brightening. The export is fine for YouTube, TikTok and Shorts because those platforms re-encode anyway. For a distribution master, finish from a WAV source in a DAW.