EQ Preferences

My take on EQ is, it's certainly as stamkorg says a tool for correcting things, but for also shaping your signal to suit your specific requirements, be they 'sounding softer/wooded/brighter etc.' or to make it more like a certain recording or vintage, or your own unique sound, to fit into a mix and so on.

Most people should find most Pianoteq defaults good to excellent out-of-the-box - but we all have different speakers/headphones and room spaces (acoustics lacking in some ways). There's no exact replication of any audio across any two peoples' environments yet we tend to get used to our equipment. Once we get critical about making our VSTi sound as good as it can, for ourselves in our rooms, then for sure EQ can come into focus.

If you're interested in finding more depth from your EQing, first I'd really suggest checking the manual and give some time to testing out the tools in Pianoteq (a pre EQ and a post EQ) which are extremely useful (you can run 3 instances of the post EQ in effects for example). You really can take a few tricks to these to bring out certain flavours of bass, some wooded textures or sparkle.

There are too many marvelous EQ plugins to list for using in your DAW - but I'm extremely happy to point anyone to the "Waves" and "Izotope" plugin ecosystems, as they tend, like Pianoteq does, towards excellence. They offer an almost impossibly useful set of tools for any digital audio task such as fantastic emulations of successful hardware EQ units used in the best studios around the world, through to complete re-thinks for those who may not have physical hardware equivalences to consider - essentially opening myriad avenues to tweak your sound (not to mention all plugins unrelated to EQ).

As for preferred EQ settings, each Pianoteq preset gets its own EQ based on what I want to bring out in it (close your eyes, hear the reverb, is it a distant piano on a stage, or up close, in a populated room or a lonely bar stage? Imagine the setting you want to breath life into) - this makes more sense in time, when you've moved mics around and made other changes perhaps. You eventually find that you get the best results by listening critically to your piano and making unique EQ tweaks, depending on things like your goal/outcome, the style, the intended audience - or just what you like.

There's a long history of the audio industry standardising on certain 'curves' to suit their consumer equipment markets. Things are less restrictive these days but a kind of "V" type curve could be worth trying out (if you're experiencing a classic kind of general desire for basic depth and shine), if you're looking for one to sweeten up your audio. Without deeper editing, just some slight boosts in the bass region, slight cut in mids and slight boost in trebles (giving the V shape). It's not to say everything wants that kind of EQ, just a thing you might begin with to flesh out - sometimes you don't want so much bass, and need lots more mid or sculpting in the upper mids etc.

Have fun with it and keep making discoveries