![]() Most of the time you shouldn't have to make extreme adjustments to your EQ, but again, just trust your ears.Audiofile Engineering has released an update of Quiztones, a unique ear training application for audio professionals and musicians. What I like to do is boost a frequencies with a narrow Q, then sweep the frequencies knob back and forth until I hear something I don't like (or do like) and then decide if I want to boost it or cut it slightly. You can look at charts that give you ballpark figures about where you'll find the fundamental frequencies for a given instrument or sound, but it's often easier to use the EQ to help you do that. A piano or vocals, while capable of producing low bass notes, don't always lend themselves to being the best instrument to dominate that domain, so you might use a HPF to cut off the bass frequencies, leaving the upper harmonics, and allow the bass guitar or upright or synth or whatever you have for bass sounds to have it's own space. So for example you want the bass region of your sound to be dedicated to instruments who are intended to be bass instruments. If many instruments occupy the same range of colors, they become hard to distinguish from each other, so what you have to adjust the EQ to compensate or aid sounds that overlap with other sounds. ![]() When you mix multiple sounds together you're blending different sets of color bands and gradients on top of each other. ![]() Sounds are complex things and if there were a way to convert sound into light, and then pass it through a prism, you would see that each sound has it's own unique bands where there are obviously dominant fundamental stripes and hazy gradients in the higher frequencies that are soft but still add character to the overall color of that sound they're called harmonics. James Bernard of Propellerhead Software likes to describe sound kind of the same way you'd describe light, with a spectrum of wavelengths that produce different colors depending on the wavelength and brightness depending on the amplitude of that wave. ![]() The most important thing to remember about makeup gain is that it is for making the compressed signal louder so you can set it to where the uncompressed and compressed signals are the same volume in order to know if you are accurately hearing your compression settings. Attack and release times are important to train your ears to get used to, because they are more subtle to detect when the compressor is bypassed than ratio and threshold. You listen to the example and toggle the EQ on and off to compare.Īs for compression, reading about the technical side can only get you so far compared to just sitting with compressors and doing your own ear training. It also had musical examples and asks you to identify the EQ settings being used, for instance what frequency is being boost or cut by 10dB (easy mode) or 3dB (hard mode). There's a really great app in the app store on iPad and Mac osx called Quiztones which is an ear training program that has you identify sine wave frequencies, to familiarize yourself with the frequency spectrum and more easily identify where the resonant points you don't like about the sound you're EQing. It's often impossible to tweak the EQ so that it would suit a track for it's whole duration. If you have a warm lead synth/guitar track, try slightly cutting the mids in the tracks making up the backing.You should slightly roll off the lowest frequencies on pretty much everything except the bass track to make it more solid.There are only a few guidelines that you should follow. It makes life much easier, since very often you can tell straight away what's wrong with the material and how to fix it. Get yourself a spectrum analyser plugin or an EQ plugin with a built-in analyser. ![]() Simply saying that it's better to "subtract" than to "add" is a fallacy. In the real world, when you're recording with less than ideal equipment in less than ideal conditions, the frequency response of the recorded instrument may have lots of notches and dips. What is written in all those guides applies only when dealing with material that has already been recorded properly. ![]()
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