Last night I just realized that I have forgotten to give away my biggest secret. That of how I got to know what to cut or boost and what makes an specific instruments sound that way -known as the instruments sweet spot(s). In basic words how to use an EQ.
My best advice for every one that’s (starting) learning EQ is to buy a 31-band, 2-channel (stereo) graphic equalizer (it doesn’t have to be an expensive one [!!!] It’s about the idea and learning curve, but to give you my honest advice I’d invest in an dbx 2231, 1231, or 231) and place it between your hi-fi’s or computer’s soundcard’s output and your speakers.
Now when you play music try and play around with the bands, adding, subtracting, and so on. Listen how the song sounds and alter it in a way you want it to sound, the way it’s most pleasant to you. Try to find out the sweet spots of the instruments within the song so it stands out above the rest of the track and vice versa.
NOTE: It’s highly recommended to A/B between the EQ’d signal and the non-EQ’d signal to know what you are actually doing to the audio for the better or the worse(!!!).
This is the way I learned and self-taught how to use EQ and I still use it from time to time, very handy! So next time you go into a mix you know what frequencies to aim for 😉 It sure helped me a whole lot!
Just to let you know that I don’t do everything by the traditional ‘ear’; in the studio I have Waves PAZ running as stand-alone plugin using a RTAS Shell on a separate TV screen. It’s inputs listens to the main outs from Pro Tools using the free JackAudio application and a VU kinda response time (closest to the human hearing). This way the analyzer is always shown.
It’s a save bet for me to say that the analyzer is probably the most handy tool during mixdown for me in a way that I can see exactly what the instrument is doing in the frequency spectrum. And it sure saved my ass a lot of times. However I can’t stress how important it is to STILL rely on your hearing (!!!) the old fashioned way. The ways an analyzer works is not a complete save bet (blindly) as explained in one of my earlier post.
Learning how to EQ will prepare you for the biggest part to later on understand how to transient design your instruments in a corrective way. Also compression plays an important role in this.
Have fun playing around with your EQ and let me know if this worked for you as it did for me.
Scalping off with surgical incision and precision,
Your Music Surgeon
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