To complete this series of EQ mistakes, we’ve got to talk about the big boy. The thing we all WANT to do when we first start messing around with EQ.
We’ve looked at EQ-ing without listening, not EQ-ing in solo, and EQ-ing out of context. Once you’ve really mastered those three, what do you do once you’ve got the EQ open?
The tendency is to say This kick drum needs more low end and high end. So we reach for the low and high bands and start boosting. As I mentioned recently, removing some of the low-mids (around 400 Hz) can accomplish the same thing…and it usually sounds much better and more natural.
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This past weekend was the very first Simply Recording Academy. Graham Cochrane and I got together with a bunch of home studio guys like you and tracked and mixed a band here in Nashville over two days.
It was epic.
I’ll be writing about it more, but my brain is still processing everything.
There were a lot of great moments over the weekend, but one that really stands out was on the second day. We spend the entire first day tracking a band (a really, REALLY good band called Manic Bloom — check them out, buy their music). We spent the second day mixing the song.
The moment that struck me was when we were probably over halfway through the mixing process, and Graham and I had only used the stock EQ and compressor plugins that come with Pro Tools. That’s it. We literally didn’t touch another plugin for most of the mix session.
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So far we’ve looked at why you shouldn’t EQ without listening and should limit how much you EQ in solo. But what about the bigger picture?
If you’re being a good little mix engineer, you’re making your EQ changes while listening to the entire mix. But how do you know when to cut from one instrument or another? Do you think about how making one EQ change here will affect the mix over there?
Let’s say you’ve got some muddy build-up at 200 Hz. Do you cut 200 Hz in the bass? The vocal? The acoustic guitar? The piano? The answer is, of course, it depends. Depending on how much buildup is there, you may need to do a cut on more than one track, even all of them.
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In the last article we took a look at the problem of EQ-ing without really listening to the track. The opposite, however, can be just as bad for your mix.
What if you listen to the track TOO closely? What if there was a way to isolate that track and only listen to that track and mute all the rest? Wait a second. Yep, that’s called the solo button.
EQ-ing in solo, in my opinion, is one of the hardest habits to break. Think back to the very first song you ever mixed. What did you do first? You solo’d the kick drum, messed around with EQ for a while. Then you solo’d the snare drum, played around with EQ for a while. Then you solo’d the bass… You get the picture.
How did that work out for you?
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On last night’s webinar, I talked about EQ. During one section, I focused on common EQ mistakes. I wanted to share my thoughts here on HSC, too.
EQ-ing Without Listening First
Are you guilty of this? Come on, be honest. Have you ever opened up a mix and started slapping EQs on every channel and twisting away at the knobs?
It’s okay, I’ve done it, too. Do you know why this is a bad idea?
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One of the things I love most about recording music is that there are no rules. One guy decides to use a cardboard box as his kick drum sound…and it sounds awesome. Another guy decides to sample in the sound of a screaming cat and blend it with the cymbals. (Okay, I’ve never seen that, but I bet it’s awesome.)
You’re free to do whatever you want. Maybe that’s why so many people record music as a hobby. They spend 40 hours a week being told what they can and can’t do, but in the studio they can do whatever they want. The only real rule is that it needs to sound good. Ah, recording…
But there is one “rule” I almost always follow when mixing drums…and it almost always works. So, of course, I want to share it with you.
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Today I asked my Facebook fans what they wanted me to write about. Luca asked about how to get a big bass sound in the mix, using parallel compression, etc. Great question, Luca.
If you were to keep track of how much time you spend dealing with the low end in a mix, particularly bass and kick drum, verses everything else, I bet you’d be surprised. A huge, punchy, tight bass sound can make or break a mix. Once you’ve got the low frequencies playing nicely together, the rest becomes much easier to put in its place.
But how do you get that big sound, especially out of the bass track?
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If you’ve been mixing for any length of time, you know how valuable the high-pass filter can be. It removes excess low end from your non-bass-heavy tracks, allowing you to clean up the low frequencies, making room for the kick and bass.
But then there’s this thing called a low frequency shelf. What’s that all about? In the picture above you can see both a high-pass filter and a low frequency shelf.
A high-pass filter actually filters out the low frequencies entirely. The curve slopes downward at a specific “steepness.” As you move further to the left in the frequency spectrum, the signal gets progressively lower and lower.
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