Lessons

Lesson Info

EQs

Now the fun stuff like you so I'm sure you know this but turns the volume of a specific frequency upper down now when we say specific frequency, that could be a little bit of a well miss number is not the right word, but it's the one I'm going for, um, depending on how wide your queue is, which is the cues setting on your cue it's not turning up one frequency just cause you're turning up a thousand hertz if you're accused wide, you're turning you could be turning up everywhere from sixteen down to six hundred if it's on a zero point one q, which is the widest queue of them all the while we're the number of the wider I know that could be a weird thing to get your head around. So one of the other reasons that when you get on the message boards and you see these dorks going, I always turned six k upon my toms this is dumb because the queue of the q and every cue is absolutely different. So what we're going to go over is, you know, that's the cue and later on I'm gonna show you how you fig...

ure out those things and you're not just turning down this specific frequency or that frequency you're turning down a group of them and you have to choose that group wisely so you could shape the color of a sound it's by far the best wayto contour character yesterday I showed that I use mix with a specific cue a lot of time when I do pa peng trucks, I have a different queue for some other tracks. It can also filter out ugly sounds if you use a surgeon like you, which is a small q you khun one of the best techniques for bastard and mixing is that when you hear a frequency and a sound and you say that really sounds terrible, you go in and you zap that frequency and pull it down. Um as well, there are filters inside most of the hughes um, these filters could get rid of bad information on the high end like this or bad information, though I'd like trouble one of the things that everybody words for me q. It is always a great lesson is that when you hear humongous bass in the song, some of that comes from using a filter to get rid of some of the lowest part of the base. The fact is is just like we're talking about the five inch speakers can't translate it most music listening today is done on a much smaller than five inch speakers, and the filters allow you to tighten up that based on the bottom end and allow the big bass you have somewhere around forty to eighty hurts the blossom by getting rid of everything under about twenty to thirty sometimes even forty hurts and even on some punk records under fifty or sixty hertz um using a filter is really, really essential. So would I use it says here is the flux keep your that is true I used that plug in sometimes most of what I use is a massenburg m g w a cz well but the picture didn't fit on the sites we figured we used the one that fit better instead of the one I use the most but I do use to seek you'll up every dog comes with a nick you I don't care which one it is they albany q and most of them are pretty decent now do I love the design e q three do I ever use it? Absolutely not because I have better accused do I have friends who make great records with those accused every day? Absolutely so the real world is this so this is the massenburg designs parametric e q george massenburg who made this was the guy who actually invented parametric in kew that we use every day so hats off to george he's a basic bad of him coincidently, most of the people who designed gear are terrible engineers who make terrible records. This man has made some of the most amazing sounding records of the entire world hence why he changed our whole industry so everything in the massenburg designs works if we could go over to my computer police everything in the cq is on the screen is modeled off of what this does he basically spent the time and made a really good cue that does all the math properly teo emulate with this does to my ear this is the best sounding like you I've ever heard inside the computer world um but every one of these corresponds exactly toe what happens on here this lowest knob here I'm gonna double check that since I'm on the wrong side I am correct awesome this filter here this week you could be a filter or shelf uh q and just as this one it could be if I go here I'm able to change which type of q this is in general your cue on that side is that usually could be your filter as you can see on this I'm taking out everything below twenty six hertz there has never been a master I've done in my life where that filter is not set somewhere between twenty and a hundred hertz hundred hurts being very rare twenty hurts being very very common almost every record you've ever heard has a filter on it somewhere in the bottom end wising for that eyes dependent on your speakers being able to reproduce down that well um in general even if they can't reproduce that whoa you'll get a tightness in the bottom end that really starts to sound pleasant when you find that frequency if you go to high without frequency you start to have a thin kind of not tall mix like it's a very weird sound so the rest of the next three of these are all peeking in queues so peking accuse as you can see in this diagram you see this little dip here I have here in this little bump I have up here those are what we're talking about when we're talking about the q on q is that I'm doing wide or very narrow boosts at certain points in the frequency span to get a character of a sound this is on that hay on a truck I played which we really went for a really weird character on this which is why I want to use this for example um so the character on the cq in particular, you know, I had to shape the sound of make the song sound almost like older we wanted almost get like a fifty he's beach party vibe. In fact, the band was so awesome that when they was working on the song well I sent of the first mix they said could you make it sound more like this? So they sent me a youtube of, uh fifties uh bikini girls and guys play got a beach which I thought was the awesomest thing I've ever gotten first suggestion in my entire life so that's what we did and somewhere along the way I decided this cq is what I needed to do that mix to make it happen so to get backto the correlation between this and that this is what you see on every major mixers mixed bust that or the other thing we had in the diagram which was the madly bassett pass of our super common in the analog domain and most managed mastering engineers use one of those two to do the overall queuing in the analog domain of a track this is our digital equivalent the last bad dot it could be either a filter or a shelving high and so as you could see here if you look at e cuban number three in the middle there I'm shelving up at about six point one six hurts so it's awesome about the digital that the dog doesn't have is you can choose any frequency this one there's a certain span you could always shelf so high you could only do that because we're the digital world the tangible rules of op absent circuitry go right out the window um so that the biggest thing everybody says to me is so which sounds better and the answer everybody wants to hear is at a log you paid thirty five hundred dollars for this instead of seven hundred fifty I think it's apples and oranges this does things that's out that this cannot d'oh and this does things that cannot tio this imparts very little character one of the things people love about the cq is it's very clinical and doesn't have a lot of character just does the job without getting in the way the manly massive passive is a totally different animal it's modeled after ah pole tech which is a passive e q design which imparts tons and tons of character the cube but part of the great part that character that e q is you could turn it up or down a lot with it just still sitting pretty in doc getting shrill the worst part about digitally cues is that use always so much you could do before you get a character that sounds good and on some of them you have to turn up ted d b to get the character you would from three d b on an analog piece of gear all the designs are very different and one of the big things to remember about plug ins is this is all about some nerd coding math and he's coding math based on what he thinks sound should sound like in making correlations toe thinks he's hopefully listening to with the real world hopefully because some of these accuse air so poorly designed that they don't even do that they just go a plus b equals c so as you could see from here, this is, uh, you know, a pretty standard tool that you're going to be using that almost every track, but on the mix it helps to have one that's really, really precision, so if you only have so much plugging dsp, I would not recommend using your worst plug in to be the one that goes over all the tracks. If you have always certain instances you can use because you run out of dsp, get a good want to do some overall shaping. So why do you shaping over your entire becks? As I kind of went into yesterday? Um, I turned out a lot of high end will end toa everything I do now, I do do that on the accused some ties, but there's just some things that it doesn't sound good to like what I'm tracking by vocal and I have this amazing piece of gear from pedal of audio called a quartet for vocals that costs so many thousands of dollars and I have a five thousand dollar vocal bike, but for some reason what I had trouble to my vocal while I'm tracking it, I have a much harder time getting the ss out now if I don't have that trouble I recorded all down and then add it on the master, my ass is air so much more pleasant so that trial and error led me to do the thing of I want to brighten all the instruments and bring some base out there, and I don't want to cute, and even though the pendulum becue sounds really, really awesome, um it's, just not the right point in the process to do it and some of that is all trial and error. What works for you? I have other friends that take a poll tech and craig the hi ended the war went on the vocal all the time and it works great for them. The pedal will be accused modeled after a pole tech but it's just not what I get my results from, and you need to find what you get your results from. So, um for I go ahead, do we have any questions about you? We do have one again from our fifty one fifty fan. Uh, is it worth cutting everything under the twenty hundred twenty hertz at the mixing stage or just wait till the mastering stage? So I actually would say this too is that when I mix there's no track that doesn't have a low pass filter, in fact, when I get started mixing like, you know, one of the big, biggest advice it that you get when you're learning how to mix his don't solo so where I you know obviously I've warned this down and when I first started we're gonna mix I did not soul and that was a good wording tool but what I do now that I'm confident is is the first thing I do when I get a mix to go especially somebody else recorded it is I hit solo and I we set the low pass filter so I could just get out of the way because usually by little fast filter I could just say you know what there's nothing below one hundred fifty hurts of this I'm just start getting this out of the way and I may change the blade er but I want to get that out of that process of the way because it's a process I'm going to do at some point and it works really well for me to just start at a place one of my bottom ends at least as clean as I know it could be because there's no information below this point on these instruments so yes said it during the mix on your individual tracks said it while you're mixing absolutely I'm really happy to take this moment and correct you that's a high pass not a lopez you are correct that you know best that it should be a low pass that I know and you know I swear to god fifteen years of doing this every day I still do that every single time it is very pleased with what exactly stuff a cannon. You think you're so cool sitting up there with your fancy e. Q. I do have a question about that. You mentioned that you love the cq. Do you use it just for mastery energies on everything? Uh, truth be told, I've gotten so addicted that they seek you that I pretty much. This is the only cure I used. Aside from the foxy pure between those two, I it's pretty much the only excuse I use you. Every once in a while. I dip into one for something like if I'm feeling like I'm not getting my creative juices flowing, and I wantto throw a wrench in the circuit. But this is what I used on ninety percent of my trucks.