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Mixing with Channel EQ

Hi. In this video, I'm gonna show you how to use the channel EQ to attenuate unwanted or excessive resonances in the vocal track. So let's play it through face the moments. I feel like I'm either the tops start the of the OK. So I can hear some excessive resonances in the vocal recording. But I'm gonna use a couple of techniques to isolate them and attenuate them. A classic technique is to take one parametric band and increase it by quite a few decibels narrow the band and during playback, sweep the frequency until you start to find the resonances and then attenuate them from there is the moments I feel like I'm see the tops of tree start of, of the, of the how this was you. Um But bodies with binding energy is nothing quite like you. If it's the moments, I feel like I'm either the Thomson start of the, of the OK. So I think I've reduced an excessive resonance there at around 370. So what you saw me do there was I just created a boost and then I used that boost and sweeped it across th...

e frequency spectrum until I found what I thought might be excessive resonances and then I pulled down the gain from there and then I adjusted the quality factor just to refine the effect that I'm looking for. What I'm gonna do now is actually turn off the analyzer for a minute and refine from there. Just so I'm not distracted by what I see face the moments of fear. OK? And what I'm gonna do now is toggle the bypass of this band to listen to the effect with and without that reduction, if it's the moments, I feel like I'm the tops start the of the how well. OK. I think that's quite effectively reduced some resonance there at that frequency and any other resonances that I might hear, I can apply the same process to this is a reasonably clean recording. So there's not much of that to tackle here, but I could just simply repeat the process that I just did. Now, what I'm gonna do from here is actually solo, the lead vocal track just to listen to any possible noise or unwanted rumble and minimize that with EQ as well. The wind rushes past my face and through my hair for the briefest of moments, I feel like I'm flying. Ok. So there's definitely some lorry and rumble in there. You can probably hear the noise cutting in and out as well, which Tom has gone some way to mitigate using Fado automation before I came into this project. Unfortunately, most of those problems are masked in the mix as well. So before I soloed it, we obviously listened to this vocal against the mix and those issues weren't really that apparent. But what I'm gonna do now is actually turn on the analyser. So the analyzer just gives us the relative levels of frequencies in real time and have a look to see roughly where those low end rumbles are. The wind rushes past my face. OK. So there's definitely some activity down here. So I'm going to enable the high pass filter. I'm going to drag the frequency up to about here and refine from here by ear, the wind rushes past my face and through my hair. For the briefest of moments, I feel like I'm flying, see the tops of trees, the start of leaves, the curvature of the earth. Now, I see how this works. You're the feather. I'm the hammer with bodies with binding energy is nothing quite like you and me. So I think I'm roughly at the frequency that I want to start filtering at. So what I'm actually gonna do now is adjust the steepness of the filter which is measured in decibels per octave. That's what this number here where it says 24 db per octave. What that means is how many decibels per octave are we reducing the signal by above or below the frequency? So the frequency here is 100 and 44 Hertz So an octave below 100 and 44 Hertz is 72 cos an octave is either doubling going upwards or, or halving in frequency, which means that at 72 Hertz, the signal is attenuated by 24 decibels. So that refers to the steepness of this curve here. So if I change it to 48 it's much steeper. So I can be more exact about what frequency I start reducing at. However, it might be a bit too resonant. Let's have a listen, the wind rushes past my face and through my hair. For the briefest of moments, I feel like I'm flying, see the tops of trees, the start of leaves, the curvature of the earth. Ok. So there's not a lot in it, but when in doubt, I try not to be too steep because it just can create too much resonance. The wind rushes past my face and through. And what I'm doing here is I'm actually adjusting the quality factor to kind of shape the tone of the vocal at around that frequency. So I'm kind of slightly boosting around that frequency to compensate and bring back a little bit of warmth to his vocal. The wind rushes past my face and through my hair. As you heard, it got a bit too resonant there at some point, the wind rushes past my face and through my hair. For the briefest of moments, I feel like I'm flying, see the tops of trees, the start of leaves, the curvature of the earth. Now, I see how this works. You're the feather, I'm the hammer with bodies with binding energy. OK. So I'm pretty happy with the way I've carved the tone at the lower end of his voice here. But there's also some problems in the midrange and a sort of high midrange that I want to tackle as well. So let's carry on with the surgical process of finding those frequencies and attenuating them. The wind rushes past my face and through my hair for the briefest of moments, I feel like I'm flying. See the tops of trees, the start of leaves, the curvature of the earth. Now I see how this works. You're the feather, I'm the hammer with bodies with binding energy. There's nothing quite like you and me. The wind rushes past my face and through my hair, the wind rushes past my face and through my hair. For the briefest of moments, I feel like I'm flying. Ok. And now what I'm gonna do is uns solo, the vocal track just so that we can start hearing this in context of the mix again, cos you don't wanna go way too far out of context of the mix, do lots of stuff to the vocal and then find that it doesn't work against the mix face. The moments of fear, the top start of the of the how no um with bodies with binding energy is nothing quite like you. It's the moment of, ok. So what I've done here is adjusted the output gain of the channel EQ, so that when I'm toggling the bypass, they are roughly the same loudness to my ear so that I can compare them fairly first. The moments I feel like I'm ok. So I'm quite glad with what I've done because it's quite muddy without the EQ that I've applied here. The moment of either the Thompson start of the, of the five. OK. So what I've applied here is some high shelf. What I did was I applied quite a bit again and then I refined the frequency from there just to add a bit more bite back onto the vocal. So this is more tonal shaping at this point, changing the overall characteristic of the vocal and then I compensated or recompensed the output game just so that it wasn't too loud. Face. The moment of OK, I feel like I wanna make him a bit warmer again and I haven't actually used this band down here yet. So what I'm gonna do is bring that to around sort of 100 and 40 Hertz. I'm just kind of estimating that at the moment and I'm gonna slowly increase that band just to see what it sounds like. Face the, you see the tops of start of the, of the have all um the bodies with binding energy is nothing quite like you. The moments I feel like I'm see the tops start the of the how OK. I actually need to increase the gain because the EQS is just a little bit quieter than the on Q face. The moments I feel like I'm OK. I'm pretty happy with the way that this evers, a slight increase in gain on this band is contributing to the overall tone or shaping around this band here. So it's quite interesting sometimes you'll find that the different adjustments you make in different bands, they all kind of contribute to each other. So if I kind of remove my points and now you see this is this blue shape is kind of the net result of the EQ, the different bands affecting and overlapping with each other. What I think I wanna do now a bit as well is just a slight attenuation here around 2.5 K just to make the vocal sound a bit deeper. But I feel like just looking at that already, that width is a bit too much. So I'm going to increase the cue from here. See what that sounds like to suffer. The tough start of the of the Her I'm but bodies with binding energy is nothing quite like you. OK? What I'm going to do now actually is turn on the analyzer which is now set to post what that means is what you see in the analyzer here is post EQ. So it's the result of the eq movements that I've made. And as you can see after this, there's not a lot happening in there. But if you actually switch to pre, you'll find that you'll find that there's not much activity in there to begin with. So, again, this is just kind of overall tone shaping. And as you saw when I was adjusting this band, I went into quite aggressive territory just to see what it sounds like, just to make sure that my brain knew what band I was affecting and what the extreme of that was. I sort of brought it back into a more subtle setting. I feel like without the EQ, the vocals are kind of getting lost in the mix a little bit. So the EQ that I'm applying here is bringing out what we want to hear and reducing a lot of what we don't want to hear. The process that I've just gone through is pretty normal process for echoing vocals and it takes a lot of refinement. It takes a lot of listening, it takes a lot of back and forth and listening to the mix as a whole. Try not to get to narrowing your focus on the instrument that you're, you're affecting because you are affecting its place in the mix and not just the way it sounds. So it's always good to go back and forth. And sometimes when I'm actually E Qing vocals, I'll actually try and listen to the instruments because it kind of forces me to kind of EQ against it if that makes sense and always adjust the output gain. So there's not drastic differences in loudness between Un Qed and E Qed. And like I said, the compressor after it is helping me with the dynamic issue of just two large variances in dynamics which make things difficult to EQ. And also it's likely that I'm gonna compress after the EQ anyway. So I'd like to know and I like to hear the way that the EQ is affecting the behavior of the compression after it. Thanks for watching and I'll see you in the next video.