Archive for the ‘The Mix Fix’ Category

 Mix Mondays is our weekly mixing help column, which aims to take the sting out of Monday with a little audio talk.

Equalization is probably one of the easier kinds of processing to understand, but it can be a little daunting at first because there’s so many controls and often not enough explanation of what the knobs are actually doing.

Most plugins make it easy to see what’s happening: you make bumps and dips and hear changes in your sound.  However, most old-school engineers (and quite a few new-school engineers) will tell you that the visuals of your Eq are just there to help you along your way.  There’s limits to what all those displays, RTA’s (real time analyzers), and meters can show you.  They approximate what is happening to your sound, and how you’re affecting it.  But that’s really a deep topic for another time.

Suffice it to say, like everything else in the world of music production, you’re really only limited by what you can hear, not what you can see. So do yourself the educational favor of closing your eyes while making some Eq changes, and see if you can learn to hear what different changes sound like.  

OK, I’ll get off my soapbox now and get into it.  The basic idea of Equalization is something called “Frequency-specific gain.”  Being able to change the volume of just one frequency out of the entire audible range (20Hz – 20,000Hz) isn’t really possible…or useful.  However, Eq’s let you make broader changes to ranges of frequencies, which is really useful in music production.  The mechanics behind how Eq’s do this is complex and varied.  In fact the way in which Eq’s are designed to select and process bands is what gives each one its particular “sound” or “character.”  
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