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anonymous 19 May 2007

Hi there everyone! I guess I'm the new guy around here. :D After lurking around here the last week or so I've gotta say I'm really digging this place. On to the tales of horror and woe!

I know some basics and I usually get a pretty decent clean recording. I have a lot to learn but one of my biggest weaknesses is definitely EQing instruments that share frequencies, specifically Kick drum and bass guitar. I seem to get really good thick guitar sounds, but I'm sure there are bass frequencies that are unnecessary in there too.

I guess I should add I do pretty standard modern rock ala Breaking Benjamin etc. Pretty simple mixes... a few high gain guitars, bass, drums, vocals. I get a pretty big, heavy low-end, but instrument seperation could be better. I want it to be heavy and powerful, but very clean, sperated and defined. Sorry about the redundancy.

I've read some in the past about frequency carving where you remove certain freqencies from instruments so the overall sound is still there but they get to occupy their own space. The problem is I really don't know where to begin with that kind of stuff. Given the type of music and style, there have gotta be some good starting points and typical frequencies to boost or cut. Sorry about the length of all this! A lot of you seem very knowledgable and any help would be great. Thanks!

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chips Sat, 05/19/2007 - 05:04

I have just started trying to do this also.
Something I have found invaluable is the spectrum analyzer that comes with the cubase software I use (although you can buy standalone software version).

This basically looks at a piece of audio and then shows you (using a graph) what the main pitch of that audio is. I can then use this information to remove that frequency from other instruments.

For example, the last time I used it showed me that the main frequency of my Kick drum was 56 hz and the main frequency of my bass guitar was 80hz. Using a narrow Q on my parametric eq I removed 56hz ( the kicks main frequency) from the bass and removed a little 80hz (the bass' main frequency) from the kick drum. This gave me quite a bit of clarity and separation.

Also using a high pass filter on guitars helps to cut out any uneeded bass frequencies there.

Hope this helps, i am kind of new to these techniques myself !

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