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I recorded acoustic guitars for a song that had just guitars and vocals. A very nice simple melody. In stereo, AB spaced pair. (one at the bridge, anled a little down, the other at bout the 10th fret)

Last night while mixing I got very surgical with the EQ. EQing L and R channels seperately. Cutting all frequencies that I dint like (boomy, metallic sounds etc.) Using quite a few narrow q bands.

boosting the highs to get sparkle and so on.

(preceded by a little compression)

I was wanting to know, while this is sounding nice. should one take a more general approach to the eq.

I know it's ok to do anything as long as it sounds good. but I was curious to know what methods do you ppl usually apply.

thanks,
sidhu

p.s. I have been trying to mail Ben of http://www.modernmastering.com, all mails i sent him have been returned.

Comments

NTDunn Thu, 03/02/2006 - 23:45

You will find that attenuating frequencies you don't like, rather than boosting the one's you like, works very well. And you don't end up killing the stereo bus. When you take out that frequency you don't like, the one's you do will pop out into the mix. If you have a bass track with it, you can solo the two together and find that frequency the bass and the acoustic guitar share, and filtering it out of the acoustic guitar track (probably around 240Hz) This will make the bass pop out more and make your guitar sound good, and you havent used up your headroom

JWL Sun, 03/05/2006 - 10:02

another thing I've done that really tightens things, esp when you have doubled tracks or a dense mix of overdubs, is to run all the acoustics to a stereo bus and use a multiband compressor to fine tune things a bit. Some will say this is overkill, but I find that it can really glue the whole thing together nicely if you do it right. Acoustic guitar dynamics are extremely frequency dependent.

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