hi everyone,
i'm producing music (mixing & mastering) at home with plugins
for a couple of years now and have achieved some good skills concerning
the usage of eq's and dynamics etc., at least i think so ;-) ...
but there is still one thing that i don't know how to achieve without using
many eq's in a row. what i mean is, when i listen to a professional
audio CD and i sweep with a narrow q-factor through the spectrum
everything is perfectly balanced, there are no audible annoying peaks
in the frequency range. when i do the same thing with my own recordings
i always notice, that there are many many frequencies that are annoying and these peaks also vary in volume and i would need 20 eq's in a row with a narrow bandwidth, to filter all those annoying frequencies. so, the question is, do the pro's use so many eq's
to balance the spectrum, or is there another tool for mixing/mastering, that
is used to get rid of the annoying narrow frequency peaks?
this is still an open mystery for me.
Comments
You are complaining about one of the reasons why George Massenbu
You are complaining about one of the reasons why George Massenburg made popular the parametric equalizer.
Some of this just comes from good acoustics. Good microphone selection. Good microphone placement. Good preamps. Notice I didn't say equalization?
I love good equalizer's. I'll even use bad equalizer's, when needed, to some extent. But equalizer's are frequently overused/abused. Why? Like a mountain. Because it's there. Because you paid for that knob and want to use it. You went to school for this and want to show everybody what you learned. You wouldn't want to tell them you learned to not screw with things that didn't need screwing? So if you sweep your equalizer across a good mix and don't hear any excessive shrill picks & notches? Chances are, no stupid equalization was used. So you wouldn't hear that shrill pop. So you are actually hearing your own technical faux pas'. So now you have learned something very important. And that is how to equalize the living crap out of things while utilizing dynamic manipulation to control unnatural sounding excursions. That's the cool thing about sound. It's black magic. Voodoo. We're all speaking in tongues.
I'd rather have a corned beef
Ms. Remy Ann David
do the pro's use so many eq's to balance the spectrum, or is the
The pros use core sounds that require little, if any EQ at all. If you need EQ for more than "tailoring" then you're probably either using the wrong core sounds, or you're not capturing them effectively.
A dB or two of a frequency or two to make a sound fit a mix better. If there are "annoying narrow frequency peaks" in your core sounds, they're already there. For some reason, you're not hearing them until you sweep a parametric along the source. You need to get the core right at the source. Stacking EQ's might make a bad core 'less irritating' but it rarely has the capacity to make "bad" sound "good" in the long run.