0:00 in this 9 and 1/2 hour EQ course you're going to learn everything you need to know about using an equalizer and not only are we going to cover the fundamentals like understanding the frequency spectrum understanding how an equalizer works and all the different parameters but you're also going to walk away with a ton of clarity on what you're actually trying to achieve when you pull off an EQ and you're going to have a deep understanding of how proper use of Equalization can lead to clean clear and professional sounding mixes and Masters in fact take a listen to this mix without and then with EQ nothing else has [Music] changed most people have no clear understanding of what they're doing when it comes to EQ and they just pull up an equalizer and move the bands around
0:46 randomly waiting for something to happen I call this erratic EQ and you know you're one of these people if you struggle to identify the right frequencies to cut or boost you're unsure about how much you should cut or boost by and you even struggle to hear the changes that you're making when you tweak the EQ parameters for most people the root cause of all this is that they have no strategy workflow or intention behind EQ and because of that they're relying on common advice like trust your ears or if it sounds good it is good which isn't really helpful we're going to address all of these problems and more and we're also going to address frequency masking stock versus premium and Hardware eqs how to EQ any instrument of voice how to nail the lowend mid-range and top end and how to to clean up muddiness in the lower mids
1:32 and you're going to learn about a unique method for applying EQ that we call the chef strategy which guides you through the entire process now this isn't going to be the most entertaining video you're going to watch on YouTube today but it's incredibly in-depth and by the end you're going to be an absolute Pro with an EQ and as long as you go away and actually practice what you learn and follow through on the Practical activities there's simply no way you're not going to feel extremely confident with Equalization on the other side there are a lot of resources that go along with this course course including practice assignments cheat sheets charts and a bunch of other PDFs so I put it all in one folder and it's absolutely essential that you download this folder if you want to follow along properly with the course so just click the link in the description below or scan the QR code that you see on screen now then on that page enter your email address to
2:18 get access to those free resources so you can follow along with the course all right I'm going to hand you off now to Dylan Pines he's a professional producer from Nashville he's an amazing teacher and I think you're going to love him so enjoy [Music] hello everyone this is Dylan with musician on a mission so excited to be teaching you today about the basics of EQ now you've probably seen these pieces of Technology around if you've tried you doing any kind of mixing you've seen them if you've seen any sort of studio if you've seen anyone at a board twiddling knobs they're probably messing with an EQ but today we're going to be starting with the exact Basics which is
3:04 what is an EQ what is an equalizer which is what EQ stands for well what it basically is is a volume fader for your instrument's tone so when I say volume fader I of course mean like this thing over here that controls the volume of the entire track what I mean by that when I say a volume fader for your instrument's tone I mean it allows you to turn the good parts of your tone up loud and it also allows you to turn down the bad parts of your tone so turn up the volume of the good parts turn down the volume of the bad parts before we get into some examples to show you what I mean by that let's talk about tone so every instrument obviously has its own unique sound you know obviously a singer
3:50 does not sound the same as a guitar and a violin does not sound the same as a drum set now the reason for that is because tone is made up of thousands of unique sound waves that are all happening simultaneously so like I said earlier you know a violin is going to be making thousands of different sound waves than a drum set might be making so these sound waves are what's known as frequencies and the reason your instrument sounds the way it does is because of its own unique blend of frequencies so an EQ allows us to go in dive in get our hands dirty with these frequencies and turn the volume up of the frequencies we like and turn the volume down of the frequencies that we don't like we'll get into frequencies
4:36 more in a little bit but for right now let's just get into some examples of what an EQ can do and what an EQ sounds like so right here I have three examples of different instruments we've got some lead vocals a drum set and an electric guitar and I also have an EQ that I have controlling all three of them so let's just listen through right now to the vocals and let's let's see what I can do to make them sound [Music] different I can tell by the blaz in your eyes re let me try it down here I the blaz in
5:24 your eyes recklessly so you see what that's doing to the tone you know whenever I'm boosting certain parts of the tone are getting more aggressive maybe the sound is getting warmer or thicker depending on where I'm boosting it or maybe brighter and harsher and vice versa whenever I'm cutting stuff you start to hear it sound thinner you start to hear it sound maybe darker or maybe even a little bit more balanced at times although I am being very aggressive with these Cuts cuz I want you to be able to hear exactly what it sounds like so let's do the same thing on the drum set [Music]
6:13 hear how it's getting really bright up [Music] here and then the farther down I go the warmer and boier it gets and if I cut it it's the opposite you lose all the boom and if you cut up here you lose all of the brightness all the crispness cool let's do one more example just so you get an idea of what it sounds like so this is an electric [Applause] [Music] guitar so you got kind of some some
6:59 crispiness right here some aggressiveness right here some warmth right there if I cut it sounds [Applause] thinner less aggressive or even darker so you can see that if I cut in the same place where I boosted before basically the opposite effect happens so you know if I boost in the top end then you know it's going to get a lot brighter it's going to get a lot more shimmery but if I cut in the top end it's it's going to feel darker it's going to feel a little bit more closed off a little bit more you know like you're hearing it through through a wall kind of like this so you'll see this tool in every mix that you do this is maybe the most common tool used in
7:45 mixing used in recording used in audio in general along with compression and Reverb and the volume fader and the pan knob uh I'd say it is the most important mixing tool that you're ever going to use so you need to learn how to use it but before we start using it we have to go over the physics of what's behind the instruments that you're messing with with the equalizer we need to understand exactly what frequencies are what the frequency spectrum is and so we're going to be getting into that right now so in this lesson we're going to be talking about the frequency spectrum now I know that might be a confusing word a little bit complicated a little bit techy if you haven't heard it before it's a lot less complicated than it sounds at first
8:32 but the reason we're learning this is because the frequency spectrum deals entirely with EQ you can't really know how to do EQ without at least understanding a little bit what the frequency spectrum is so frequencies are the thousands of unique sound waves that each instrument creates whenever a string is plucked a drum is hit uh voice is sung and the frequency spectrum is is all of those unique vibrations those unique sound waves that the instruments are creating laid out basically in a chart from 20 Herz all the way up to 20 KZ before we even get started what are Hertz obviously that's some jargon there Hertz are basically how frequencies how
9:19 sound waves are measured it's a scientific term what it basically means is how fast a particular sound wave is and while we don't really deal with that in audio very much really what it is is how high pitched a particular vibration is a particular frequency is so the higher the Hertz the more high pitched it is the lower the Hertz the lower pitched it is so like uh is going to be producing a lot more lower Hertz whereas ah is going to be producing a lot more higher Hertz you know we're using the word frequency a lot we're using the word sound wave and vibration a lot really what we're talking about is that the frequency spectrum is a
10:05 representation of the Sonic energy of an instrument moment to moment and we use the frequency spectrum to use our eqs and to better understand what EQ moves are going to do to the sound to the tone of that instrument so even though it might sound like a single note instruments produce thousands of upon thousands of frequencies when they're being played and the balance of those frequencies is what makes tone tone so a saxophone might have a dramatically different balance volume balance of frequencies than a drum set or a violin and we are going to be using an EQ to affect the general volume balance of the
10:52 frequency spectrum to get a different sound let's bring up our EQ and I'm actually going to be working with a a full finished mix because I want to show you what each section of the frequency spectrum sounds like because each section has its own unique tone and it makes it a lot easier to use an EQ if you are able to think okay I want this sound to be warmer and you know exactly where to go to make the sound warmer so let's start at the very top so the bottom of human hearing is 20 htz we physically cannot hear anything lower than 20 HZ on the flip side the top of human hearing is right here 20,000 Hertz or 20 khz is
11:42 really what gets said more often people talk a lot about how like oh dog's sense of hearing is so good and that's true dog sense of hearing is a lot more sensitive than ours but also they can hear higher pitches than we can so you know we only go up to 20 khz they'll go up to 30 k KZ 40 khz it's part of the reason why you know dog whistles we can't hear them but they absolutely can and that's how they know to go back to their master so we basically have names for the different regions of the frequency spectrum so the first area of the frequency spectrum that we're going to be focusing on is what's known as the subbase region and that's between 20 htz and 60 HZ now the subbase region honestly is a little bit difficult to
12:29 hear it's really more felt like if you're ever in a club and you're dancing to the music and you can just like feel every single Kick Drum in your body that's because there's a lot of frequencies in this region of the frequency spectrum there's a lot of energy down there so let me show you what that sounds like and again really think of really try to feel this and if you're using good speakers or good headphones you'll be able to feel it more if you're using like laptop speakers or iPhone headphones uh you're probably not going to be able to hear this because they don't go down that [Music]
13:14 far you just feel that just boom that's happening in the kick I'm actually going to solo this out so you can only hear this section [Music] so whenever you are sitting in your house and a car drives by with a big Sub in it which is where it gets the name from and all you hear are just these extremely low thumps that are just rattling your whole house that's because everything that it's producing is coming from this part of the frequency spectrum and has lots of energy energy down in the subbase so the next section we're
14:01 going to be talking about is the base section and together with subbase and the bass this is what's known as the low end of a song now the base section is 60 HZ through 200 htz now this is the part of the frequency spectrum where most of the thickness is going to come from most of the Boom is going to come from bass is obviously very popular in a lot of music nowadays you know here just like that good low-end thickness that comes from a lot of pop and Hip Hop stuff like that that is going to be living down in this region so let me show you what it sounds [Music]
14:51 like here how all you hear is just that just the really really low pitch of the base and the k Kick let me solo it out for you so you can hear [Music] it you hear how you can also start to hear some of the other instruments they are just barely making a few frequencies down there most of what's living there is the kick and the Bas but I'm actually going to slide back down so you can hear the subbase so you can hear the differences between the [Music] two [Music]
15:42 both very important but like I said one is meant to be heard the other one is meant to be felt so the next section that we're going to be going over is the low mids and that's actually going to be the meat of your entire song the low mids are between 200 HZ and 600 HZ so this is where most instruments live you know if I'm playing a guitar most of the strings that I'm going to be hitting produce the bulk of their sonic energy in the low mids same with a male vocal or most of a drum set this is going to be a section where if it's balanced well then the whole mix is going to sound easy to hear the whole mix is going to sound full it's going to sound really
16:28 nice so this is where lots of problems arise in the mix because you've got all these different instruments that are competing for space because they all have so much Sonic energy in this one section of the low mids so this is where you're going to get a lot of mud and you're going to get a lot of I wouldn't say harshness but just a lot of unintelligibility like it's hard to hear everything it just sounds kind of gross that's probably because of the low mids so let's slide this along and see what it sounds like wild [Music] fire wild fire you hear how things started to
17:15 sound really boxy they all started to sound cluttered that's the sound I'm talking about so let me solo this out so you can hear [Music] it you also hear that you can now hear just about every instrument in the entire mix whereas in the low end all you were really hearing was the kick and the bass so this is where everything is going to be living so the next section that we're going to be going over is the mids and that's around 600 HZ to about 3 khz so that is let me move this about right
18:01 here to about right here this is where a lot of human hearing has been uh attuned to listening for uh especially once you get higher into kind of like the 1 to 3 KZ range now the reason for that I have no idea we actually do hear different frequencies differently you know we hear the mids and the upper mids a lot louder than they actually are whereas I think we hear the the lower mids a little bit softer than they actually are I forget I'd have to look at a chart but because of that we're going to really want to make sure that this area is properly balanced because a lot of really good stuff lives in here but also a lot of really bad stuff lives in here so let's see what it sounds
18:49 [Music] like fire fire you hear how once we started getting towards the top of the mids how it started sounding a lot more aggressive and also a lot more harsh a little bit more brittle that's because like I said those are the frequencies that we hear the best as humans and so because of that it's just like extra presence extra exciting but also it extra hurts your ears so let me solo this out so you can hear it fire [Music]
19:44 fire so to me the the mids is actually the part it's the range that sounds the most varied you know cu the bottom sounds a little bit more like the low mids top sounds a little bit more like the upper mids which we're going to talk about right now so the upper mids is between 3 khz and 8 khz it's a smaller range very very important range most of the presence the character of sounds lives up here boosting something here could make it sound a lot more aggressive could make it sound a lot more uh present a lot more exciting a lot more inyour face but this is where a lot of the pain of sounds lives a lot of the brittleness a lot of the harshness
20:29 lives up here so let's see what this sounds like might hurt your ears a little bit but important for you to know fire fire so you can hear how some instruments were extra emphasized whenever we boosted that area you know the snare the Shaker the symbols the vocals all of those instruments have a lot of energy in the upper mids and so whenever we're boosting the upper mids we are emphasizing those instruments
21:15 over the rest of the instruments whereas if we boosted the lower mids everything lives there so everything gets boosted now let me solo it out so you can hear what it sounds like [Music] so there's one last section one last frequency range that we need to talk about and that is the highs you could also call it the top end if you wanted to you hear that a lot and that's just 8 KZ so right here all the way up to 20 khz so just this little region right
22:02 here now the highs is going to be where we get what we call Air now air is kind of confusing until you hear it but it's this idea that something without much in the high frequency range tends to sound kind of controlled kind of muffled whereas something with a lot of energy in the high frequency range tends to sound a lot breathier tends to sound a lot more open let me show you what I'm talking about so I'm actually going to just take it out first of all [Music] fire
22:47 [Music] fire fire and when I take it away everything just sounds like you just covered it up out of nowhere let me solo it [Music] out it's hard to actually hear any pitches at this level it's almost all just rhythmical sound it's almost like it's um the atmosphere of the sound is in the high high frequency range so that's all of the frequency ranges to review we have our subbase which is 20
23:34 to 60 Herz we have our base which is 60 to 200 Hertz we have our low mids which is 200 to 600 Hertz our mids which is 600 to 3 khz our upper mids which is 3 khz to 8 khz and then our highs which is 8 khz all the way up to 20 khz where we we really can't hear anything anymore so you're going to get to know these frequency ranges very well because this is how you're going to know where to EQ and when to EQ you might hear a sound and you'll say oh man that sounds too warm well you know oh the low mids is where warmth comes from I must need to make a cut in the low mids so I'd recommend bringing up an EQ boosting one
24:19 of the bands and sweeping it around in each frequency spectrum on your own instruments and your own mixes just to get a feel for what each of them sounds like what the tone of that area is the faster you do that the faster you internalize what those areas sound like the faster you're going to get really really good at EQ so in this video we're going to be covering the anatomy of an EQ what's all of the parts all of the jargon we're also going to be covering any vocabulary that we are going to be talking about throughout this entire course that might seem confusing if you haven't heard that word before four so really this is going to be our section of saying hey these are all the parts of an EQ and here are the things that I
25:05 know are probably going to confuse you if you are a beginner to the world of Equalization first things first most of an EQ is built around this thing right here now this is called a filter now there's tons of different types of filters there is the most common one which is the Bell filter which is the one that I have right here there is Filters that cut out the bottom end and filters that cut out the top end the filter that cuts out the bottom end is actually called a high pass filter or an hpf now the reason that it's called that it's a little confusing you'd think it would be called a low cut filter since it's cutting the lows but technically it's called a highpass filter because it
25:50 allows the highs up here to pass through on the other side there is right here low pass filter or a high cut filter you you'll see both sometimes and that's because it lets the lows pass through while it cuts the highs the other kind of filter are shelving filters shelves and what these are is they just allow you to boost or cut the entire bottom end or boost or cut the entire top end depending on what kind of shelf you've selected now obviously all of this deals with frequencies which which are the vibrations that the instruments uh create whenever they make a sound where I put one of these filters is going to
26:36 entirely depend on what frequency area I'm wanting to affect so you can actually see right here that this particular area of the frequency spectrum which is basically this entire graph is about 248 Hertz so that's squarely in the low mids if I move it up you can see see it goes up so this is 5,000 Hertz or 5 kilohertz and Hertz are the unit that frequencies are measured with basically the higher the Hertz number the higher the pitch of the frequencies now the next part of each filter is the volume amount so you can actually see right here I have this boosted about 19 DB DB
27:22 stands for DCB it's how we measure volume if you are new to recording or in you're going to see DBS on pretty much every tool that you're going to use and you can see as I boost it the number goes up and as I cut it the number goes down we have a negative signal right there so the number underneath that is the Q and what the Q is is basically just how wide your filter is so if I go down here to my Q amount you can see as I get higher as the number goes up it gets thinner and thinner and thinner and vice versa as the number goes down as it gets closer to zero it gets wider and wider and wider it depends on the EQ that you're using some eqs you can actually go up to a q of 100 and can go
28:08 all the way down to almost zero at that point though it starts to become kind of negligible because well if I'm boosting or cutting this much I'm not really leaving anything good in the Spectrum so most of the time you're going to be sticking somewhere between 0.5 0.7 somewhere in there or three or four for your normal cuts and if you're trying to do more of surgical Cuts something to to really clean something really nasty out of the sound then you might want to have a much thinner queue like this so something that's going to be a lot more of a of a spike rather than a wide cut or boost like this speaking of those spikes the next piece of jargon that I want to cover is room resonances now
28:54 these are basically Rogue frequencies that get pushed extra loud because of the shape of a room or the shape of an instrument and usually room resonances are not multiple frequencies it's not like oh there's a room resonance that is 200 through 400 it's usually one frequency so let's say you know I'm listening to an acoustic guitar and there's a resonance that's happening at 230 well I can go to 230 I can boost Bo it up if I hear some really aggressive like Bo single note sound no matter what chord it's on well that's probably a room resonance so what I would do get a really really sharp q and just cut that
29:41 fully out that's the thing that you're going to hear a lot you'll hear the term surgical EQ a lot anytime there is a spike like this where you have an extremely tight q and a very very deep cut that is surgical EQ that's meant to basically take out these resonances that only existed because of the room they only existed because of the microphone they aren't actually natural to the recording so you're wanting to just cut them out completely like a surgery so another piece of jargon that I want to go over with you is what's known as the Spectrum analyzer so I'm going to play this mix right now
30:29 so you see all these random spikes and grooves all these lines this is the Spectrum analyzer now what it's basically doing and I'll stop it but I'll freeze it so you can see now what this basically is is it's showing you the frequency content of that moment that's going through the EQ so I can see okay so this particular mix has a lot going on between 500 and 3 khz has a little bit of a hole around 4.5 khz it's got a hole down in the the subs these things are useful because they allow you to get a mathematical idea of what your ears are hearing so it gives a a visual aspect to what's primarily an auditory
31:16 technique you know you usually do EQ with your ears and your ears alone so this is a helpful tool to have and most modern eqs use it now if you're using an analog e Q then it's most likely not going to have a spectrum analyzer and that's fine honestly it might even be better to learn without one of these but if you have them it's great to at least be able to see what's going on in that particular track it might help you find some of those residences you know there might be some extremely high spikes maybe like this one right here it might also help you to find parts of a particular instrument that are lacking that need some boosting or are maybe too much and need some cutting now the last piece of vocabulary that I want to go over is the concept of masking so
32:04 masking is something that happens in acoustical physics so in the world of sound it's something that happens whenever two sounds that create similar frequencies similar Sonic energy are both played at the same time so rather than both of those sounds becoming twice as loud because both of them are being played at the same time they actually only get a fraction of the amount of loudness as you would expect and while that sounds very you know sciency and kind of like okay who cares if it's a difference of loudness what happens is that you lose Clarity because both of those instruments are fighting for the same space in the frequency
32:50 spectrum so whenever you have masking usually what that means is Things become hard to hear things become come covered up masked which is the the reason why the term exists masking is usually helped by doing lots of EQ Cuts creating space for uh for instruments and different parts of the frequency spectrum if you're ever hearing anything and it sounds very full in your ears and then you put it in context of the mix and suddenly it just vanishes that's likely due to masking we're going to be covering all of these Concepts throughout this entire course but I just wanted to make sure that before we even started we had the best foot put forward so that any Jaron that you were confused
33:35 about we just got that out of the way now so let's move on from here to our next [Music] lesson so we are going to talk about what an EQ can do more specifically we're going to be talking about the four goals of using an EQ if you can do all four of these things then you're going to have an incredible sounding song So goal number one is to get rid of the nasty stuff in your recordings goal number two is to enhance the good stuff goal number three is to blend the recordings of the mix together and then goal number four is to balance the tone of the entire mix so let's look at these four goals of EQ in a little bit more
34:22 detail so the first goal was to get rid of the nasty stuff in your recording so what I mean by that is basically getting rid of room resonances now room resonances are rogue sound waves that bounce off of your room and get stuck in your microphone and they basically cover up the quality of a track it's kind of hard to hear the full Splendor of a recording with all of these room residences bouncing around so throughout this course I'm going to be teaching you how to get rid of that nasty sound the ringing that you hear in a lot of your recording so goal number two to enhance the good stuff in your recordings that is basically going to be creating a tonal balance in one specific instrument so that might be you using your electric
35:08 guitars listening to your electric guitars and being like man you know this sounds good but it could be crisper or it could be warmer or uh it's a bit too muddy or maybe ah it's a bit too harsh EQ is the solution for all those things now goal number three was to blend all of the instruments together now what that means is to create space in the frequency spectrum for every single instrument to sit nicely so they're not all fighting for attention because usually what happens is whenever you throw a ton of tracks all in the same song and you hit play it doesn't really sound like a song it just sounds like a whole bunch of random instruments playing at the same time so one of the goals of EQ is to shape all of these sounds so that it sounds like a mix it sounds like a song it no longer just
35:54 sounds like a collection of Random recordings so finally goal number four is to balance the tone of the entire mix so what I mean by that is that we are wanting to make the tone of the whole mix as consistent throughout the song as possible and also sound good in any speaker you would want to play it in now I know you've probably played your songs in your speakers and they've sounded great after you've mixed them and then you've taken them to your car and they sounded awful or you've taken them to your friend's house and they've sounded terrible that's because your mix's tone isn't balanced you might have awesome sounding instruments but the tone of the whole mix is out of whack so we're going to be going over that as well now we need to talk about that word balance
36:43 because balance is something that is absolutely Paramount to learning how to mix well and it's absolutely Paramount in learning how to EQ well so let me tell you a quick story so back in the 40s and 50s audio engineers the people in the music studios who are actually recording everything they actually used to be called balance engineers and they didn't have all of the fancy technology that we have today they didn't have eqs they didn't have compressors or reverbs or any of the automation that we have or obviously computers all they had were volume faders that's it all they had was the ability to turn the volume up and the ability to move the microphone around but their goals were the same as our goals are right now they want to
37:28 achieve balance in the mix we want to achieve balance in the mix we just have a lot more tools to do it so when we talk about balance in mixing we really mean three different things we want to balance the Dynamics which that's going to be your compression we want to balance the space and that's going to be your panning and your reverbs and delays and we want to balance the tone that's what we're working on in this course that is what we're going to be using eqs for is balancing the tone of the entire mix and because of that if you go back and you listen to sounds from the 40s and the ' 50s obviously the stuff now sounds a lot better than the stuff back then because we have more tools available to us to achieve balance I'm going to be teaching you how to get rid of the nasty stuff in your recordings how to enhance the good stuff in your
38:15 recordings how to blend your recordings together and how to get the entire mix tone balanced so that no matter where you play your song it's going to sound incredible it's going to translate and it's going to sound ultimately professional and if you're able to master these four things you are going to have an incredible sounding mix now before we can move on to learn the techniques on how to actually accomplish these goals we need to learn what an EQ can't do it's really really important and that's going to be in our next lesson so let's talk about what an EQ can't fix so this tool is not a miracle drug it's not going to solve every single problem you could possibly have in a mix now there's tons of tools that
39:01 you use in a mix to solve certain problems compressors help to shape the Dynamics reverbs and delays help to shape the space pan knobs also help to shape the space make a mix seem three-dimensional different effects help to shape the emotion of the mix and eqs you know they work to shape the tone of the mix they work to balance the frequency spectrum balance all that Sonic energy while that is true that that's what an EQ is for there are certain things that it's just not going to be able to fix so you want to make sure that you are doing everything in your power to fix these things at the stages where they're set in motion that all sounds so vague so let's just get into the five pitfalls of mixing the
39:48 five things that an EQ just can't do number one an EQ cannot fix a bad recording eqs can only change what what's already there it's boosting parts of the frequency spectrum it's boosting the Sonic energy or it's cutting some of the Sonic energy it's not adding anything it's not adding new sounds it's not completely taking away old sounds all of that is determined in the recording stage so a bad quality recording is not going to be able to get fixed in the mix you have to get the best quality recording you can now it can be helped for sure you could make a bad quality recording better but getting it up to Pro level which is ultimately where you
40:33 want it to be just isn't going to happen so there's a rule of thumb that I always come back to whenever I'm doing any recording and it's basically the idea that whatever quality that I create in the recording stage I can only really raise that quality by one or two levels let's think of this quality in terms of grades so if I make a really great recording you know let's say it's like B level 80% well I'm going to be able to take that up to an a level with mixing be able to raise it to where it sounds like a professional record but if I make just an okay recording let's say it's a c-grade I'm only going to be able to take it up one grade so I'm only going to be able to take the quality of that from C average to be pretty good now
41:22 most of us who have bad recordings aren't even really hitting that c-grade it's D or F failure so I'm not going to be able to take it from F to a I'm not even going to be able to take it to from F to C so you need to be able to focus on getting the best sounding recordings that you can the problems for your bad recordings well we could take an entire course just on that but there's four things that are probably affecting it the worst and that is the room that you're recording in the mic placement the gear you're recording through in the gear that you're playing on all of those are kind of the main variables that are causing your recordings to sound really bad now there's ways to fix all of them you know you can get acoustic treatment
42:08 for your room you can maybe improve some really subpar recording equipment you can learn how to do better with your mic placement to get the best possible sound or you could upgrade your own gear there are definitely ways to fix this but the most important thing to remember is grats that's G g i r a TS get it right at the source that's the most important job for mixing if you can get it right at the source your mix is going to sound incredible even if you're not as good at mixing as I am if I'm mixing with really really crappy tracks and you're mixing with studio recording tracks you might get a better mix than me it's possible so that's the first thing that EQ can't fix the second thing is that EQ can't
42:54 fix a bad range M so if you have written for example four base parts that are all happening at the exact same time EQ is not going to save you that's just going to sound jumbled it's going to sound like a mess because all four of those base parts are competing for the exact same spot in the frequency spectrum it's all that soic energy all existing in the exact same place no amount of EQ is going to fix that and on the same side if you've written tons of different instruments that are all existing in the same octave you know the same musical octave then you're probably going to really struggle with your eqing stuff just won't sound like it fits no matter how much you cut no
43:40 matter how much space you create in the mix so one of the best ways that you can solve this is to spread your parts out musically I might even go into your songs and say okay you know there's five different things that are all happening at the same time how can I put all five of those things in a different octave now you don't have to put forth tons of effort necessarily it could just be looking at you know two or three guitar riffs that are all happening and saying okay maybe I can take this one up an octave or maybe I can take this one down an octave spread it out another thing you can do is if you can pick instruments that have different tonal qualities from each other so for example if you have two
44:26 guitar parts let's say maybe you've got some chords and you have a riff I would suggest if you have multiple guitars to record one of those parts with a brighter guitar and another one of those parts with maybe a warmer guitar you're not going to have to try quite as hard to get those two parts to fit together because they have Sonic energy in different parts of the frequency spectrum so you're not having to fight against the two of them just to create space so that they're not elbowing each other trying to St stand the exact same spot of the room ultimately the less buildup of Sonic energy that you have in one spot of the frequency spectrum the easier it's going to be to balance your mix the easier your job is going to be so the third thing that EQ is not going
45:12 to be able to fix is a bad performance and I I feel like this is pretty obvious I don't think you necessarily need me preaching at you about it but EQ cannot create emotion now EQ can make it brighter or maybe a little bit less distracting but if it's a boring performance or an Out of Time Performance or an Out Of Tune performance then that's not really going to matter The Listener is going to be bored or distracted or will just lose interest so you have to get it right at the source you got to get it right during the recording session I would rather someone give me a less polished recording that is super emotional then someone give me something that is
45:59 maybe an incredibly good recording but uninspired performance so try really hard try to give the best performances that you can now the fourth thing that EQ can't fix is a bad volume balance now this is something that's actually overlooked a lot all of the tools of mixing are really sexy learning about all of the gear and learning how to do everything and just feeling like a wizard whereas the volume faders are boring you know you turn it up or you turn it down and and that's really it but it's actually in my opinion the most important step in mixing because it's laying the foundation for the rest of the mix volume balance is almost like its own form of EQ if a super bright instrument is pushed up really really loud in a mix even though all of the
46:46 other instruments might be very warm or dark that whole mix is going to sound really bright it doesn't matter how much you EQ out all the stuff in the the other instruments it's going to be a very bright mix The Simple Solution to that just turn it down a little bit and all of a sudden boom it feels good in your head that's a good rule of thumb to take from this if you can't get an instrument to sound good with EQ it might just be too loud try turning it down a few decb and see if that fixes the problem so finally we get to number five an EQ can't fix a bad listening environment the room you're mixing in is affecting the sound coming out of your speakers quite a bit more than you might realize I don't know if you've had this experience where you've sat down and
47:32 you've just fought with the mix for hours and hours you've tweaked and tweaked and tweaked until finally it sounds incredible and you go and you show it to a friend at their house through their speakers and you listen to it it sounds like crap well there might be a lot of reasons for that but one of the big reasons is that you might be listening in a poorly treated room so the sound that's coming out of your speakers isn't accurate so even though you might be making great EQ moves great mixing moves they're only going to sound good in this one space they're not going to sound good everywhere else you need to be mixing in an accurate space so that you actually know what EQ moves you're making because otherwise you might be turning things down that don't actually need to be turned down or
48:18 turning things up that definitely shouldn't be turned up that means investing in acoustic treatment now that's a bit of a complicated object so I've actually attached some resources so that you can go and start to learn what you need where to put it and how you can get your speakers to sound as accurate as possible so that your mixes sound good everywhere so those are the five things that eqs can't fix the five pitfalls of mixing so now that you know that you're going to be able to go out make sure that you're getting great recordings Great Performances that you're getting a great Arrangement and that you're getting a great volume balance and hopefully mixing in a good listening environment your mixes are
49:03 going to sound 10 times better if you spend the time that you need to spend to get all those things [Music] right now one of the biggest and most frustrating questions for beginners with EQ is where do I boost and where do I cut you have this tool you know how to use it but you have no idea where to even start so one of the reasons that this is such a hard question to answer is because music is so hard to describe you know there's no scientific terminology to describe what something sounds like so we end up having to use descriptive words like oh that sounds warm or like oh that sounds really distant or ah you know that
49:50 sounds really aggressive now that's all well and good but what does that actually mean like how can I use the word warm and turn it into something that I can create with an EQ so enter the balance chart so this is a custom chart that we've made at musician on a mission to be able to connect these words of feeling these words of emotion these subjective words that you use to describe sound with actual frequencies actual frequency ranges so now if you're saying oh you know like that sounds warm you can say oh that's probably because it's balanced in between about 100 Herz and 400 HZ right about here so it not
50:36 only shows you where the tone you're looking for probably lives in the frequency spectrum but it also shows you where the tones you don't want to have live in the frequency spectrum so you can see that the top of the chart up here has a lot of harsh words like boxy muddy harsh syllabus stuff that you don't want in your sound stuff that as you're listening to your recordings you might use to describe it and you see over here there's a little arrow with one part that says too much and down here one part that says too little so if you have too much Sonic energy in a particular part of the frequency spectrum let's say around 200 htz well then your track Probably sounds muddy but if you don't have enough Sonic
51:23 energy in that area well you're might sound pretty thin so what we're going for is to balance the tones of our instruments and to balance the tone of our mix so that all the words that we' use to describe it are all here right in the middle nothing is too much there's not too much energy nothing is too little there's not too little energy we're living right here with a balanced frequency spectrum so using the balance chart in your mixes is honestly really simple all you have to do is print it out maybe keep it to the side or maybe keep it up on your screen and whenever you're trying to EQ a sound just sit there close your eyes and listen and say okay well this sounds full well awesome that means that your mids are really well balanced or you might listen and
52:09 just be like man you know this sounds really Hollow you know it just sounds oddly empty to me well that means that there's probably two little Sonic energy living down here in the low mids maybe the Basse or maybe the so all you have to do is find the words that you're going for and it's either saying oh I want this to sound full and then saying okay why doesn't it sound full or it's saying oh this sounds muddy or oh this sounds Hollow or some kind of uh synonym for those words obviously these aren't all the words that you could possibly use but most of the synonyms for those words are on this chart then all you have to do is go through the process of finding what part of that area is
52:56 causing the problem what part has too much energy what part has too little energy and then balancing it out making some boosts making some cuts and making sure that it's sounding just like you'd like it to now we've used the word balance a lot why am I leaning so much into the phrase balance well that's because it's not just about cutting or boosting it's about creating balance in the frequency spectrum that's really important you're not just saying oh cool want this instrument to sound better therefore I just need to boost it a bunch or oh this instrument sounds too much therefore I need to cut it a bunch often times you know the solution is let's say you know oh this sounds distant well maybe I just need to boost
53:42 it in this area but sometimes it might be a situation where rather than this area being out of whack maybe this area over here is actually too loud and so it sounds distant to your ears not because the upper mids are out of balance but because maybe the base or the low mids are out of balance so you might need to go and make a few Cuts over there and all of a sudden bam it's no longer distant to your ears and you didn't even touch that part of the frequency spectrum now that comes with time that's obviously something that you learn to do the more you practice with this but it's important for me to tell you balance is the focus it's not focused on boosting or cutting or enhancing it's focusing on balance
54:29 and the nice thing about this chart is that the more you use it the more you'll internalize it this is ultimately something to teach you what parts of the sound live in what parts of the frequency spectrum the more that you use it in your mixes the more you'll be able to listen to a sound and just be like I want that to sound warm okay I should boost it in the lower mids and you go and you do it you don't even have to look at the chart but until you get to that point using this chart is going to be a huge help for you so let's give it a shot with a few instruments and see how it actually works so here we are with a few examples of how we can actually use this chart in practice so first off we're going to start with the vocals right here so I'm going to hit play and I just want you to close your eyes and listen and think how would you
55:16 describe this vocal what's the problem with this vocal you were me to be aded by more more than just me I can tell by the blaz in your eyes R so now let's actually look at the chart so to me I could use two different words to describe this I could describe it as you know maybe it's too warm or maybe it's muddy um but I could also describe it on the other side as dis it feels really far away and partially that's because it has some Reverb on it but it really does feel like it's lacking any kind of character any kind
56:05 of emotion it's just kind of it it almost sounds like the person is talking into their hands like this so what that means is I want to search in this area so kind of between 1.5 KZ and about 8 khz so I'm going to go over here and I'm going to get myself an Q like right here and I am going to make a band and let's uh see what happens you were meant to be adored by more than just me I can tell by the blaz in your eyes recklessly now you hear how all of a sudden that opens up the emotion is
56:52 there and I'm boosting very very aggressively because I these are examples where I actually went and cut stuff out I don't think it's necessary to boost this much but you can hear the difference let's do a before and after so here's before where it sounds really distant you were to be aded by more and here's after where it sounds quite a bit more balanced you were me to be adored by more than just me simple as that so now let's go and check out these drums I'm going to Loop them same thing I want you to close your eyes and listen and think what's wrong with these
57:38 [Music] drums to me the wor word that I would use is Harsh they sound really grading they kind of hurt to listen to a little bit so if we go to our chart right here search for the word harsh well boom there we see it so up here in the mids and the upper mids so around 1 khz all the way over to about 8 khz I would want to search in there and see if by boosting the Sonic energy in that area if that solves my problem if that
58:25 balances the frequency spectrum out so we're going to get another EQ up and let's see what [Music] happens ooh that sounds real bad to me want to take it [Music] down turn it up just a little bit see see and that sounds balanced to me let's do it before and after so here's [Music] before you can hear all of that like that's going on that is just so much Sonic energy just sitting in that upper
59:13 mids area and then when we take it [Music] out it's balanced again so let's go and check out our acoustic guitar or excuse me electric guitar we bring this up same thing close your eyes listen see what comes to your [Music] mind there's a few words that I would use to describe this I might you know I might describe it as distant I might
59:59 describe it as maybe weak you know I would even more than that though I describe it maybe as busy you know it feels really busy but then the part's not that busy why should the sound be busy and I think the word I would use to describe it the most accurately is Muddy it sounds like it's just chalk full of mud so if we go to the Chart you can see that sits about right there so that's kind of 100 Hertz to around 500 htz so open up an EQ see if we can balance it back [Music] [Applause] [Music]
1:00:47 [Applause] [Music] out that sounds a lot better to me so here's [Applause] before here's [Music] [Applause] after we've just scooped a lot of that mud out we've balanced the frequency [Music] spectrum turn it up just a [Applause] [Music] bit easy as that now I have one more example for us let's go and look at this full mix and let's see what happens so close your eyes and think what you think is wrong with
1:01:34 it [Music] fire wild [Music] fire so what do you think is wrong with this now most of the mix actually sounds pretty good good but if you're listening to it you're realizing there's not really a lot of bass like there's not there's not really a lot of in it you know it it sounds thin I would say that's the word that I would use to describe it so if we brought up our chart can see that thin is in fact it's the subbase the base a little bit of the low mids so let's bring up an EQ and see if we can balance it
1:02:20 out fire [Music] wild [Music] fire fire yeah so listen to the before and after so here's [Music] before okay and here's after fire [Music]
1:03:05 and [Music] after it just sounds a lot more full it's got a lot more warmth it's got a lot more clarity it's got a lot more bottom end and ultimately it sounds balanced and that's what you're going to be using this thing for you're going to be using it to balance your tones you're going to be using it to balance the tone of your mix and eventually you'll be able to get rid of it you'll be able to know exactly how to do this by yourself without using this kind of tool so hopefully this tool will help you out in the future with your future mixes so when it comes to knowing where to boost and cut when you're using your Ebe there's one central question what are
1:03:52 you listening for whenever whenever you're making your decisions if you don't know what's causing a certain sound then you're not really going to know how to fix it or you might not actually be able to pick out what the problem is with the sound you you might just know well there's something wrong with the guitar it just sounds off but I can't really tell what it is so that is where ear training comes in so ear training is about tuning your ears to hear the details in a sound so most people actually only hear the overall picture you know they see sort of broad Strokes what's going on around them or rather they hear broad Strokes what's going on around them now in order to mix well and EQ well you need to be able to
1:04:39 hear the details in the instrument that you're mixing you need to be able to hear the sounds within the sound the sounds within the instruments not just oh that's guitar and it sounds weird but you need to be able to say oh that's guitar and it sounds too brittle and I know that that's probably because right there in around 2K is probably too much something along the lines of that now that might seem impossible right now but if you train your ears you'll actually be able to notice those small details you'll be able to focus in and hear all of the intricacies of a sound now there's three techniques that I'd recommend doing to do your ear training so the first is what I call the bench
1:05:26 technique all you have to do grab a notepad a pencil or pen and go and find a bench in a local park or a mall or a busy section of town or a Starbucks or whatever it honestly doesn't matter then I want you to close your eyes and just listen for five minutes and I want you to write down everything you hear and at first you might write down just you know the obvious things like if you're in a mall you're like okay well I hear music happening and I hear you know people talking in front of me as they pass the bench but then eventually the longer that you sit there you'll start to write down well I hear footsteps and I hear the air conditioner and I hear uh someone using a power washer in the back
1:06:11 you know and I hear birds chirping outside and I hear uh people rustling through clothing in the store that I'm sitting right next to things that you wouldn't have noticed had you not really sat there and tried to just pick apart the individual sounds the ear hears 100% of the sound around you but the brain does not that's a big thing to know when it comes to ear training the brain actually blocks out quite a bit of the sound so that you can stay focused on whatever is happening in that moment so you're going to have to retrain your brain to hear all of the sounds that are happening around you you're going to have to practice and what's going to happen is you're going to go and sit on the bench you'll write down what you
1:06:58 hear and then you'll be done and then you move on to the next place maybe on a different day and you're going to write down what you hear and you'll notice oh you know I'm actually hearing more here and you go to the next place and you write down even more and then I want you to come back to that first bench and I want you to write down everything you hear and the more you do this technique you'll actually notice that you can start picking out sounds that were fully blocked from your Consciousness I mean that just you would have not have ever heard had you not sat there and practiced paying attention to everything going on around you this skill is so needed in mixing and in eqing because you have to sit and listen and be able to almost spread the sound
1:07:46 out in front of you and say okay I see the whole frequency spectrum I'm listening with my ears and there that's the problem you know almost like in the Iron Man movies and the Avengers movies whenever Tony Stark is able to create those Holograms around him and kind of mess with them and pick out the exact piece of data he wants that's what you're doing with sound that's what you're doing with your instruments or your mix or your vocals you're trying to hear the sounds that make up the sound so that is technique number one for ear training the next technique that I recommend is to use training programs ear training programs they are actually out there the two that I would recommend going and checking out are train your
1:08:33 ears and sound gy now pretty much what they do is they allow you to upload music and they will play the music without any EQ applied and then they'll actually you know they'll randomly boost or cut something in the mix and you have to sit there and for all intents and purposes guess you know okay okay well this sounded like it lost a lot of upper mids you'll click upper mids and it'll tell you if you're right or wrong and what'll be interesting is right when you start doing it it'll probably be pretty frustrating because you'll feel like I'm just guessing I'm not really I don't know what I'm doing yet but the more you do it the faster your ears will get used to those sound changes and the faster you'll actually be able to fully
1:09:19 understand when something is out of whack and what's out of whack about it that's the big thing not only just oh something's wrong here but like oh something's wrong and it's a problem at 400 HZ you'll be able to say that it's honestly really incredible so I definitely would go check out train your ears and sound gem both of those are are great options there's also other ones that are out there that you know I am unfamiliar with if you get a recommendation from another teacher go try that one out to so the last technique that I want you to try is what I call the vowel technique and this this one's kind of weird but it's extremely effective so stick with me on this so basically your voice can help you find problems in the frequency spectrum now
1:10:05 the vowel technique is based on this rule that when your voice produces vowel sounds it's actually changing the Sonic energy that's coming out of your vocal cords so one vowel might have a ton of energy in one part of the frequency spectrum and another vowel might have a ton of energy in another part of the frequency spectrum so you can use these vowel sounds to determine what part of the frequency spectrum is out of whack so let's talk about these words and we're actually going to whisper them because it basically spreads the frequencies out across a certain area which makes it easier to compare it to a mix you think of it like making white noise out of your voice so the first word in the vowel technique is boot like
1:10:52 a boot that you'd wear and that is going to be roughly around 250 Herz so like boot boot that kind of sound now the next word is toe that's going to be around 500 htz So to that kind of sound the next word is father and we use the word father just because it's easier to remember it's really the fa sound that we're going for so and that's going to be around 1 kerz then we're going to use the word bet that sound and that's going to be around 2 khz then we're going to use the word beat like a beat on a drum or a beat like a vegetable so beat and then
1:11:40 finally we're going to use the word kiss and with kiss we actually are focusing more on the S sound than the I sound so you're really just holding the S so like kiss that sound right now I am going to actually go in pull up some white noise boost in those areas and you'll be able to hear that what I'm doing with my voice is actually what's happening for the most part in those white noise areas so I have some pink noise set up here and we are actually going to use this EQ to test out this technique so the first word is Boot and that's at around 250 HZ so I'm going to turn this up
1:12:28 okay I'm going to turn this on I'm going to solo [Music] it so you hear that hold out the word [Music] boot see how similar that sounds it's got that ooh sound ooh okay now let's look at the next word which is toe and that's about 500 roughly like that kind of
1:13:17 sound you hear that you hear how the tone matches the pink noise so the next word is father so fa and that is at 1 khz so 1,00 Hertz so let's listen to that how similar that sounds this is something that you can do really anytime that you mix if you're trying to find problem areas and you just can't figure it out you can use these words to find the exact spot so the next word bet so I'm gonna unmute
1:14:08 this okay the next word is beat and that's at about 4 ktz so I'm going to unmute it be you he that sound is so similar and finally the is Kiss and again kiss we're really more going for the S sound at the end of kiss kiss is more just a word to remember it and that's going to be at around 6 khz it's as simple as that so how you would use this in your mix is you'd be listening to your instruments you'd be listening to your mix and as you're trying to figure out like okay well where's the area where the problem probably is well just go through your
1:14:54 list just start going like boot okay well it's not boot okay well it's not bet okay well it's not toe so on and so forth and until you get to one maybe it's like you get to beat and you hear the same sound happening there you go now you know it's around that area in the frequency spectrum now this is not a perfect system obviously you know there's no vowel sounds below you know about 250 there's not really any vowel sounds above 6 khz there is a workaround though because if I go through all six of my words and nothing really sounds like it fits well I've pretty much narrowed out 2/3 of the frequency spectrum now I know well the problem is probably in the base
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