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Jin Huang
Sorry for the long pause of updating my lesson blogs. By the time you see this blog, I have finished my final lesson of the bachelor’s program. Mixing songs are crazy. You spend days and hours trying to fix one little thing that is not the way you want it, and your time just disappears. However, practising is more important than writing in theory; without practising, you’ll never be able to find out the way that works for you. It’s good to look back from the end of the journey, seeing what I’ve been confused for days and nights suddenly becomes apparent to understand. All the photos and diaries I have here, will probably be the best memory I can have as a junior, stepping into the world where I can never dream of before.
Date of Session: Apr 12, 2014
Time in: 11:15
Time out: 13:45
Lesson 13: Equalization
This chapter is all about equalization. Like how photographers change the chromatogram to get the right colour for a picture, we change the frequencies spectrum to get the right sound for our music. EQing is either additive or subtractive — we add the frequencies we like in the song while taking away the frequencies we don't like. EQ is series of filter circuits — it filters out the certain frequencies that we want to change; it makes the choice of the certain frequencies that we want them to pass unaffected or not. That’s the simple idea of how we make songs better. Lionel said that instead of audio engineering, he’d rather call it sound reinforcement. People bring us their song, and we make it better. That’s the idea.
EQ can be applied in different stages of a session. When tracking, we use EQ to separate each individual instruments more; when editing, we use EQ to clean out the frequencies that can be noisy in the background; when it comes into mixing, we boost the certain frequencies we like; when mastering, EQ is more likely to balance the whole mix.
There are different kinds of EQ as well. The one Lionel showed me in the live room in my first lesson was a graphic EQ which uses a series of notch filters to cut or boost very specific frequencies. It’s more like a parametric EQ, but what it doesn't have is the Q control. A parametric EQ gives you full control over the levels, centre frequencies, and bandwidths. A program EQ, however, is more like a multi-band EQ, which deals with different ranges of frequencies differently. This kind of EQ is more functionally and easy to use, but they mostly appear in plugins because an outboard gear will be expensive. Lionel showed me how to match a plugin EQ with an outboard EQ. The different signs on an outboard EQ indicate how it will behave in the frequency spectrum.
EQ can be used to clean certain frequencies, but when it comes into string noise, it becomes a little tricky. Lionel showed me a video of spectral editing in Samplitude, and it was so powerful. It’s not only the frequencies that you can edit, but also, you can analyze into the different layers of a waveform to find out what you want to change. That’s the real magic. Wish Pro Tools will be able to do the same thing with native plugins someday.
By the way, the picture above is the famous Pul Tech Program Equalizer EQP-1A, built by Lionel. By the time I was taking this lesson, this EQ hadn't been built yet. Lionel was just talking about his plan of building the EQ. This picture was from a latter session, and I was so excited to see the EQ’s birth. Now, it’s been working in the studio as part of the chain. Cheers!
Finally, I showed Lionel two songs I mixed. One is my original song Drop The World, the newer version; the other is my best friend Chris’s song, Once. I’ve made my mix much tighter than the first one I released on my 19th birthday, and each individual instrument is more balanced. The other song sounds great, but sonically, it’s still empty. This was the feedback I got from Lionel, so these are the key things that I would be improving for my future mixes. Every little change makes a huge step; some better mixes are coming up.
