Up Or Down!

[smellyfuzz]

The following I thought was an interesting post on Req-home on mixing.

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DOWN OR UP?
BY ROBERT DENNIS
03/23/01



Down or up? Down definately!
You can tell the quality of a mixing engineer by looking at the
board after the mix. Is every channel equalized? -
professionals equalize fewer channels than amateurs. But a more
tell-tale sign is the way the equalizers "dB" knob is pointing.
Professional mixers more often have them pointing down,
indicating a dip or reduction of the energy in the frequency
band selected. They less-often have them pointing up,
indicating a boost of energy in the frequency band being
equalized.
The first use of an equalizer by a professional mixing engineer
is to get rid of unwanted resonances, ambiences and leakage.
After the various instruments have been "cleaned up" with
equalization, the engineer will then added needed accents.
A prime example of this is in the equalization of the foot
drum. Foot drums often have a resonance between 350 Hz and 400
Hz that makes the instrument sound somewhat like cardboard,
when you mic the back of the drum. The low-end power (the
fundamental) of the foot is at about 50 Hz. The beater sound
has a attack somewhere between 2.5 kHz and 7 kHz. (2.5 kHz for
felt beaters, 4 kHz for hard wood beaters and 7 kHz for metal
beaters.)
There's two ways of thinking about equalizing a foot drum:


The professional engineer may well wind up with a combination of both approaches but
only after taking the down approach. As the mixer brings down the cardboard, the drum
automatically has more low-end punch and more beater attack. Sometimes the mixer may
increase the amount of dip to as much as 9 dB and the bandwidth as much as 2 octaves (0.7
Q) which can further accent the low-end power and the beater sound.
After the dipping is done, the mixer listens to the drum. Less boost will be necessary and
sometimes only one of the boosts will be needed to get the desired sound.

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I must admit that I am one of those "turn it up a notch" musicians.
I like to do a quick mix in between recording tracks, this gives me a
feel for what I'd like to do when it is time for the real mix down.


After reading this article I went over to my board, and did a whole
new mix of a song that is just about done with the tracking.

I killed all the EQ's and listened for a while, then made adjustments
only by turning down.

I was highly impressed.

[Gidge]

That is one of the more important things to learn in mixing, but the hardest to actually do.....its a long road learning this crap, and why I respect guys like Ed and Bruce and Emeric and Doc( and the list goes on) because they do it so well....

A lot of times you can boost a frequency and it gets exactly the result you want, but lurking somewhere is is a frequency that you could have cut that would have made the same impact....instead of boosting that frequency on the guitar track, search the other tracks and see whats covering it up......

Easier said than done.....but Ill keep tweaking and one day Ill get it....

[CyanJaguar]

nice post fuzz,
thanks.


ps,but lucid converters are better than 2" tape