Khompewtur said:
Hey Chris, that analyzer data looks really cool, what did you use to get that?
It's been pretty handy for me lately, especially in trying to analyze the stuff that's hard to hear...like anything below 50Hz or (for me) above 10K.
It's just the PAZ analyzer in most WAVES packages. The interface shows the EQ curve in real time, so you can see any weird spikes as they happen...nothing more than my old fashioned stereo spectrum analzyer does, but this has 70 bands instead of 9, lol. Anyway, once you "Preview" a section of the tune...or the whole tune, just hit "save data" and it'll save a little text file of what's going on. Oh, and you run it in one of 2 modes..."RMS" or "PEAK"...peak is self explanatory, and RMS is like an overall average stereo energy of combined Left and Right over the range of the sample.
And yeah, you can use it like you were thinking...or more often, if you've got one band that's going nuts, bring it down to be closer to the surrounding bands...But then again, lol...it depends on the tune. Most industrial/techno stuff is gonna' have a lot more low energy and may not really have many spikes below 250, but most pop/rock tunes seem to have a spike at 63Hz and 120Hz, and maybe at 80Hz (for the kick), so the trick is to pick a tune that you think sounds LIKE the tune you're recording.
Oh, and on that PAZ analyzer tool, the thing I like the most about it is that you can run a commercial tune through it, see the EQ curve, SAVE the EQ curve, and use it as a background to compare your song with...I have about 20 EQ curves saved that I use as references...Mixes that I think are good based on having listened to them on a bunch of different systems...everything from Allison Krauss for the acoustic mixes to RadioHead.
I think Sam has the Waves package, so I don't think I did anything he hasn't done...it's just that I had that PAZ thing for a long time before I figured out that it could actually be useful, lol...so I thought maybe somebody else might learn something about it too.