well i've been down getting love in the hip-hop forum but thought I'd come back up here for a while where people speak english. What would nubs do you might ask? well let me tell you: as a general rule I try to use no processing before tracking and go straight from mic to preamp. The comment made about mic technique is correct. Don't eq until you've switched out different mics and moved them around. (with knowledge of their frequency responses) Actually the nubmeister sweeps sine waves through all of his mics and plots the frequency response himself (well really the tech does) You will notice it changes over time, especially on aging mics. We do a couple every week throughout the year. I rarely eq before going to tape and compress on occasion. I prefer choices at the mix stage. If I am just tracking I prefer to leave the mixing engineer choices. Sometimes if the players technique is very uneven I will compress to tape, just because they are driving me nuts and I get sick of fiddling with levels, you will find a lot of engineers actually compress to tape for this reason, despite what they may publicly say. As a general rule I use compression first in the chain, then eq. Especially if you are doing any boosting. If you boost pre-compressor you end up fighting your compressor because it will squash the frequencies you just boosted. Also your compresser can bring up the noise level from your eq's inherent noise floor. You will notice on most consoles that the insert point comes pre-eq, This is not a random occurence. Of course on higher end mixers you can switch from pre to post. I noticed on the frequency chart posted most adjustments indicated boosting at "such-and-such" a frequency. Boosting as a general rule is undesirable because it can increase phasing, and the reason I generally don't like it is because it also increases IM distortion. This is nubs eq primer: If you are a beginner and have parametric eq just leave the bandwith around 1.5- 2.0 octaves for now. We are looking for bad frequencies to take out. Apply a boost, maybe 6-10 db. Now grab your frequency pot and sweep. When you hear something you don't like gradually apply a cut until you hear the "bad" sound go away or it is minimized. An example might be a kick drum, you sometimes end up with a "cardboard" kind of sound around 300-450 hz. Look down on your console, if you have lot of boosts on a single channel or in general you are eq'ing improperly, especially if large bandwiths are being used. If you have 3 1.5 octave boosts you on a single channel you are essentially raising the overall level. Might as well just raise the fader and avoid distortion and phasing. Of course all of this is a general rule and i've seen fine engineers do the opposite, I don't know why but they do. Some argue compressing before tape increases s/n ratio vs. compressing during the mix, but I figure If your equipment is so bad you need to do this you should really concentrate on increasing the quality of your chain.
p.s. I just found a used 19" monitor for $12, nubz be kickin' it 'n shit bro's . . .