iso 1/3 octave eq bands

[stupidfatnugly]

glen,

i'm trying to make sense of your chart

if I'm playing bass in the key of C, my lowest octave will hit at 63Hz, next octave@125Hz;then 250Hz. so I should not attenuate any of these frequencies?

so if i WANT TO MIX WELL with a male vocal; I would cut the male vocal at
250Hz and maybe boost it/leave as is at 200Hz and cut the bass at 200Hz?

also your bass goes from 41 to 343Hz; does that mean that most of the freqs higher than 343 will be attenuated? (with a couple freqs left up for attack or string noise?)

 

[SouthSIDE Glen]

glen,

i'm trying to make sense of your chart

if I'm playing bass in the key of C, my lowest octave will hit at 63Hz, next octave@125Hz;then 250Hz. so I should not attenuate any of these frequencies?

You should do whatever your ears tell you needs to be done. What key you're playing in is irrelevant.

so if i WANT TO MIX WELL with a male vocal; I would cut the male vocal at 250Hz and maybe boost it/leave as is at 200Hz and cut the bass at 200Hz?

If you WANT TO MIX WELL with a male vocal, you should develop ears good enough to allow you to no need that chart for anything.

I'll be honest, if I had my way, I'd destroy that chart, because so many people try to misuse it in ways similar to the questions here. It is certainly the resource with the least amount of value on the site. But unfortunately that chart has become the single most popular resource on the website by far, and if I removed it I'd probably have another contract put out on me.

(Almost) NEVER use that chart as a guide for what to actually DO with your sound. It is meant only as a guide to help one ID frequencies as part of training their ear.

also your bass goes from 41 to 343Hz; does that mean that most of the freqs higher than 343 will be attenuated? (with a couple freqs left up for attack or string noise?)

No, as indicated in the chart's legend, the red part of each instrument's range indicates the general range of the fundamental frequencies/notes covered by that instrument. But unless you're playing an analog synthesizer with a pure sine wave oscillator as your tone, every fundamental note you hit will have associated harmonic frequencies and instrument resonances as well that can extend well into the yellow rages.

In the case of the string bass, it has a fundamental note range of E1 - F4, which is about the equivalent of about 41Hz to 343Hz. But that's the range of the *musical notes* that the instrument is designed to play and their fundamental frequencies, not the range of the actual full range of frequencies generated when those notes are hit, which is why the yellow part of the range is there as well.

The fundamentals will generally be louder than the harmonics and resonances will be*, but that does not diminish the importance of the harmonics in creating the overall tone of the instrument.

The "Notes:" comments in the chart details simply highlight occasional points of interest in the various instruments. in this case the comments about pick/slap and string noise, as those are often points of interest to many engineers and home reccers.

G.

*Electric guitars and basses actually tend to sometimes seem stronger at the first overtone than at the actual fundamental.

 

[stupidfatnugly]

I can say what sounds good to me but y'all know what sounds even better. I can train/teach myself visually better than anyway else; so I hope it doesn't sound like I disregarded everything you just said G.

harmonics are multiples of the frequencies, right? So, if you hit that low C at 60Hz; you get harmonics at 120Hz;180Hz;240Hz;300Hz;360 and so on, all the way up? Do they go down aswell?


So I have this attachment with bass and vox together b/c they are both panned dead center so I need to seperate them. My YELLOW VERTICAL LINE that I've drawn on the bass EQ is at 40Hz and it crosses the white curve at -6db;so I guess I'm getting -6db @40Hz but I'm not sure if the curve takes precedence or the placements of the dots/circles. I have my bass boosted 2.5db at 70Hz; but as you can see the white curve is below 2.5. do ya know which I should attend to?

I put a wide -4db cut at 92Hz to accomodate my kick and stretch all the way over too 200Hz to make way for the "fulness" of the vocal. I cut -4db at 450 for honking;boosted 1.8db at 826Hz for attack and let the rest trail off to make room for precussion and guitars.


For voxEQ(upper/left): I drew a white vertical line at 1.5kHz, where I put a narrow -6db cut b/c I really hate tinny vocals.
The red line at 750Hz is a 3db cut for anti-honk. I read that baritone voices go from 100-400Hz and tenor voices range 120-550Hz; So, I tried to leave 100-550Hz alone. There's a 1.4db boost at 120Hz for "fulness".

Am I on the right track? I've been told that I'm creating a black hole in the center with my vox,bass,kick and snare b/c I turn them all up loud b/c those are the most important parts of the song.

 

[SouthSIDE Glen]

harmonics are multiples of the frequencies, right? So, if you hit that low C at 60Hz; you get harmonics at 120Hz;180Hz;240Hz;300Hz;360 and so on, all the way up?

Yeah, that's basically correct. It's not always a neat progression, sometimes one might find only the even multiple harmonics (e.g. x2, x4, etc.), other times the odd ones will be dominant, or a mix of them both. Theoretically they'll go "all the way up", but often the amount of energy (volume) at the higher harmonics may drop so low as to be insignificant.

Do they go down aswell?

They can, in which case they'd be referred to as subharmonics or undertones. But they tend to be rarer than harmonics or overtones, and when they do occur, they rarely go below the first or second undertone to any significant degree.

I'm not sure if the curve takes precedence or the placements of the dots/circles. I have my bass boosted 2.5db at 70Hz; but as you can see the white curve is below 2.5. do ya know which I should attend to?

The dots are how you actually set the EQ - i.e. they represent where you actually have the numbers set. But the nature of how the EQ actually works (for many reasons far too messy to get into in detail here) means that the actual EQ curve is "smoothed out" a bit, and doesn't necessarily follow exactly the sharp-edged, straight line, mountain-peak kind of profile that you'd see if you simply connected the dots. This is normal, and the smoothed-out curve of what is actually being applied is what the white line is approximating. As such, the white line is a truer representation of what is actually happening than your dots are.

All that said, I wouldn't worry too much about which one you should "attend to"; without wanting to sound like a broken record, your ears and not your eyes should be the judge here. If you have (just for example) a yellow dot set for a 3dB boost but the white curve is only showing a 2dB boost, don't worry about it, because the exact number of the actual boost is not important. What's important is whether it sounds better or worse if you have the dot set to 3dB and the line is at 2dB or whether you boost your dot to 4dB in order pull the line up to 3dB. The dots and lines are just a reference to let you know what's happening, not a guide telling you what you should actually do.

Am I on the right track? I've been told that I'm creating a black hole in the center with my vox,bass,kick and snare b/c I turn them all up loud b/c those are the most important parts of the song.

You're doing a good job of paying attention to/worrying about details, but it's impossible for anyone to say just based upon pictures and numbers a to whether you're actually on the right track or not. First, only your tastes and desires can decide just what the "right track" actually is; i.e. just what sound you actually want to wind up with. One man might want more "fullness" in the vocals whereas another might want to put it more in the bass, and so forth. Second, it all depends upon the actual nature of the tracks you're working with, how they actually sound, and how well they do or do not play together.

This is the difficulty of using things like the frequency chart. Charts like that are meant (or at least should be meant) to help teach and describe general common characteristics of the various instruments and sound sources only as a way of helping the listener train their ears for associating certain sounds *that they hear* with the numbers represented on their gear such as equalizers and frequency analyzers. But they should not be used as a basis for recipes or canned procedures based upon the numbers to be selected before or without consideration for what one actually hears.

[EDIT]
I understand what you're saying about working better with visuals; some folks are just like that naturally. And that's OK. But the fact is that were are dealing with sound here, and that the ONLY way to know what something sounds like is by listening. pictures and numbers are just not sufficient to get the job done very well.

Think of it like this; imagine trying to create a painting or a photograph by the numbers. One can look at a brightness histogram of a photograph, and it can help somewhat in determining general exposure setting, but it will do nothing to tell you whether the picture actually looks "right" or not. One can numerically determine the balance of colors used in making a painting, but those number will tell you nothing about what the painting actually looks like.

I understand your propensity for the visual, but it's only going to get you so far in mixing audio until you understand how to relate what you hear at least as well. It may not be the way you're naturally inclined, but it is a learnable/trainable skill, and a necessary one at that.

*THATS* how tools like the frequency chart can come in handy, as a guide to help one understand what they are hearing. But it simply cannot be used as a substitute for critical listening.

G.

 

[SouthSIDE Glen]

Accidental duplicate post. Mods please delete.

G.

 

[stupidfatnugly]

Ok but I do have the right idea, in that I need to cut the bass a few db's
and get a wide enough bandwidth in order to fit where my boosts for kick and vox are, right?

 

[DrewPeterson7]

I can't really add much over what Glen is saying here - a knowledge of what frequencies tend to fall where on what instruments is certainly very useful to have while mixing, but it's sort of like knowing music theory. I think Miles Davis might have been the guy who said, on the subject of playing jazz, that the secret is to "...learn all the music theory you can, and then forget it." Not meaning jazz is played with no regard to theory, but rather that all that shit just needs to be internalized to the point where you're not thinking, 'Ok, I'm superimposing a diminished arpeggio over the dominant chord's 3rd to suggest an altered 11th sound,' but rather to just DO it and trust your ears to pull you through. All these facts and figures are great, but at some point you need to just forget them and run with your ears.

One of the biggest learning experiences I've had was, well, I guess some background first. I started mixing on a computer, in college, so I had no experience EQ'ing or setting levels in any other context than "ok, let's lower that to -6.5dB, and put a high pass on 45hz with a slight boost of 1.5db at 360hz." Basically, since I'd never had to do anything else, for me I learned thinking about doing it by numbers. I first started recording back in '99, on a demo version of Sonic Foundry Acid 2.0

So, really I'm embarassed to say that this happened within the past year, after listening to guys like Glen talk about the need to trust your ear above all else, I realized I was going about it the wrong way. So, one night I just hid all of the track waveforms, started looking just at the "mixing console" part of in Reaper, and started mixing with my eyes closed. I'd listen for something that didn't sound right (say, a bassline that wasn't as clear as it could be), pull up an EQ, close my eyes, and start sliding it around until I liked what I was hearing. I'd also pull up a few tweaks that intellectually made sense (say, a low-pass on my electric rhythm guitars), and again close my eyes and start moving it around until I was happy with what I heard. Ditto with setting levels. I would have no idea what numerically I was doing, I was basically doing the computer equivalent of spinning dials just to see what happened.

To make a really bad pun, it was a very eye opening experience. For one, it was much more fun - it felt free-er, more creative, and less restrictive, more like an art than a science. For another, I found myself making adjustments that I wouldn't have previously had made, but finding I was happier wiith the results.

So, try it. Take all the numbers and facts and figures, and forget about them. Shut your eyes, start moving vaders around, and listen to what happens. It may suck, but either way you'll learn something.



*disclaimer- I'm by no means an expert engineer or mixer, but I figure I'm a tolerable enough home recording hobbyist that I won't make an ass out of myself by giving advice here.

 

[SouthSIDE Glen]

Ok but I do have the right idea, in that I need to cut the bass a few db's
and get a wide enough bandwidth in order to fit where my boosts for kick and vox are, right?

Maybe you should add the word "stubborn" to you screen name. You keep looking for a specific type of answer where people keep telling you answers don't exist .

Look, it's often a good general tactic to remove something from one instrument to help make room in the same area for another instrument. If that's your question, the answer is yes. As to whether the specifics of what you're doing with the bass and the kick are "right", only you can answer that question.

G.

 

[stupidfatnugly]

Yeah, that's basically correct. It's not always a neat progression, sometimes one might find only the even multiple harmonics (e.g. x2, x4, etc.), other times the odd ones will be dominant, or a mix of them both.

OK, I'm training my ears today and I notice with a string section that I get a hum at 400Hz and then a bit of a whistle at 1200Hz.

so this would be an example of the odd multiple being dominant? 400 x 3?

nothing stands out at 800Hz so should I cut it there to make room for other stuff?

 

[RAMI]

nothing stands out at 800Hz so should I cut it there to make room for other stuff?

Dude, sometimes you've got to forget about "theory" and use common sense. Why would you cut it where nothing stands out. What are you cutting?

 

[SouthSIDE Glen]

OK, I'm training my ears today and I notice with a string section that I get a hum at 400Hz and then a bit of a whistle at 1200Hz. so this would be an example of the odd multiple being dominant? 400 x 3?[

nothing stands out at 800Hz so should I cut it there to make room for other stuff?

What do I (or anyone else) need to say or do to convince you to stop trying to mix by the numbers? I suppose it can be a tough habit to break if you get used to it, but it's one you gotta work on, friend.

As to whether that hum and that whistle are related or coincidental, even or odd harmonics, or resonances in the instrument itself, I can't say based on the info you've given. Are they happening all the time, or just when certain notes are hit?

As to where - or more important, *IF* - you should cut anything, you know what my answer is going to be . Basically you cut what sounds bad from this source or what's getting in the way of whatever sounds better from another source.

If that "hum" and "whistle" stand out or otherwise sound undesirable (a parametric sweep can help here), then cutting at those freqs can potentially make the track sound better. As to where to cut to make room for something else, that entirely depends on where you want that something else to dominate. Cutting at 800 (or any other specific frequency) to make room for something else only makes sense if that's where that something else needs the room.

Rami has the right idea; usually you usually don't cut to make room where there's not much to cut, but rather you cut to make room where there's too much to leave. Also, you might low pass or high pass where the instrument is just not that important. For example, many folks will high-pass just about everything but their kick and bass in order to make sure that those two tracks have the low end all to themselves.

But as far as making sure they have room for each other, *YOU* have to decide where each instrument's strengths and weaknesses lie and accentuate the strengths of each and minimize the weaknesses of each. And that takes listening each, maybe using a sweep or two to help listen, and *only where necessary* cutting out the bad and *maybe* gently accentuating a little of the good.

G.