Learning EQ

[junplugged]

This is kind of a new thing for me. You know how you have been doing or looking at something for a loooong time and then one day realize that you have had this attitude and it surprises you to suddenly be aware of it? Well, there is so much high end and high mids in prof. released recordings, that all my life, I've adjusted stereos everywhere to bring up the bass and cut the mids and highs.

It's very strange for me to be hearing all this high end now that I am trying to mix my recordings. I'm still trying to get used to it, it's been only 3 weeks or so that I got studio monitors, and unadjusted the eq on my junky home stereo. So now I have to re and un-learn my long history of listening, and it's taking a long time b/c I'm STILL not used to it.

Everything sounds different now that I am listening to the high end. It's uncomfortable to me to have to now live outside my comfort zone of low mids and bass to have to make decisions about the upper end that I have barely any reference to since it's all new.

I'm beating a small point here, but it's kind of big since EQ is a pretty darn big area. It also has an impact on mixing levels b/c they also seem different since I have levels in a band (bandwidth) that I don't have as much experience with.

However, I already see an improvement in my mixes. Gee, they're not muddy. But the other thing is that everything I used to listen to is really different. I always thought Soundgarden was so dark and moody, then I heard it on my monitors and was kind of shocked, and that just goes about the same for a lot of stuff, then there are things like Surfacing CD from S McLachlan that really shines and freaks me out with the high end.

I also used to tune my amp to the lower end, not where the elec guitar belongs, esp my tele. Actually I could never really be happy with that guitar and amp b/c it was too mid and high end. Well, I guess I can like it better now.

New ears.

 

[masteringhouse]

This is kind of a new thing for me. You know how you have been doing or looking at something for a loooong time and then one day realize that you have had this attitude and it surprises you to suddenly be aware of it? Well, there is so much high end and high mids in prof. released recordings, that all my life, I've adjusted stereos everywhere to bring up the bass and cut the mids and highs.
...
New ears.

Yep! We all go through phases in our development where our critical listening changes and develops. It seems to me that most folks concentrate on the extremes of low and/or high end at the beginning of their career. This is probably one of the reasons we see the "smiley face" EQ settings on alot of systems (along with the reasons of how we percieve frequency vs. loudness).

For me the character of a production is in the quality of the midrange. Is it nasal sounding, fatiguing to listen to, boxy, muddy in the low mid, etc. While a good clean punchy bottom and a clean high end is very important it's more the icing on the "mid cake".