Hi...I'm trying to improve my EQ knowledge...the options on the BR800 menu are a bit of a mystery to me!...any comments on general settings to be getting on with?..What should I be doing with say Bass guitar.../ rhythm / lead etc......Any ideas for improvement welcome....Ian
To get to the EQ, press "track" and then you'll see it. The first page of the menu is a simple off/on for each track. Press enter to get to the second page.
Your choices on the second page are low, mid, hi gain, and lo/mid/ hi frequency: Gain basically means "increase" (or decrease), so you can raise it or lower it. If you lower it, you'll see -1 etc. They go together, so low gain will turn your low frequency number up or down. (Not the number itself, the amount of gain at that particular frequency).
Frequency can relate to pitches. When an orchestra tunes up, they tune to A=440. That's also called "hertz" (hz). On a piano, 440 hz is the A below middle C. An octave higher would be 880hz, an octave lower would be 220hz. One has to know where (roughly) the musical notes live on the frequency/hz scale. Here's a good chart to study (middle of the page):
Digital Pathways Audio A: Frequency, Amplitude and EQ
What all this means to you: if a cymbal has a harsh sound, the harshness might be around 3K. On the BR, you would turn the High Freq to 3.15K (it goes in steps on the BR), and then turn
the High gain down. It goes by db, so minus 1 is a little bit, minus two is more etc. In general, subtractive will be more helpful to you than additive, as you want to remove unwanted things like harshness. On the low end, a bass can be boomy, so you would use the low freq., figure out where it is boomy, and then you would turn down the low gain there.
That's a very simple explanation. The BR eq is extremely limited, so think of it as an "emergency" tool. If a guitar sound is really piercing, you'll turn down the high freq. Sometimes, you'll have a midrange instrument like violin, which doesn't go that low. However, there is noise that you might not realize in the low end. If you have many tracks, the noise will create mud, so you'll want to eq some of the low end out. The BR isn't the right machine to do that, but that's not really a concern for you at this point. Worry about harshness and boom.
