Ah, I see now! But when people talk about compression, reverb - I just play around with them and hope it sounds alright, how should I learn how to apply these to best effect?
Things like compressors, reverb and EQ are tools for shaping sound, just like a set of chisels or saws are tools for shaping wood. And like using any tool, you have to know how the tool actually works - that is, that a jigsaw is better for cutting fine shapes but a rip saw is better for rough cutting large pieces into smaller ones, and that one does not just take the rip saw and start sawing, but there is a technique for starting the cut, one for the fastest and most efficient cutting through the bulk and one for finishing the cut without tearing the end of the wood or binding the saw.
For an EQ, a major part is learning what those frequency and badnwidth numbers actually mean and learning what sounds you hear are represented by those frequency and bandwidth numbers. My recommendation to get started there is to take a 15-band graphic EQ (real or plug-in) and play some of your favorite CDs through it. As you play them, take one band of EQ at a time and start sliding it up and down slowly and listen to how that one band affects what you hear, what the actual tone differences sound like and what aspects of each instrument and vocal are affected by each frequency band. Do that for an hour a night for a week. Then bring in a friend with different CDs to do the same thing as you blindly listen and try to guess what frequency range they are moving up or down. Once you can regularly guess within two sliders either way, you're getting fairly good - at least good enough to get close enough to be able to fine tune on your own from that point. Also read
this article for a particularly useful method for using a parametric EQ for sweetening your sounds.
Compression can be a bit trickier to wrap your ears around, and is a bit more complex in what it does. Here, I'd recommend some reading up first; I have a pretty comprehensive beginner's tutorial if you
go here and click on the "Compression Uncompressed" icon in the bottom right corner. This will give you a head start on the functionality of compressors and some reasons for compression, as well as a few specific techniques often used. From there, you can experiment to your heart's desire with your own compressor to get the feel for it a bit better.
Reverb is more of a taste kind of thing; but a good rule to start with is if you can consciously hear it, you probably have a bit too much of it. Check out the Recording Project website and Tweakheadz website for more on reverb (and other effects.)
I have nothing against pure experimentation for learning, but it can be kind of the deaf leading the deaf if you don't have some background from these kinds of articles first - or at least along with the experimentation.
The goal is to learn how the gear works and what twirling this knob or pushing that slider actually means and actually does to the sound. Once you have that knowledge - and once you have trained your ear to listen for that stuff - then it's "simply" (I say that word half-jokingly
) a matter of listening to what you got, comparing that to what you want to have, and then applying your knowledge of how the tool works to get form here to there.
Is it easy? No. But it's not all that hard either. It just takes a little patience and practice. We can't all be Michelangelos with our brushes, but with just a little knowledge and practice, we can make some decent paintings that will far surpass some cardboard cut-out, paint-by-number recipes that say paint color #2 inside these lines and color #3 inside those lines
.
G.
