TIME I TOLD YOU EVERYTHING… | How To Quickly Improve Your Mixes With Subtractive EQ Tip

VIDEO TRANSCRIPTION

So you may have noticed, I've got a new room. Yes. I'm in a new studio. Which got me thinking at some point I'm going have to retire. Well, it's not that I'm desperate to retire, obviously. But recently I had a birthday which is starting to creep me up to an age where I'm feeling pretty old and feeling like all the old guys that I used to work with when I first started. And get a new studio, makes me think, Oh my God, not another studio. How many studios can I work in? Essentially what I'm saying is I'm feeling a little bit old. I don't know how long this is going to go on for. So what I've decided to do with this channel, I'm not giving it up. I'm going full pelt into it. I am going to do three videos a week. No holds barred, not holding anything back. I'm going to tell you everything that I know.

Because ultimately, like I say, I am getting older. I am going to retire. And I've got all this knowledge in my head that I've been doing for the past 25 years. And so what's the point it be in my head. If I got hit by a bus tomorrow, I'm giving it to anyone. So there's no point in learning in the first place. So every week, Monday, Wednesday, Friday, 6:00 PM. GMT. I'm going to be giving you everything I possibly know about mastering, mixing, production, sound, everything. So if you want to know anything, just ask me. I'm here. I will answer all of your questions and I'll show you with demos and stuff. This is one of the reasons why I've built this studio too. Because I've got a studio. It's a massive space. This is only half of it what you see.

And it's going to be a place where I can film and I can do these videos three times a week because it will be set up permanently for me to be able to do that. So the front is built. However, the back of the room is looking appalling. It's got loads of temporary bass traps around, so it's not too live. I do like the room to be quite dead. It's a bit lively at the back, which is fine. The room is 28 feet long. So it's got plenty of space. It's got 14 foot high ceilings. So it's got loads of rooms. So that's not really a problem for the speakers that I've got. And I've also got turned off. So that helps to sort of sort the room out a little bit, but this looks terrible.

So if you want to see me make the bass straps in the back. If you want to see how that's done. Make sure you like the video below. And as I say, I'm going to be showing you everything that I know. So now I've updated you on everything that's going on. Let's get on with today's tip. So this is a super simple way of finding the right EQ for the right place where you want it to be. So how I did this in my olden times as when I was totally hardware. Now, obviously I'm in the box a bit more. But when I'm using an analog EQ, like this maselec here, what you would do is you would put the gain all the way up.

And then you will put queue to about 14 on here, which is tight. It's quite a tight queue that you use on a parametric EQ. And then what you do is you'll just sweep the frequencies to find out which one, whereabouts that sort of either annoying one is or where you want to kind of take that frequency away. So by adding it, you over accentuates it and then you can then drop it out a little bit. And then you can play with the queue to tighten that up. So let's get on the computer. I'll show you how that's done now with a little FabFilter EQ that I've got. So here we are in RX with my assistant Matt’s track again. Reason being that copyright reasons for YouTube, they're a bit tight. So what we're going to do, I'm just going to show you how I sweep the EQ to find any resonant frequencies.

Now in this track, there is a resonant frequency. Let's pull up the EQ. So here we are in the FabFilter. So as I said, what I do in the analog world is put a tight queue on it. But within the digital world, you can get much tighter than you can in the analog world. So you can actually really fine strip frequencies out. It's easy for me to say. So I've got this in linear phase in hikes. That's how I like it. And I've put this game right up. This is quite extreme, but you'll see that it does work. Now, this is something I would probably suggest doing in mixed stage rather than mastering stage. But it does happen if you've got a mix that you can't get back and you need to get a resonant frequency out. This is how I do it. So play the track. I'll show you how to find the frequency first and then we'll take it away. (Music playing). Put this right up and then we go through and find the resonant frequency. (Music playing).

So we've got the honky bit going on. So now we've found that frequency, what we do, let's strip out it's about 70, 71. I think some of that. So let's strip that right down. We're on a super tight queue and a let's preview it again. Now where you're listening to in the track so that you can log into it. You'll hear what I mean is it's where the piano is playing. So it's above the vocal. but what happens is, is what you're listening for is you'll hear the vocal suddenly cleans up because we got rid of that resonant frequency that should have been got rid of in the mix then we can actually hear the difference. So let’s play that. (Music playing).

So that super cleans it up, as you can hear. I wouldn't probably go as radical as this because there are other things going on in that area. But you can hear the massive difference that makes and how it really cleans up that focal area. This can be great for doing in drums. It can be great for doing in bass area. Really good for stripping some frequency so that you can get some distance in between the bass and the kick. So that's pretty handy for doing that. But as I say, the best thing to do is sweep it first, find the frequency that you want. You can do it much better in the box than you can out of the box. And then once you've found that frequency, you can duck it. And then that means you can actually clean it up and then even put some EQ around it so that you polish it a bit.

But first of all, you need to get rid of those resonant frequencies. So that's how you find the frequencies that are annoying you and ripping them out. There's going to be more tips like this every week, Monday, Wednesday, and Friday at 6:00 PM, GMT.