5 Quick EQ Mixing Tricks - Warren Huart: Produce Like A Pro

[Music] hope you're doing marvelous as ever please as subscribe hit the notification bell and guess what you'll be notified when we have a new video so today I want to talk about 5 1 2 3 4 5 uno dos tres cuatro sank because that right Eric something like that 500 inspired Revere forth 5 different techniques of using EQ so start with the bass here's the final sound got some saturation on it it's got a good low end and one of the main components that are creating that well firstly and this is a trick I love to do which I got from mr. Tim Palmer who you may know from u2 and Tears for Fears and a bunch of other great records that he made and mixed all kinds of fun stuff listen to the bass di on its own so it's nice controlled low-end so what I'm using a stock plug-in here and this stock plug-in is set to a hundred and seventy bad 172 Hertz and everything above that is low passed away so it's only letting the low-end actually after that is another EQ which is at about sixty fifty-eight and it's sloping so it's controlling that low-end if I take it off here's the DI just a floppy kind of put it back up so it's all low-end so I've got the DI all low end if I go to the amp over here let's have a listen to the amp without any that any plugins on it at all just totally flat I've got the same EQ crossover point and guess what I'm high passing it say it ain't so yes it is so I'm high passing it so why am I doing this well firstly a DI generally speaking with a few exceptions generally is much cleaner sounding than a bass amp bass amps especially bass amps I like tend to be tube valve as we say in England and they distort and they kind of give you some crunch and the speaker maybe is on the edge of breaking up great things loads of personality but unfortunately don't usually give us the cleanest low-end so I take the bass amp and use it for definition so with that EQ on wiping off the low-end and then with the DI with the low-end re-introduced you get this you get a nice controlled low-end this is a great example we're taking multiple sources and eq-num differently than busing them together works really well works great on kick drums it works great on bass amps there are people that will tell you otherwise however this is how everybody I know does it everybody I respect you know all the great mixers like Neal Avron mark and all of those guys fantastic mixers this is how they work okay and of course Tim Palmer where I stole this trick from so this last one here is just fresh nits giggles and I'm wiping off the low-end and it's a Sansa and it's just totally destroyed put the three together you still got all the bass di providing all the lower take it away nothing so it's great so the reason why we do this is to get proper phase proper polarity now there's a lot of myths with high passing a lot of misinformation out there the reason why we high pass is when you only have one source creating low end of certain frequencies it is much cleaner and much more likely to fill a void so when you take like two or three elements of a bass guitar or two or three elements of a kick drum if you separate the elements into different EQ areas you'll get better low-end because if I take like two or three kick drums and have them all going flat against each other there'll be some cancellation of a low-end you won't get bigger at low-end you won't get more balls as I've heard you'll actually get phase cancellation and it will sound like mud however you can see here really good low-end clean lower I take everything off horrible so that's now flat put it back on much better cleaner low-end real punchy boom so you can see why high passing works so this is a combination high passing a low passing i'll going through go through it one more time because I really want you everyone to get this so on my bass di I have low passed at about 172 on my bass amp I've high passed at about 172 so now they're out of the way of each other and also on the DI duplicated I put a sansamp on and also high passed at 172 so basically these two elements the DI with the sansamp and the bass amp give me the personality that I want and the low-end comes from one source from the DI moving on here we have an electric guitar [Music] which is I've actually EQ quite aggressively here on the high end [Music] you know no nosy little muddy there's quite its it's just a boost here you can see that I've done here and I've got like you know nearly 5 dB at five and a half K however there's times when it feels a little pain I like what it's generally doing but occasionally gets a little a little too aggressive so we're boosting it the way we want we've also yes high past here [Music] my father [Music] [Applause] see the high-pass when I enact a high-pass it gives me a little bit more detail so now I hear more definition from the base because I don't have that low-end on the on the guitar fighting with the low-end on the bass there's a little bit of space in there but I don't miss it because particularly in this particular part because the bass players playing super busy so what am I going to do okay I like the guitar it just gets a little too bright in places but not all the time generally I like the boost so let's get out you guessed it a de-esser so we boost it but now I'm gonna go and grab just a good old-fashioned de-esser and control so it's mainly okay but if I just bring it here [Music] just turning it in a bit so what is the lesson with the C cueing well I want this I do this all the time I do with vocals I do have guitars are doing anything where I wanted to be brighter but I want to control it talking to Gavin Larssen the mastering engineer this is the kind of thing he does as well on masters they use they brine it and then use a little bit of de-essing because it's a bit effectively a you know a high-frequency multiband compressor and then just control it so I boosted it [Music] nobody now and then we'll just just gets a little too bright sticks its nose out the des is doing it so the trick is hi passing get our waiver base nice gentle shallow slope here I'm actually going quite quite high it's 115 but it's a gentle slope so at 115 then I'm boosting it at five and a half K and low passing but that boost is quite excessive so to control it I'm putting a DSL [Music] so boosting EQ and then controlling excessive boost that's more even with the DSO number three we're going to go to the kick drum now this has no samples on it this song this is a song that I've got up that I've actually did a full course on it's totally live see what I did this is insane insane in solo that is the worst sounding shnizzle I've ever heard in my entire life absolutely horrific what I found was listening to this D 112 that was recorded had this sort of double click the whole album was done in one day in one day ten songs recorded life it's a great album it's done really well god bless it but when I came to mix this in the box for this course I found that I could not get the kick drum to sound the way I wanted it to in the box until I got really crazy so I have gone absolutely nuts on this you can leave me a thousand comments below but in solo this is our Sam yep now the other element here together the thing is solo it's not that Pleasant but I put the whole thing in the drums make sense we don't listen to music in solo so what did I do well a couple of crazy things so on this one absolutely insane stuff I put just boost at the high end like crazy and then I actually ran a compressor just to control that and more high boost as absolutely no it's all completely high past absolutely no low-end in this at all now so what a so what am i doing I'm taking two independent elements and treating them EQ embossing them together yes I know there are people who say you shouldn't do that well unfortunately most of us do that's so then I went crazy on this kick drum really excessive EQ low-end boost then mid-range cut a load and mid-range cut and then more high-end boost here and that's basically the two elements the two elements are put together so don't be afraid do not be afraid to get crazy especially on the low end because what will happen is when you've got like bass guitars or kick drums or anything that has multiple sources for low-end two or three mics or a DI and a mic when you get two or three low-end things together you'll get quite bad cancellation so if you look here let's zoom in quite assuming quite heavily here okay if you look here here is so here's the front of this doesn't line up it's a little bit out but it's not terrible but then see as it progresses does that make sense see how far out it starts to get and I don't care what you do you'll never get that phase correlation to be exact you just never will so when you have multiple sources of low-end there they're already at different points away from the kick drum ones inside ones outside sometimes there's a mic even further it further out and with that they all hear the low end in different ways so if you don't scope the low end out before you combine it one to one source you'll get tons and tons of low-end cancellation that's why high parsing is your friend and using multiple sources to fulfill different things Bob Marley is a genius at this he'll take a kick drum and and just take it into little pieces put it together and it's the biggest kick drum you've ever heard now honestly this is not a pretty kick drum it's not pretty but in context of the mix [Applause] I could have put a sample against that it's very tempting to put a kick sample against that and just kind of like beef it up just a little bit but the whole idea of this mixing in a box this classic the classic rock one was to avoid doing that and just use those elements and use stock plugins as much as possible okay that was numero quad the kick drum alright forth now this is uh it's just something to be really aware of when mixing especially drums or rock and roll in general when you're working with EDM or virtual instruments they're recorded exceptionally well and not only record exceptionally well they're recorded in an environment where you know it's a piano recorded one note of the time for a vote for a you know virtual instrument playback or whatever exceptionally controlled but when with live players especially drummers it's gonna be huge dynamics and a lot of buildup and what we've got in this room if you ever listen is this kind of like darkness so I've compressed it I've added a little bit of low fight to distort you know what I like to do just to distort some of the high ends so it doesn't get too washy but this is this is a big one I've also put some room on it even more verb but look what I did on the EQ here so on the EQ I have high past it quite quite heavily because you've got room mics pulled back a long way away from the rest of your drums if you don't go in there and high-pass those remotes you're going to get double hits on the kicks in particular yeah it's not going to sound bigger it's just going to go pull over and once again having multiple sources of low-end coming from different areas will cause you all kinds of mud and face issues so I've gone in there at 350 and I've pulled it out all that low mid build-up and I'm also as you can see high past at 179 so several this is sounds exciting put the other room mics in which have a similar effect onto it all of these room mics have got the low end taken out of them [Music] so you can hear the thump of the kick when I put the live kick in that's where the live kick so what you get you get the arm you get the low end of the kick and then you get the ambience around it the AH comes from mics which is what they're there for that's what the roommates are there so if there's a quick illustration as why we high pass while professionals high past is if we take off the EQ it sounds all floppy in that low end put it back on much more control so there is a reality why people hype us it's like it doesn't get like it doesn't give you more low-end it just gives you money out of phase no definition and one of the biggest discussions we've been having is with mastering engineers is that they're finding they're getting stuff where there's no definition they don't know how to pull out 60 40 to 60 Hertz of a kick because they pull it out and all the guitars come up and all these like random mics and stuff like that that's why you need to get into high passing and and knowing when to do it and how to do it so low mid cut is a wonder because you get tons of low mid low mids are in pretty much everything I mean even a mandolin has a little bit of low mid in it believe it or not there's a buildup of low mid so when you get multiple amounts of instruments room mics in this instance bass guitars electric guitars be very conscious of that sort of two fifty two three four hundred area gets really really crowded and you'll find a lot of guys on their mix buss will pull out like a 300 or so and all they'll boost some 60 and boost some mid-range and above effectively doing the same thing so low mids try to cut them as much as you can not Matt necessarily drastically or everything but being very aware that they will build up very quickly okay eeeek hearing your reverb this is a good one so I've got a kick reverb going so let's take our to kick elements and listen to me can you hear this one's bad so what am i doing I'm actually see what I'm doing I'm hi passing going into the kick-drum I could also actually frankly low pass it around about here now this is an old Abbey Road trick they use an EQ curve a little bit like this high and low passing filters going into their reverbs their room verbs are actual real ones and the reason for that is the same thing if I get a kick drum and it's pushing out a lot of 40 to 60 Hertz and I pump it out it's going to be a huge buddha buildup in the low-end reverberating so EQ going into reverb is really really take it off so that's terrible let's leave the kick drums got bore bore blah another reason for good high passing horrible build up still got the ambience you don't have that low-end pumping one more time take off the EQ just a horrible low Rumble I throwed bass guitar in there and it's just gonna be like an undefined bunch of low-end Rumble so you need two high pass there I'm quite drastic there I've gone up to 230 high passing on the reverb I pass no high pass absolute mess so be very careful high passing is really really important use it properly know when to use it and low passing as well because I don't need that super super high on the kick drums that's just going to give it away the cymbals the high end of the vocal snare drum all this kind of stuff we can do a similar thing let's try it quickly while we're here on our reverb [Music] so you know what I'm gonna do something similar I'm gonna go I'm just gonna go to about a hundred maybe a little bit higher get out of the way of the that's not as big of a deal it's more precautionary that's why sometimes high passing can be precautionary because there's stuff that's like small amounts of low Rumble they're gonna get in your way though it's it's not even in the fundamental signal of the of the snare drum but there might be a little bit of a build up of it so you put that over you know 40 tracks then you're going to get a bit of a mess in there so high passing is also very useful even when it isn't perceptible on an individual instrument remember on about 40 instruments if you've got a lot of low-end build-up it really can get in the way great so that was five very quick tips I think one of the main things to learn is like high and low parsing can work in all kinds of situations gonna work for bass guitars kick drums reverbs de-essing combined with high EQ boost is fantastic not just on vocals which is obvious but also on guitars so it's a really really useful technique you're gonna brighten everything but you can go into control when it gets too excessive so I hope you enjoyed that have a marvelous time recording mixing please as ever subscribe hit the notifications bell to be notified leave a bunch of comments and questions below let me know how you eq stuff one of the basic things that you do that really will help your mix have a martha's time recording a mixing [Music]

Channel: Produce Like A Pro

Views: 130,325

Keywords: warren huart, produce like a pro, home studio, home recording, recording audio, music production, record producer, recording studio, EQ Tricks, Mixing with EQ, How to use EQ, EQ Mixing Tricks, Quick mixing tricks, mixing tricks, Mixing Tips, Quick Mixing tips

Id: nkPnxOkUd6s

Length: 21min 48sec (1308 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 19 2018