(piano key dings)
- Hello, my name is Jonathan Wyner, and welcome to another
episode of Are you Listening? Today I'm going to spend
some time talking about EQ, setting the table for how I think about EQ in the context of mastering and giving you a demonstration
of EQ'ing a track and at least some of the initial stages of the thinking process and
how I might navigate the task. Thus far, we've talked about compression, and limiting and EQ, and those are the three
sort of major food groups, if you will, the major tools in the toolkit
of the mastering engineer. We have lots and lots of
other tools that we might use. We might use exciters,
we might use reverb, we might use imaging
tools, all kinds of things. We'll come back and talk about
those in some later episodes. But I think it's really important to stick with the basic tools first, in part because those are the things that we spend most of
our time working with. When you get into some of the other tools that are maybe secondary in terms of how often
we might reach to them, they all come with their own artifacts, they all come With trade offs, they're are tools that
we don't use as often and so why not start with the basic stuff? To that end, I thought I would also give you some perspective
about how I think about what tools I reach
for when I am mastering. So I encourage you, when you are thinking
about mastering a track, or learning how to master a track, to not be distracted by
all the bells and whistles that a lot of our modern tools offer. We have lots of tools that you can deploy in a mid-side mode, multi-band mode, parallel processing. There are a lot of kind of
fancier modes, if you will, and sometimes those modes are
really helpful and necessary and important and are the best way to achieve a certain result. But most of the time, it's
really just reaching for EQ, compression, if needed,
limiting if needed, that is the stock and trade of mastering. There are a few different
ways to think about EQ, but my favorite, I
think it's based in part on the reason that EQ was
invented in the first place, 100 or so years ago, when we first had telephone
line transmissions, the sound of a voice would be
transmitted through a receiver across a fairly long cable and there would be high frequency
roll off, or signal loss, associated with the long run of the cable and also the impedance relationship between the source impedance and the load impedance, if
you will, in the phone line. In order to restore
intelligibility to the signal, an EQ was invented or
developed to compensate, or to emphasize the high frequency energy and restore or retain intelligibility. So that principle I think,
also holds to this day. When I think about EQ'ing and mastering, I'm thinking about restoring balance, I'm thinking about correction, I'm thinking about what
was the mixing engineer possibly hearing that I might need to
somehow restore for them? Let me give you an example
of how that thinking works. Over the last 30 or 40 years, one of the most popular speaker types has been a speaker made by
Yamaha called the NS-10. It's pretty ubiquitous, and if you see videos
of recording studios, until fairly recently, you will see a picture of Yamaha NS-10s across the meter bridge in many studios. Those speakers are remarkably
good at helping people judge the level relationship between the most important
instruments in a mix, but they are severely deficient when it comes to hearing
the full spectrum. If you look at the frequency
response of the NS-10, you'll see it's got a big
bump in the upper mid range and the presence area
between like 1 1/2K and 3K and it rolls off very
steeply in the low end. So if you're mixing on a
pair of those speakers, it's often very difficult to really critically judge the tone. You might get the balance right but measuring top end,
to mid range, to base, is another story. So when you as a mastering engineer are listening to that
mix, you might hear a mix that's severely base
deficient or has too much base because of what's happening with the relationship between the speaker and the ear of the mix engineer. And in mastering, we're trying to restore what we imagine the balance, the intended tonal balance
to be, for the mix engineer. The thing that I like about this approach to EQ and mastering is that it puts you in the
position of trying to correct or restore intelligibility or clarity, as opposed to trying to create the sound, to try to be the hero with an equalizer. Sure, there are ways
in which we can use EQs that are creative, and help
us sort of add something, embellish the sound, if you will, but in general, I think if
you think about correction as a guiding principle, it will help keep you out of trouble. And quite frankly, it's a
little less intimidating to think in those terms as
opposed to thinking man, I just have to make
this record sound great. Maybe it's just let's reveal
what is great about the mix. One of the things that
I think people wonder is what differentiates a mixing
tool from a mastering tool? So let me talk about this in
the context of equalizers. Back in the day, before we
had software tools, certainly, one of the important differentiators
was detented positions. In other words, when you make a change, it clicks into a certain value. And especially if we were
dealing with stereo program left and right, simultaneously, we want to make the same
change to both channels, 99% of the time so that the stereo image remain solid. These days, we don't
really have that constraint in software anyway, or a DSP-based tools. So again, what is the difference between a mixing and mastering tool? For the most part, I would say that the way
the tool is laid out, the user interface or the interaction, the way you engage with
it is a big difference when you work in a mixing
or mastering context. In fact, I would say the
tools aren't so different, it is the activity that's different. So if you take a look at the
user interface for Neutron, as opposed to Ozone, Neutron is a channel strip tool that's used primarily in the
context of a mixing session on individual channels or on busses. And then Ozone is a tool that's designed
for the task of mastering. It can't sit on the stereo buss or the two mix out of a mixing session. The EQ in Ozone and Neutron
is largely the same. There's some slightly
different filter shapes. There's a difference in terms
of numbers of nodes and so on, but the bigger difference
between the two is in the scale, at least in the way that the
tools are initially laid out. And if you take a look
at Neutron you'll see that the dB boost and cut
in the default setting is a much bigger scale. In other words, if you move a control a
few pixels up or down, you'll get a much bigger
change then you do on Ozone. And that reflects this
sort of natural workflow, if you will, that if your
EQ'ing a tambourine track in a mixing session, you might want to cut all the low end out. And so a big giant low
frequency gesture makes sense. In Ozone, a little bit goes a long way. And so the tool is laid out
to help you navigate the task in a way that I think
supports the activity. So I think that that is really the thing that differentiates the tools. An EQ is an EQ is an EQ, there may be some subtle differences, but when you're practicing
and just trying to get better at the mastering task,
don't get too distracted by does this EQ sound better than another? Maybe try to grab something
that's laid out to help you with the activity that you're engaged in and use that to practice. There are lots of helpful visualizations that we get to use in the
course of music production. I want to call something out, which I believe in very strongly. You may hear people talk
about trusting your ears, trusting your instincts,
develop your ears. That's incredibly important. Obviously at the end of the day, understanding the musical
language through our aural sense is what's going to get
us where we want to go in music production. However, I have found visualizations to be incredibly helpful
over the course of my career, peak-reading meters,
averaging meters, LUFS meters, polar, like phase meters, we also have created a tonal balance meter that we offer as part of the
Neutron and Ozone package. All of these visualizations
are incredibly helpful in confirming what we think we're hearing. Our brains are fallible, our brains are sometimes going to trick us and having some kind of
external objective validation against which we can check
what we think we're hearing, I think is incredibly valuable. So I want to encourage
you use visualizations as a way of helping you navigate problems. Identify them with your ears, and then use the visualizations that you have available to you to help you navigate the task. Before we listen to the track
that we're about to listen to, let me just say a few words about mindset or a process for getting
into EQ'ing and mastering. When I start listening, I will sit back, listen all the way through a track so I understand all of the
changes in the arrangement, you don't want to get
surprised by the introduction of a base halfway through, and find out you've added too much base because you're only listening
to the beginning of the track. But the first thing I'll do is sit back and I'll pull out either a
laptop or a piece of paper and a pen or a pencil. And I'll make notes about what I hear. I'll make notes about
what I like about a track and I'll make notes about anything that I think I might want to change. The reason that I do this,
and that I'm suggesting this, is that when you get into
the weeds of doing the work and you probably know
this from mixing records or mixing songs, you
get in 30 or 45 minutes, and you start getting
distracted by little details relating to small elements in the track, the high hat has a little
bit too much top end, there's a little sibilance
in the third chorus. And it's easy to lose track
of that big picture issue that's very much at the
heart of what we're doing when we're mastering. So by making those notes upfront, it creates kind of an agenda
or a touchstone for me. I can always glance at it or look at it when I'm 80% of the way through and say, oh, I wanted to add some more top end or make the thing have a little
bit more push in the bottom, is that what I've done? And it's just a helpful way to ground me during the course of my session. There are a lot of different ways of approaching EQ'ing
tracks but in general, I think of it in two different ways. One is this idea of tonal balance, does something need a little bit more or less top end or low
end in order to play well, to be intelligible, and rich, and full and all of those things
that we want in our audio, and then trying to make
something sound more impactful or clearer. When I'm in the former mode
in the tonal correction mode, I'm usually gonna be
using very broad filters, either very, very wide
bell-shaped filters, so I might grab something
and make it really big Q so that I'm boosting or cutting across a wide range of audio, or I'll use the shelving equalizer, which obviously is the
same idea, only more so. The reason for this is when we're trying to change the tone, or change the overall brightness
or richness of a track, we don't want to change the balance. And if you're using
narrower band equalizers, either to boost or to cut, will tend to favor certain instruments and maybe even certain notes
in a scale within a mix. So you have to be
careful about using them. And we use EQs to address
narrow-band issues for different kinds of reasons, but usually not in order to adjust the overall tone of a track. When I sit down to first
think about doing the work, after I've set the level, I will sit back, I'll get a
laptop, or a piece of paper and a pen or a pencil, and I'll listen all the
way through a track. And I will write notes
before I do anything, and just make observations
about what I hear, what I like about a track and what I might want to change. The reason that I do that is that after working on
a track for half an hour, or 45 minutes, you can
start to get into the weeds of the little details about things and lose sight of the big picture. So it's a helpful discipline to always have that initial impression and those notes to refer to. So let me play you a track here. A little bit of it, I'll let it play for about
45 seconds or a minute. Again, typically I would
listen all the way through to make sure that if
things changed radically at the end of the track, I
would know what was coming and factor that into my decision-making. But for the purpose of this demonstration, I'll just play a snippet. ("Colour in Me" by Death and The Penguin) ♪ You color ♪ ♪ You color, your color in me ♪ ♪ You color ♪ ♪ You color, your color in me ♪ ♪ You've drawn your secret weapon ♪ ♪ Now everything is in black and white ♪ ♪ You've drawn your secret weapon ♪ ♪ A curse from years gone by ♪ ♪ What set it on ♪
(what set it on me) ♪ What set it on me ♪
(what set it on me) ♪ A curse from from years gone by ♪ ♪ What set it on me ♪ ♪ A curse ♪ - Cool, so you get a little bit of a sense of what the truck sounds like. It's a good mix I'm not listening to it and thinking man I need
to change the balance, the vocal is not loud enough,
the vocal is too loud, etc, I do have the sense that it could use a
little bit more clarity, maybe a little bit, be
a little bit brighter. I also am hearing that there's a little bit
of competition overall between the top of the
bass guitar and the vocal when the base is in it. And that those are two things that immediately come to my mind when I'm listening to the track. The third issue that I hear is that maybe the bass could
be a little bit clearer. The kick drum feels like it's
sort of wide and not punchy. I guess that's what I would say. First of all, starting with
the idea of bright, right, so a shelving EQ, maybe a
dB, dB and a half of top end is going to be fine. There are different kinds of shelving EQs I could pull from. I could use a traditional shelving slope, or I could use something
like a Baxandall filter, which favors the air band, as opposed to the the
sort of sharper effect that you'll get from
a standard high shelf. So let's see what happens
if I turn this on. Now the thing I want to listen for is the effect on the drums, the effect on the top of the vocal, keeping in mind that
I may end up provoking a little bit of sibilance
or energy in the top end that I might need to try to pull back. Anyways, give it a quick listen. I'll start with it off
and then turn it on. ♪ In me ♪ ♪ You color ♪ ♪ You color, your color in me ♪ ♪ You've drawn your secret weapon ♪ ♪ Now everything is in black and white ♪ ♪ You've drawn your secret weapon ♪ ♪ A curse from years gone by ♪ - So I think you can hear
a pretty clear difference even with just a dB and a
half of top end added there, that it's lifting the air. We get a little bit of the
high hat coming forward. As I mentioned, I might want
to pull down and narrow-band to keep that in check or
maybe using a de-esser, but I'll come back to that later. Right now I'm just concerned
with a general sense of tone. The other thing I want to do that's in this sort of tone
control zone, if you will, and this is one of my go-to moves, something that I'll often try
is I'll pull in a shelving EQ, set it way down, probably
below the lowest note that any instrument is playing, in this case, I've got
it set to about 35 hertz, and pull out a little bit
of sub-sonic information. And my hope is that that's gonna give me
a little bit more clarity and a little bit more
room for the kick drum to feel a little bit livelier. So let's see how that works out. ♪ In me ♪ ♪ You color ♪ ♪ You color, your color in me ♪ ♪ You've drawn your secret weapon ♪ ♪ Now everything is in black and white ♪ ♪ You've drawn your secret weapon ♪ ♪ A curse from you ♪ - For this track, it works extremely well when I pull out some of the energy, the bass actually sounds
better and richer, the bass instrument, and
the kick drum sounds freer and clearer and punchier to me. So that's something I encourage
you to experiment with. As I mentioned, I'm not a
big fan of high pass filters because they will not only take out some of that very deep information, but they also create a
little bit of phase shift, actually a significant
amount of phase shift that will cause the punch of
the track to be diminished. Let me give you an example of that. So I'm gonna start again flat and then I'll turn on
the high pass filter. ♪ In me ♪ ♪ You color ♪ ♪ You color, your color in me ♪ ♪ You've drawn your secret weapon ♪ ♪ Now everything is in black and white ♪ ♪ You've drawn your secret weapon ♪ - I'm gonna play this last
section for you one more time. Listen to what happens to
the bottom of the kick drum and the bass and the top of the kick drum. When that high pass filter comes in, the top of the kick drum
gets much, much sharper and the focus of the sound overall shifts up into what I would
call the upper mid range. I hear a lot more energy at 2K, 3K, in that region from the rhythm track. So I'll start with it off. ♪ You've drawn your secret weapon ♪ ♪ Now everything is in black and white ♪ ♪ You've drawn your secret weapon ♪ ♪ A curse from years gone by ♪ ♪ What set it on ♪
(what set it on me) ♪ What set it on me ♪
(what set it on me) ♪ A curse ♪ - So it makes a big difference to my ear. When I say big difference, you're like, oh, I think
I can hear something, but anyway, it takes a little while to sort of dial into some
of these differences. That's why I'm trying to kind of give you some
descriptive language to understand what it is that I'm hearing. But at any rate, the short of it is go for a
shelving filter when you can, as opposed to a high-pass. Every so often a high-pass is just a thing but more often than not,
shelving is a better tool. So the last sort of general tonal issue that I want to address initially, at least experiment with with this track, is to see if I can't get
a little bit more low end down in the fundamental range of the base. So when I say that I'm usually thinking of
somewhere in the neighborhood of 50 to 100 hertz. There are a couple of different
ways of approaching that. I can use a shelf and you'll see there's this
complex relationship now between low frequency shelf
boost that I might use and the low frequency shelf cut. So I might get a little
bit more energy here from the low end of the base. Let's see what that sounds like. ♪ You've drawn your secret weapon ♪ ♪ Now everything is in black and white ♪ ♪ You've drawn your secret weapon ♪ ♪ A curse from years gone by ♪ ♪ What set it on ♪
(what set it) - It's a little heavy. There are things I like
about the sense of richness that it gives, but it gives
a little bit too much thump. So instead of using a shelf here, I'm gonna go for a very, very broad peaking EQ, put the center frequency
down around 60 hertz and hopefully pick up a little bit less of that subsonic thumpy energy. I'll start with it off. ♪ You've drawn your secret weapon ♪ ♪ Now everything is in black and white ♪ ♪ You've drawn your secret weapon ♪ ♪ A curse ♪ - I like that a little bit better. It's only a half a dB at 60 hertz, but it helps to maintain
the sense of fullness and weight in the truck. So I'm gonna keep that for now. At this point, I'm definitely
gonna do an AB-compared of all of the EQ changes that I've made. At every point, it's worth stopping, AB-comparing and making sure
that each change that you make actually makes things better. If it doesn't stop, go back
to the last one and reassess. How do you know when
you're done with a truck? Well, a simple way to think of it is if you can't do anything else
that makes things better, don't do anything, just stop. So that's a really good litmus test. Anyway, let's do a quick AB. I'll play from a little further back here so we can hear the difference that these three different
EQ moves makes all together. ♪ Your color in me ♪ ♪ You color ♪ ♪ You color, your color in me ♪ ♪ You've drawn your secret weapon ♪ ♪ Now everything is in black and white ♪ ♪ You've drawn your secret weapon ♪ ♪ A curse ♪
- So I think you can hear the three of
them result in something that sounds a little bit more
open, a little bit richer, a little bit clearer. This is not changing the
overall sound to my ear, it's just revealing a little bit about what I hope the
mix engineer intended. Once I've got a general
tone shape that I like, then I'll start thinking a little bit about is there anything that feels like it's popping out at me that's just coming forward to much, a concentration of energy that's making the overall sound too bright in a way that's very specific or narrow, featuring a particular instrument
or range of instruments? I'll look or listen for those things and see if I can't subtract
energy in those regions to get energy out of the way so I can hear more of what I want to hear. There are a couple of ways
of going about doing this. The most common way of
doing it is narrow band EQ. You take a bell EQ, and sweep around and look for what it
is that you don't like, and then pull it out. I think that's a little bit challenging for the following reason, if you create a narrow band
and sweep around with it, you're probably not gonna
like anything that you hear because it's all out of proportion, right? So if I sweep around, and
I set this at 400 hertz, I'm gonna say, wow, that's not good. I'll pull out 400 hertz, but it may be because of
what I'm doing with the EQ. My preferred method is to
do it in one of two ways. If I think there's an issue, earlier on I mentioned collision
between the top of the base and the vocal is to try to
imagine what that frequency is, and then pull in a narrow-band
EQ and sweep around by subtracting and see if I
hear that problem go away. The other way to do it is to
use the frequency solo option. For instance, like what
we have here in Ozone. Let me give you an example
of what that looks like. ♪ You've drawn your secret weapon ♪ ♪ Now everything is in black and white ♪ ♪ You've drawn your secret weapon ♪ ♪ A curse from years gone by ♪ ♪ What set it on ♪
(what set it on me) ♪ What set it ♪
- So I ended up at about 225 hertz, and heard a place where there was this upper
resonance in the base that was interacting with the vocal that I didn't particularly enjoy. ♪ You've drawn your secret weapon ♪ ♪ Now everything is in black and white ♪ ♪ You've drawn your secret weapon ♪ ♪ A curse from years gone by ♪ ♪ What set it on ♪
(what set it on) - And I think you can hear
it's a very narrow band now, a couple of dB down to
225 hertz with a Q of 10. That's very narrow, but that seems to be making
a little bit of a difference and kind of freeing up the vocal. I get a little more separation between the vocal and the base, and I'm liking what that sounds like. So when you're chasing
energy you don't like, and this applies to mixing
or mastering in a track, and you try to pull it out, you tend to want to pull out too much. Because if there's
something you don't like that you're hearing, you think, well, let
me just get rid of it. Of course, there's some collision there and there's too much
energy in the interaction between the base and the
vocal here at 220 odd hurts, but also there's fullness
from this snare drum. I mean, this is a mix. This is all of the instruments
are intersecting here, and there's a lot of a lot going on there. And if we pull out too much, we probably will end up realizing later that we've created an imbalance overall. So when you use subtractive EQ, let's say you decide you
want to pull out four dB of something in the
spectrum, put half back, instead of minus four, go to minus two, you can always come back and revisit that decision later. But usually, that's a good trick to help keep you out of trouble in terms of creating that imbalance. I'm a firm believer that there are no secrets in
the work of music production. A lot of people talk about
the mystery of mastering, and I don't really believe in that, what I do believe is that
it takes a lot of practice to get good at something. I've had, on multiple occasions,
artists come to me and say, this is my first record, I've been working on my
record for three weeks and it doesn't sound like
a charting hit, how come? Sometimes it's easy to think that because
we have all of the tools and all of the technology at our disposal, that it's all gonna happen right away. What I'm trying to say
is, don't be discouraged but just understand that it takes time. Malcolm Gladwell laid out this
five years or 10,000 hours, I'm not gonna rely on any particular idea, in terms of how much time
you might need to spend to get good at something,
but it does take time. And if you're among the few who have the luxury of
practicing mastering over, and over, and over again, every day, over the
course of weeks or years, you'll get good at it too. Thanks for watching Are you Listening? If you want to be notified
about other episodes, when they come out, subscribe
to the YouTube channel and then you use the little bell icon, feel free to go to the
izotope.com website. There are lots of
educational materials there. There's the iZo sessions where you can download sound samples and experiment with them yourself. You can download a copy of Ozone and I look forward to
seeing you next time. Hope you find this useful.
