DaVinci Resolve EQ Crash Course | Audio Effects Series

what's happening guys welcome back to another video here in our audio series in davinci resolve so today we are going to continue from where we left off in that last video which if you haven't seen the first video about setting the levels of your audio clip check out the card up here you can click on that and it'll take you over to that video so check that out you want some good audio levels before we move into the next step which is setting your eq so by working with the eq here in davinci resolve you're really going to be able to shape your sound a little bit make it clearer you're gonna be able to remove unwanted uh noise or things that just don't sound good within the clip there's a lot that you can do and eq can really make a big difference on any one of your clips here as we get going here and i mentioned this in the other video too you're gonna want some good uh headphones or speakers it's gonna make your job of hearing the nuances of the sound a little bit better and a little bit easier so i'll leave a link to the headphones that i have here in the description below had these guys a long time they work great and they weren't too expensive i mean as far as headphones are concerned so these guys are pretty good so let's jump over into resolve and start talking about some eq here's our clip in davinci resolve and there's a few ways we can start to work with the eq here and the first way is when you're in the edit tab which is where we are right now edit tab right here you can go ahead and select your clip and you can come up to your inspector open that up want to make sure you're on the audio tab right here and you can scroll down and right here you have clip equalizer so this is a very basic eq you have four different bands here and sometimes i'll use this but more often than not i'm going to jump into the fairlight page and i'm going to use the eq for an entire track because i'm going to have say my clip of me talking and my vocals in the entire track so i'm going to want that eq to affect everything in the track not just a particular clip but if you wanted to adjust just one clip you could do that right here in the edit page but we're going to jump over into the fairlight page and if you're looking at this equalizer right here in the inspector you might be a little unsure about what all this stuff means but i'm going to explain it in the fairlight tab just because the eq is bigger and that's generally where i do all my work so that's where we're going to explain all these different things and what they do but you can apply the same principles to this smaller eq over here in the edit tab so let's go ahead and jump over into the fairlight tab and get going with some eq here click on the musical notes there on the bottom if you're not sure how to get to the fairlight tab and here we are we have our clip we've got our level set already now we want to open up our eq so where do you find your eq well you need to come up to the top here click on mixer that's going to go ahead and open up your mixer and right in your mixer take a look at the track you want to adjust and above where the faders are you should see an area here called eq and that's going to be your equalizer now if for some reason you don't see eq use your mouse wheel to scroll up and down here and if that still doesn't work and you still can't find it come on up to these three little dots right here click on that and make sure you have eq turned on and if you're still having trouble turn off some of these other ones so that way you don't have to scroll around and try and find it but make sure you've got that eq turned on and as long as it's turned on this is what you should see here and go ahead and just double click on your eq and it's going to bring up our eq window all right so we are going to go over the eq window here i'm going to explain what everything does how it works i'm also going to give you some ideas of ranges where say there's something that doesn't sound so good in your clip you're not sure where to find it i'm going to give you an idea of where to look in the different frequency ranges so the first tip i want to give you is that generally you want to cut your frequencies before you boost them so you don't want to go around just boost everything up and make it sound what you think might be better you actually want to go find the parts that don't sound so good and drop down those frequencies so let's start taking a look at the eq tab here and try and take this clip and make it sound as best as we can alright so just going over the eq window here real quick we have starting at the top left here this says equalizer obviously and this is your button to turn it on and off so you can hear before and after changes pretty easily so if you come over here you have equalizer type and if you click on the little drop down here you notice you have earth air ice and fire so you might be thinking what does that have to do with eq right well that has to do with some mixing consoles and these different options emulate different mixing consoles but the default here in davinci resolve is earth and generally that's what i'm going to leave it at so you can go ahead and leave yours at earth too now up in the top right corner here we have this little icon which is a reset button so if you make a bunch of changes you don't like it you want to reset your eq just go ahead and click that and it's going to reset everything for you so if you look down in this next section here this is our graphic equalizer and this is where you're going to see the changes that you're making to your clip as far as what frequency and what does the change look like as far as how big is it how much is the gain or reduction of it so it gives you a good way to look at it quickly and kind of see what's going on with your clip as far as your changes are concerned moving all the way over to the right hand side here we have our gain now this is going to be a post eq gain because sometimes as you make adjustments to your eq you're going to lose a little bit of that volume or gain so you may need to add back a little bit of gain after you've adjusted your eq kind of depends on the clip and the microphone and the changes that you make whether you might need to do this or not but the options there if you lose a little bit of your signal as you do your eq work you may need to boost it up a little bit at the end and you also have the option to attenuate it or bring it down a little bit if you need to so coming down into the bottom section here we have six different bands of equalization that we can use and each one of these bands has some similar qualities to it you can turn each one on and off by clicking on the name band 1 band 2 so on and so forth so click on that the next icon over here is what does your band look like so for example what we have selected now is this one right here which is a high pass filter and that simply means that everything below where we set this is going to be taken out and all of the higher frequencies are going to pass through so you can hear them if we take another look at these you have also a low-pass filter on the top here so that's gonna say okay if i click on that everything that's above where i set my low-pass filter is gonna get cut out and all the lower frequencies are gonna pass through so typically band one you're gonna use this as a high pass filter so below that then we have frequency so this is frequency range what frequency in hertz or kilohertz do you want that band one to be set at so if i turn it on here this is band one again like i said you're generally going to use this as your high pass filter and for most vocal tracks you're going to want to set this around 100 to say 120 maybe because any frequency that's going to be below that is not something you're going to want to hear or that you're going to need for a talking head or vocal track so you can set that around 100 generally i just use 100 because it's an easy round number so you can set this in a few different ways you can come over here and click and hold and just drag back and forth you can click on the dial here and hold and drag back and forth to get a little more exact or if you just want to come up into your graphic eq here you can grab that 0.1 and drag it back and forth and that's going to be able to set wherever you want your frequency to be now moving on to bands two through five they're gonna work in a similar fashion to band one again if you click the name it's gonna turn on the points on or off so let's just have band two on here if you look at the icons here you've got several different options of what your adjustment is going to look like so i would recommend that you use the bell curve here that's the one that i use and i find it the most helpful but you do have other options like this one right here for example if i boost it up and bring it up you can see it has this shape to it and if i bring it down below and cut it has that same shape and if i come to the similar one all the way on the bottom here it's going to do the exact same thing just in reverse where it's going to bring it up to a shelf bring it down to a shelf if that's what you want to do and then you also have an option here that's going to drop a frequency all the way down to zero now you may need to do that but you may not but i find and would recommend using the bell curve because i think that works out the best most of the time and you're going to be able to accomplish what you need to using that so moving down next you have frequency and again you have your frequency numbers here and you can either like i said with the first one click and hold on the numbers and move it around you can click on your dial here and hold and move it around or you can just come up grab that number two point move it up move it down move it wherever you want to put it below that you've got some preset ranges so you can just click on those you got the low range the middle low the middle high and the high range in the frequency band here so you can just select one of those if you wanted to go right to one of those points but generally i'm going to do it uh manually i'm not going to use one of those presets i'll just drag it around and i'll show you how we're going to find where we want to place it in just a few minutes here so the next thing we have here is gain and gain is a way that you can either boost or attenuate or reduce a given frequency for example my 0.2 here if i click and hold on my little wheel here drag it up you can see it boosts the frequency and if i click and hold and bring it down it's going to cut or attenuate that frequency and to reset it on any one of these dials you can just double click and that's going to bring it back to whatever the default setting is so let's just boost this up a little bit so you can see what the next tool does here and that is q factor so q factor says how much of the frequency band do you want me to affect by the change so if i grab on this little dial here and i crank it up you can see now we have a very narrow frequency band that we're going to affect by wherever we put this point and if i come and drag it all the way down you're going to see now it affects a very wide band of frequencies here from say 125 almost to 1k so depending on what you're trying to do what you're trying to fix with your sounds you're going to need to adjust your q factor so i'm just going to double click that to reset it to the default and we'll just bring that you know we'll just go ahead and hit reset right up here and get us all back to the default settings here so you're going to have the same options like i mentioned for band 2 3 4 and 5. so finally we have band 6 and band 6 is going to work in a very similar way to band 1. if we turn it on and we look at our little drop down here we've got our low pass filter which is generally what we're going to use for band six here and again low pass filter means it's cutting out all of the frequencies that are higher than whatever we set our frequency at anything that's below that frequency will pass through and not be affected by our high pass filter so it looks like when you turn it on it drops in at 13 100 kilohertz and you can leave it there to start that's going to be fine and generally you're going to use this high pass filter to get rid of any kind of hissing sounds or any uh high ear piercing sounds that may be caught up in your clip somehow but that's going to help take care of that all right so that's an overview of how the eq tab works what the different things do and how you can start to make some changes here so now let's get down to how to practically use the eq tab let's take our clip we're going to play through it and i'm going to show you exactly how i would edit the eq on this clip and we're going to see what we can come up with and hopefully at the end of the day it sounds a little bit better than it does right now so let's play through it once hear how it sounds before we start making adjustments then we're going to go ahead and make some adjustments to the eq all right so let's play through this once here so we can see how it sounds and then we'll get to editing some eq what's happening guys here is our sample audio clip we're going to be using as we work through the fairlight tab here we're going to be doing everything from setting our levels to adding in some effects and hopefully seeing what all the effects here too in the fairlight tab so this is the sample clip we're going to be starting with i'm going to make this available to you guys to use so that you can follow along if you want to so let's get into editing some audio all right so there's our clip without anything i'm going to put this window back by clicking that guy so the first thing that i do with every clip is i turn on the high pass filter so i'm going to go ahead and turn on band 1 and as i mentioned i'm going to roll this on up to about 100 it could be a little more a little less it doesn't matter too much but if it sounds like you've got any boominess in your clip that's going to help take care of that so let's just play through the clip and see if we can notice a difference with that low pass filter on versus it off so i'm going to turn it off and i'll turn it on as we're playing through the clip what's happening guys here is our sample audio clip we're going to be using as we work through the fairlight tab here we're going to be doing everything from and you can hear a little bit of a difference not much but i'm going to throw it on there anyway and a lot of times you're going to have to keep playing through the clip turn it on and off and we're going to be playing through the clip while we make adjustments so that we can see what's actually happening to our eq here and see how it's affecting our clip because that's going to be very important the next thing i'm going to do is come in turn on band 6 because i always want to put on my high pass filter and i'm just going to leave that at the default for right now okay so now we're going to get into playing through our clip and making some adjustments here so how do i start working with eq well this is the way that i would recommend doing it we're going to start with our band 2. i'm going to go ahead and change that to the bell shaped curve which is this icon right here the next thing i want to do is come down to my cue factor and i want to crank that all the way up as high as it'll go the next thing i want to do come up and grab your point number two and you want to just bring it all the way up to the top of your uh eq here and what we're going to do is play our clip we're going to grab this point number two and sweep it back and forth they call sweeping the eq because what we want to do is listen for anything that sounds harsh sounds really muffled sounds a little muddy or just doesn't sound so good and that's going to be where we want to stop because once we find that part that doesn't sound so good we're going to find that frequency and we're going to reduce it maybe not we're not going to bring it all the way down to minus 20 but you know say maybe minus 10 or something we're going to see what we find here in this clip and this is the first time i'm doing it on this clip so we're doing it together here we're going to see what we find now this is going to be the same process that i'm going to use for each one of the bands 2 through 5. now you may not need to use all these but maybe sometimes you do so we're going to work on this clip and see what we can find one thing that is helpful if i just move this out of the way real quick is to have our clip loop here so we can hear the differences so if i come to the beginning of my clip and i want to click on my loop button which is this guy right here once you turn on your loop the next thing we want to do is select a range of our clip because we don't need the whole timeline playing you know back and forth for the whole thing if you have one clip like this not a big deal but if you got a whole timeline you don't want to listen to all of it so what we want to do is select a range in order to do that click on this icon right here and now we can come down and select our range of our clip so let's say i want to come from here i'm going to click hold and drag and we'll bring it back to there once we select our range we can use a keyboard shortcut option or alt and forward slash and that is going to allow this clip to continue to loop and play over and over again so what i'm going to do is loop this clip i'm going to play it and then we're going to bring up our equalizer here and bring this back up and i'm going to use this uh band number 2 and we're gonna see if we can find anything that does not sound good and i know that's kind of vague but i think once we find a spot that doesn't sound good because pretty much every microphone has a spot or two or several that doesn't sound good you're gonna understand what i'm talking about a little bit more so let's play through the clip and see what we can find here with our band 2 and our eq what's happening guys here is our sample audio clip we're going to be using as we work through the fairlight tab here we're going to be doing everything from setting our levels to adding in some effects and hopefully seeing what all the effects here too in the fairlight tab so this is the sample clip we're going to be starting with i'm going to make this available to you guys to use so that you can follow along if you want to so let's get into editing all right so right there it's got a little hollow-ish sound to it it sounds a little funky so i'm going to go right there and i want to drop it down now once i find that frequency you can grab your point here and bring it down but since i might move it a little bit i'm actually going to come down to my tools down here and we see we're at frequency 281 hertz but i'm going to just reduce the gain using this knob here because i know that's going to bring it straight down so let's go i don't know minus 10 i'm going to play through it again and just adjust this and bring it down a little to see if it makes a difference what's happening guys here is our sample audio clip we're going to be using as we work through the fairlight tab here we're going to be doing everything from setting our levels to adding in some effects and hopefully seeing what all the effects here too in the fairly okay so that wasn't too bad of a problem there so we don't need to drop it out too much it just had a little bit of a funky sound to it not too bad um so i'm just gonna leave it right here at about minus five for right now so now i'm gonna move on to the point number three and basically you wanna kind of work up your eq here and a lot of times you're going to find uh problems in the say 2 to 500 range it's going to sound a little bit muddy or muffled you can hear how there was that little it's not feedback i don't even know how to describe the sound but where it kind of sounded a little echoey or like you're talking it can a little bit um so you're gonna find things like that in that that maybe 200 to 500 range so you might want to cut some frequencies in there and generally you always want to cut before you boost anything i think i said that already but you always want to cut before you start boosting anything because we want to get rid of everything that does not sound good so now i'm going to move on to point number three and again i'm going to do the same thing i'm going to boost up my q factor and i'm just going to bring the gain all the way up i'm going to play through and see what we hear so we may find something in this 500 to 1000 range we'll see how that works out but we're probably definitely gonna find something in that one to two kilohertz range because that is generally where most voices will lie as far as the bulk of the frequencies and generally you're going to get some kind of weird sound in there that if you reduce it a little bit i think it just helps the overall sound of your microphone your voice or whoever's voice you're working on sound a little bit better so now let's loop through this clip and work with our third band here and see how that sounds what's happening guys here is our sample audio clip we're going to be using as we work through the fairlight tab here we're going to be doing everything from setting our levels to adding in so there's that right there we've seeing what all the effects here too in the fairlight tab so this is the sample clip we're going to be starting with i'm going to make this available to you guys to use so that you can follow along if you want to so uh let's all right so right there it does have another little sound to it almost like it's uh i don't know echoey or there's something going on that i don't like so i'm going to leave this right here i'm going to play through it again and just drop this frequency down let's see if you guys can hear it and then i'll lower it down as we're listening what's happening guys here is our sample audio clip we're going to be using as we work through the fairlight tab here we're going to be doing everything from all right so i think that's pretty good and if we wanted to get it before after see how we're working out you would just turn off your eq i'm going to play through and turn it on we can see if we hear a difference here what's happening guys here is our sample audio clip we're going to be using as we work through the fairlight tech all right so i think that's making a difference i mean it sounds like it tightens it up a little bit um again a lot of these things that you do with audio are very uh small changes they're little nuanced things that uh you know over a bunch of different changes that you're gonna make are gonna make a big difference and just help cleaning up your audio making your voice sound crisp and clear but it's a little tedious and you really got to develop an ear for it you know it took me a long time to hear the different kinds of sounds even though sometimes they're hard to describe took me a long time mixing live sound to be able to hear these things so it's very nuanced kind of stuff most of the time you're not going to hear huge changes but the next item that we're going to take a look at here with band number four right in this 2000 kilohertz range was very noticeable i thought anyway so hopefully you guys can hear it too so let's grab number four again i'm going to boost up my q factor and we're going to raise this up and see what we hear what's happening guys here is our sample audio clip we're going to be using as we work through the fairlight tab here we're going to be doing everything from setting our levels to adding in some effects and hopefully seeing what all the effects here too in the fairlight tab so this is the sample clip we're going to be starting with i'm going to make this available to you guys to use so that you can follow along if you want to so let's get okay so there i hopefully you guys could hear that on your end there but uh right up here that just it just had a like almost a whistle to it did not sound good at all so i dropped that out so let's say you go ahead and make a couple changes here and maybe you know the voice is still not quite quite as clear as you want it to be you can come and grab this band 5 and if you uh switch over to again the bell curve here and you drop down that q factor a little bit if you boost your frequencies just a touch in that say four five six kilohertz range um maybe even as low as the three kilohertz range it's going to help with some clarity and and sibilance in the voice it's gonna help make it just sound a little bit clearer and uh let's just play through and see if it makes a difference on this clip so let's try it out what's happening guys here is our sample audio clip we're going to be using as we work through the fairlight tab here we're going to be doing everything from setting our levels to adding in some effects and hopefully seeing what all the effects here too so it does add just a little bit of clarity there and i i think that helps so let's try now with the changes that we have now as it is play through it without the eq and then turn it on and see how that sounds what's happening guys here is our sample audio clip we're going to be using as we work through the fairlight tab here we're going to be doing everything from setting our levels to adding in some effects and hopefully seeing what all the effects here too in the fairlight tab so this is the sample clip we're going to be starting with i'm going to make this available to you guys to use so that you can follow along if you want to so it sounds a little bit hollow to me sounds like you use a little more low end so i might grab this uh band number two and bring it back up and actually open up the queue a little bit bring it back up so that i'm not cutting as much and let's just see how that sounds what's happening guys here is our sample audio clip we're going to be using as we work through the fairlight tab here we're going to be doing everything from setting our levels to adding in some effect so i think that's pretty good one thing i do notice is that there's still a kind of uh i know there's the wind outside a little hiss in the background there so i think what i want to try is bringing down my band six just a little bit maybe around i don't know 11 4. let's try that and see how that sounds so i want to try just something here i want to select just the very end of my clip where i could hear the kind of wind going a little bit and i just want to loop that so i can hear what kind of change i'm making with our band 6 with our low pass filter so i'm going to loop that so it's not making as much of a difference as i thought it might but uh maybe that's something we need to use a little noise reduction on and a lot of this stuff is just trial and error kind of see what works what sounds good to you and keep in mind that we're trying to get rid of anything that does not sound good here with the eq in videos to come we're going to be talking a little bit more about compression and multi-band compressors which really continue to help sculpt that sound and just make it sound better overall for talking head and vocal stuff specifically the track that we're working on now all right so i think that's good enough for now um it definitely made some good changes there like i said they're very small and nuanced kind of things but it's going to make a difference at the end of the day for you now if you found that your eq work made the volume or the levels of your clip a little bit lower than you want you can go ahead and grab this gain and boost things up a little bit and that's going to uh regain some of the signal you may have lost by making some eq adjustments i'm gonna go ahead and leave mine at zero for now and uh we'll see how that works out as we move on forward here all right so there's the basics of working with eq now i've got a few more tips for you on how to fix sounds that you might notice in your clip that don't sound good so that band one anything that falls below 100 hertz you kind of want to get rid of you don't need that in a vocal track or talking head track now if you're editing some bass yeah you definitely want to keep that in there because that's where all of your bass frequencies live in that uh below 100 hertz range but for vocals and talking head stuff you don't need anything down there it's just going to contribute to your clip sounding muddy or you might have some uh low uh noise in there that you just don't want so go ahead and put on a high pass filter and take out everything below 100 hertz now let's say you've got a little boominess going on in your clip maybe it sounds a little bit muddy well you want to look in that 100 to 350 hertz range so that's going to be where you get some of that boominess and muddiness sounding so take a look there raise up one of your bands see if you can find that bad spot and then reduce or cut that frequency and if you continue to hear like a boxy sound or maybe it's a little bit muffled try looking in that five to six hundred hertz range up to a thousand so say 500 to a thousand somewhere in that range if you keep hearing stuff that sounds a little boxy or muffled because you may have different spots in the eq where you're getting a muffled sound or something that just kind of clogs up your audio a little bit and makes it not sound so good so again boost up your band look for that frequency and then reduce that particular frequency and that's going to help get rid of that boxiness or boominess sound then moving up from 1000 to say four and a half thousand hertz or so is where your vocals are generally gonna fall and most of the time it's actually around that one to two thousand kilohertz range so take a look in there if you're hearing things that um are just not sounding good they even describe them as a a little nasally you know you got a little stuffy nose you want to take care of that you can find that in in that one to 4 000 kilohertz range um you can also look for anything that sounds a little honky i like that description i don't know why they call it honky but that's what they do so anything that sounds a little honky or doesn't sound so good you can try and find that and bring it down a little bit or anything that just sounds harsh and that's kind of what we found here as we were looking at our clip around that 2000 kilohertz range we found just a harsh sound that just didn't sound good and that's what we dropped down so look in that range and that's where you're going to definitely hear a difference most of the time for any of your vocals and again it's going to be different for every single microphone for every single recording situation it's always going to be different now if you're in a situation like this i got my studio i use the same microphone it's going to be great to save an eq preset so that way you know pretty much i can always use the same thing but you're always going to have to test it out and see how it sounds with a new microphone or a different setup you may need to make different changes so keep that in mind let's say you've gone through and made a couple changes there but the voice still just doesn't sound that clear you want to make it a little bit clearer and a little bit easier to understand well you might want to try boosting just a little bit in that five to seven thousand kilohertz range and when i say boost it just a little i mean like seriously like just a little bit you don't want to boost it a lot because it's real easy to go too heavy-handed with any of these eq adjustments whether you're cutting or boosting but just a little bit a little bit on the boost and that's going to help with the clarity of your voice so five to seven thousand kilohertz check that out and that should help with the clarity the next range you have is that eight to ten thousand and generally for this kind of stuff like i don't touch anything in there but where i do boost that eq in that eight to ten thousand range a little bit is in live music especially with women's voices who have that upper uh register voice and vocals you wanna boost and it's gonna give a little presence and uh sibilance to the voice and just kind of give it a little bit of sparkle almost and just really take it up a level and just make it sound like really great actually i mean it does a great job i use it all the time for that purpose and these talking head kind of stuff don't really have a need for it but hey if you're still having trouble try boosting up something just a little bit again a little bit and see if that helps for you and the last range is that 15 to 20 000 range it can add just a little bit of sparkle i mean just a touch of sparkle uh to a vocal track especially for a singer again in these kind of videos in this setup not i wouldn't recommend that i would use a low-pass filter as opposed to boosting anything but for singers and and vocals in music you may want to just get a little bit of like that that airy present sound it's kind of hard to describe but when you hear it you'll know it so that's what you want to do in that upper range but like i said most of the time for this kind of stuff i'm going to go ahead and throw on a low-pass filter and get rid of any of those high like hissing sounds or anything that i might not want in that upper range of the eq so that's it if you missed the first video about setting levels which you should do before you get here check out this video and if you want to check out another video youtube's going to pick one for you down there so you can go check that one out so if you like these thumbs up subscribe to the channel if you haven't already next time we're getting into dynamics and how to use the dynamics panel so stay tuned and i will see you in the next video peace

Channel: Jason Yadlovski

Views: 36,064

Keywords: Davinci Resolve 16 tutorial, Davinci Resolve, Davinci Resolve for beginners, Davinci Resolve 16 tutorial for beginners, DaVinci Resolve 16 Tutorial for Beginners 2020, EQ in DaVinci Resolve, equalizer editing, how to edit eq, how to edit eq in davinci resolve, how to eq vocals in davinci resolve, audio eq tutorial, vocal eq cheat sheet, vocal eq techniques, vocal eq tutorial, better audio for youtube videos, Audio Effects DaVinci Resolve, DaVinci Resolve 17 Audio, EQ Audio

Id: 5Rs1XRQSlAM

Length: 27min 51sec (1671 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 05 2020