Dynamic EQ - Essential Production and Mixing Tips

hello and welcome back to the channel today we're talking all about dynamic eqs what they are how to use them and more importantly where to use them so there's plenty of examples in this video i'm also going to be using a free dynamic eq that you can download and use it's called nova and i've left a link in the description but all these techniques work with any dynamic eq whether it's paid for or free let's start by laying a bit of a foundation before we dive into the examples so on the face of it a dynamic eq functions the same as a regular eq you usually have some sort of analyzer you've got lots of different tokens such as high and low boosts you can do dipping filters peaking filters you can adjust the q factor of bands so this is the same as any other eq but where it differs is that these are not static bands as in set and forget they're dynamic bands which means they react to the input signal the way this works is that each band has a compressor built into it for instance just down here where you can turn on a threshold lower the threshold and in this case i've set threshold to minus 20 db represented by this blue line and what this means is that at the frequency i select so in this case a thousand hertz if the energy goes above this threshold this filter is going to get docked only when the energy is over the threshold so just like in my last video where i set this up to selectively remove the s's from my voice you can set this up to remove any frequency and what makes this different from a regular multi-band compressor like this is firstly you get a lot more bands with the eq but also in a multi-band compressor the bands are usually just separated by low and high pass filters and it's very difficult to get extremely precise with it whereas as you can see with this you can make your queue extremely narrow and just duck very very specific resonant frequencies without affecting any other part of the mix and as well as using it as a dynamic eq you can have static eq boosts and cuts alongside your other dynamic eq moves so let's get right into some examples and we'll see this in use so what i have here is some double track guitar i just recorded it half an hour ago one is panned left one is right but there's no other effects and some of the chords are quite soft and others are a lot more boomy in the low mids this is just down to how i played it i was more going for the feel than trying to make it really perfect so let's take a quick listen [Music] so these final notes are quite a lot more boomy in the low mids and if i play the guitar lead on top of it you can hear that the lead sometimes shines through and sometimes it just gets totally swamped at the end here just at the end here it starts becoming a problem my playing starts sounding more aggressive and not so pretty and when i add in all the other mix elements the lead just starts disappearing so what i'm going to do is show you one way i would fix this so this is a regular eq and these two boomy notes here i could simply do a cut like this in the low mids and that fixes most of the issues on those later chords but if i go back to the start these chords are now really weak because this is the a static eq cut that's affecting them and those just sound like they have no life to them they're all just high-end there's no um sort of body and warmth to that guitar anymore so now i introduce that dynamic eq and i'll let you hear the results first on the first couple of chords there's a slight cut and as those chords become more boomy it cuts away an awful lot so it's a lot more reactive to my playing as opposed to just a static compressor that treats everything the same so you could see at the end it was cutting away a huge amount of the gain from that low mid area and it really smoothed out the whole performance now if i play that lead along with it you'll hear that the guitar now no longer overtakes that lead at all towards the end [Music] you can hear that the guitar just feels a lot more controlled which in this case is what i wanted so now let's actually see how to set this up so the first thing i'm going to do is turn on the input monitoring i know that usually for the tutorials it's good to have some visual feedback but when adjusting this i really am only using my ears i don't really care what it looks like on the screen let's just press play so you can hear the audio you can see it in the analyzer i'm going to use band 2. i'm just going to give it a boost so that's a static boost this would be a static cut and to access the dynamic feature you don't have to give a boost or a cut at all you just have to go down here turn the threshold on and these are our compression settings so we have threshold ratio attack and release just like any other compressor compressor so the first thing i'm going to do is just lower the threshold until i'm getting a little bit of reduction the blue line is the threshold the yellow is the effective output eq so whatever the yellow is doing that is the eq that's being applied to our signal so with the threshold set i can adjust our ratio so a higher ratio gives a lot more compression a lower ratio gives much less compression i can also adjust the q so that we have a much more narrow cut so you can really hone in on a specific resonant frequency or you can make a nice wide band and then the final two functions are the attack and release of the compressor these are really source dependent so if you want to let a bit of the transient through maybe make the attack a little bit slower and if you want to have a really gentle release just make the release time a little bit longer or if you want it to be snappy just make it shorter what i particularly like about nova is that you can have a dry mix so you can have it fully processed or you can have a parallel mix between your dry mix and your compressed mix and it also has this eq gain function which tries to level out the overall eq so that you're not fooled by cuts or boosts in volumes so if it takes some volume off the low end it tries to add it back to all the other frequencies you can also turn this feature off if you don't want it at all so in this case to set it up to have the perfect amount of compression on the low end of that guitar what i'm going to do is just press play and i'll talk you through all the settings that i would adjust so the first thing i'm going to do is actually just try to listen for that resonance so you know it's not really a resonance it's sort of just a general boominess somewhere between 100 and 250 hertz so that's where i'm going to center on i'm going to center on about 180 hertz here the next thing i'm going to do is turn the compression on and i'm looking for a couple of dbs of compression but i'm going to set this by ear i'm not too interested in what the curve is doing so i don't want much compression on the start that sounds about right to me ratio of two to one's fine again source dependent if i wanted more compression i could just increase that ratio and i want the attack to come on quite quick and i want my release to be gentle [Music] just so it doesn't sound too unnatural that's sounding pretty good to me again with the q i just want it to affect between 100 and 250 i don't want it to be too wide that it's affecting the entire low mid the next thing to do is just play it in context and see how it sounds i really really like where that's sitting so i don't think i'm going to change that anymore so that's just one way to use a dynamic eq but there's loads of different areas where you could use it and although it seems complicated try to just view it as you know a compressor that's just really really frequency specific really frequency dependent and as well as being used to cut frequencies a dynamic eq can usually be used to expand frequencies just like any compressor so what i'm going to do is select this band and i'm going to turn the compressor on and i'm going to turn the ratio to sort of like a positive like a negative ratio here so 0.6 to 1 and you can see that the token turns from down to up to indicate there's going to be expansion and i'm just going to lower the threshold and start playing and what you'll hear is because it's at about 5k all of those slaps where i hit my fingers against the guitar those are now going to be boosted and they're going to really shimmer through a lot more so let's do another little before and after [Music] so that's another instance that you can use dynamic eq for is expansion as well as compression of frequencies so other good examples that people use this for all the time are say you've got a drum track where occasionally there's like a big cymbal crash but you don't want to remove the top end all the time because you want to hear the hi-hats throughout the whole performance but just there's a couple of big symbol crashes and it's all in one stem you can't separate all the drums out often it's good to just set a dynamic eq on the high end so when those symbols crash it just cuts down maybe five six db just to make it a little bit more pleasant and then that all the high end appears again after the symbol is finished so you've still got all the brightness in your hi-hats whereas if you just set it up with a static eq your drum track would just sound a bit muffled and a little bit odd the whole time another example of where dynamic eq is really helpful and this is where i use it a lot is with vocals so i use it not only as a de-esser so to remove the sibilant sharp harsh sounds in a vocal where you can set it up maybe centered on 5 or 6k and just have it duck each time one of those sharp sounds is made you can also set it up in the low end to deal with the plosive sounds which is ps and b's which usually blow out a dynamic or a condenser microphone just because of the proximity so you can set it up to cut away that low end only when it's on and then the rest of the time you've got a really warm vocal performance i find this is important especially on female voices where you don't want to be cutting too much of the low end away because if you know if a female vocalist has got some good energy happening between 100 and 200 hertz you want to do what you can to preserve that and not just cut it away all the time because they don't have much low end anyway so it's good to hold on to what's there however without just getting carried away although it's amazing you really don't need to be setting this up on every single track of your mix it's something where i might have one or two on in a whole mix but you know usually you can get absolutely all the results you need with just a standard stock eq a stock compressor or a fancy one if you've got them this is one of those tools that's really great for those select examples but you don't need all the time for instance when i was recording my friend calvin who is really skilled on guitar his playing was so consistent and soulful that i just didn't need a dynamic eq it didn't help because his playing was so smooth and consistent however when i turn the mic on myself and i'm recording me playing guitar i'm more concerned with getting a really nice performance that i think captures the right energy as opposed to sitting there stressing about playing at the exact perfect volume um it's more important to get the emotion behind it i suppose however with a tool that's this visual where you know frequencies are jumping up and down remember to keep using your ears and not mix with your eyes so thank you very much for watching i hope you have a really great week and i hope to see you in the next video too bye for now

Channel: In The Mix

Views: 270,074

Keywords: Dynamic EQ, Tutorial, Mixing tutorial, how to mix with EQ, EQ, Nova, TDR Nova, Dynamic EQ tutorial, FL Studio EQ, How to EQ, eq, dynamic eq, free plugin, free, best free eq, vst, music production(genre), in the mix, mixing with eq, multiband compression, vs, dynamic eq or multiband, multiband processing, mixing tips, essential mixing tips, mixing mistakes, why you need dynamic EQ, mixing with EQ, EQ mistakes, how to use dynamic EQ

Id: yILcQ9qEy18

Length: 12min 20sec (740 seconds)

Published: Sat Aug 31 2019