EQ Explained in 10 Minutes ... or it's free

give me 10 minutes to show you how eq works what it does and how to use it and no this is not some comprehensive learn everything that you need to know about eq kind of a click baby video the goal here is to give you a fast and basic understanding of eq that you can run with so let's just do it eq is short for equalizer and what eqs specifically do are alter the volume of specific frequencies that's it so a simple eq plugin would look like this channel eq which is right here this is the stock uq logic which sounds quite nice or we can actually use vintage style eqs which are going to look a little bit more like this instead with the knobs instead of more of the visualizer that we can see with the channel eq strip they ultimately do the same thing but the visual aesthetic is going to be the main difference and yes they're going to sound a little bit different from each other but they do the exact same thing now for this video i'm going to be using the channel eq since it's a bit easier to visualize so eqs have three primary controls that every eq is going to have first is the frequency which is going to control what specific frequency range we want to alter you can see we go from 20 all the way down here on the left all the way up to 20k on the right this is actual frequencies now the frequencies are measured in hertz which are directly related to pitch so 440 which would be right around here you can see 440 down there 448 that is an a so hard to sing an a that would be 440 hertz but in the eq sense this is what specific tonal characteristic of that sound that we are going to be shaping now the second control is volume we can manipulate frequencies by adding or subtracting volume from that specific frequency so if i wanted to remove some of this 448 hertz right here i could subtract that or i could boost it and you can see here on this little dial right here that is showing the amount that we're actually doing it and that is going to be measured in decibels or dbs and the third is the shape there are three types of shapes that we can use there is a filter which is going to be something like this right here on the top end or something like this right here on the bottom end so this right here on the bottom is what's called a high pass filter which would cut everything below the amount that we set it to so this shaded region right here that red shaded region is going to be completely eliminated so as you can see here i have this set to 98 hertz so everything below 98 hertz at this type of slope is going to be eliminated from that sound now a shelf is going to look like this that's going to be boosted shelf that right there is a reduced shelf and as you can see by the shape it's going to boost or subtract in a shelf-like shape so it's not going to entirely add or remove but it comes to a plateau and the third type is a bell shape which is mostly used in the middle frequency spectrums right here and you can see right here as i boost this that looks like a bell now we can control the actual width of the bell the specific shape of that bell with this little bottom number right here which is called cue control or q factor and as we bump that up as you can see that is getting more and more narrow and as we make that smaller that number is going to add more width to the actual frequency so something like this right here is going to boost starting at 448 in the middle but as you can see here it's actually boosting all the way down into like 40 hertz it's boosting all the way up into like basically 6k hertz which that's barely anything but as we start increasing this number we could basically make it so it's only impacting 448 hertz so in a practical sense these three controls are the most important controls to be aware of yes you can go much much deeper but right now these are the three that we are going to focus on the pitch of these frequencies go from the lowest all the way down here so this is going to be super super super bassy frequencies you know 80 hertz is going to be like where your kick and your bass is sitting all the way up to 20k which is going to be extremely sibilant that's gonna be more of the s on symbols and things like that now every sound we can use is ultimately made up of more than one frequency so even if you're singing an a which is 440 hertz there are going to be more frequencies present in that sound than just 440 because of the room you may be in the harmonics series and essentially a bunch of other mathematical reasons that we're not going to get into so you can see in this analyzer here i'm actually going to have you see me singing an a which is 440 hertz with this eq here and i'm going to turn the analyzer on here so that you can actually see what's happening so you can actually see right here a little snapshot of everything you can see that there is more than 440. you can see the 440 is actually basically right there that's the primary note that's happening and you can see here there's actually something happening basically 200 hertz underneath of it and then there's another couple hundred hertz above and all the way up so on and so forth that's the room that's the harmonic series and other things that are actually impacting that sound so it's not just that one frequency that's present even though that's the only note that i actually sang so just because you sing a note at 440 for example there are going to be other frequencies present in that sound that you need to be aware of now this matters because if you're working with a recorded vocal for example then that vocal may actually have frequencies that are causing problems within the context of a production and eq can be used to fix it by cutting out the offending frequencies so in this vocal for example a lot of times vocal recordings are going to have this mid-range woofy sound that is not desirable so you can actually use eq to remove that and correct it so looking at this vocal again if we listen to this i want to show you what i'm talking about if i were to boost right around 200 hertz you're gonna notice this listen watch to this if you're wearing headphones you should really be able to hear that and if not you should put some headphones on or use monitors so you can hear that is really not a great sound it's really woofy yet this sound is often present in vocals especially for home studio producers who don't have a well-treated environment and it also depends a lot on the microphone that you're actually using but we can cut off these offending frequencies by removing say three to five db now this cut right here is actually a pretty wide cut i'd probably want to be a little bit more surgical with it so let's go and remove that so that right there got rid of it now just because i'm saying this is what you may need to do does not mean that you always need to do this in this particular case depending on the actual track and the context of that vocal i might not actually need to do that this is where applying these concepts is going to come down to using your own ears another example is a piano pianos are incredibly resonant instruments and they're going to contain a lot of different frequencies so when you're thinking about how to approach a piano if there's something sounding off on that sound or it's sounding bad then you should focus entirely on identifying where that sound is in the frequency spectrum and you can do that by boosting a narrow band bell to the point to where you can clearly hear it and then sweep through the frequencies like this [Music] you can obviously hear how that is sweeping through now this is not something that you should rely on long term but you can use this as a way to train your ears so if you're thinking huh there's something kind of mid-rangey that doesn't sound great you can use this to boost and find and identify where that problem is and then do the opposite actually go back and cut so say around 250 hertz there's a problem you can just cut that so as you sweep you're probably going to feel like it all sounds bad because ultimately it's all going to sound bad because if you boost any frequency enough it's it's going to sound bad so use this only to identify where you actually need to cut and don't just start adding cuts everywhere because all these frequencies sound bad when they're boosted on the flip there may be frequencies that you want to add into a sound for color to add brightness on this piano for example or add low end on something like bass or kick so this piano right here i could go ahead and add some brightness with something like a high shelf right here and maybe boost it around 6k 8k or somewhere in that ballpark and we can see how this will sound so let's just go ahead and shut this off and listen to the piano completely bypass on the eq okay and let's go ahead and add this i'm going to be a little bit dramatic more so than i'd probably be in real life but just so you can hear it so as you can hear as i really start cranking up it starts sounding a little weird so here's off and then i'll turn it on [Music] so this is a little bit subtle right it's not like this whoa that's such a big difference but it does sound brighter now one big thing to note is that when you boost eq it's going to increase the overall volume of that sound so keep an eye on your fader to make sure that you don't get out of control with clipping now most eqs are going to have multiple bands and a band is simply the number of times you can adjust the eq so in the channel eq that i have here i have four different bell curves i have two different shelves and then i have two different filters not all eq's gonna have the same amount some will only even have a single band just because you have several bands does not mean you have to use them all at once a huge mistake i see producers and mixers make is making eq moves that are totally unnecessary which usually ends up making it worse if your eq looks like this right here i would argue that 9 out of 10 times you are doing more harm than good so just be careful about that now if you're feeling stuck making less than pro sounding productions then you should really check out my production course producer accelerator which has helped over 500 producers level up their own productions and this week we just released our new three-day sneak peek which gives you a chance to have three days of lessons sent right to you from the full course to get a feel for it it's totally free you'll get a ton of value from it if you want to increase your own production quality you can click the link right over here to get it and we'll see you in the next video

Channel: Nathan James Larsen

Views: 47,901

Keywords: how to use eq, eq explained, how to use an equalizer, how to use logic pro eq, logi pro eq, how to cut eq, understand eq, learn eq, how to learn eq, learn to use eq, learning how to use eq, nathan larsen, nathan james larsen, nathan larson, nathan james larson, how to boost eq, logic pro eq explained, how to mix with eq, mix with eq, mixing with eq, learn to understand eq, eq explanation, eq explained in 10 minutes

Id: vRa_Zk90lDc

Length: 9min 47sec (587 seconds)

Published: Sat Jan 15 2022