MY BEST MID/SIDE EQ ADVICE (w/ AHEE)

yo yo what's up aliens aki here with another tutorial and today is a very exciting one it is my best advice for using mid-side eq all right so just because you can use it and it's useful doesn't mean it will make your track better and mid-sight eq is one of these things where you can easily mess up the phase uh of your track if you do weird stuff and you just sort of use it without having a specific purpose of why you're using it and i'm gonna go through today and sort of show you some of the key targets of like why you would use mid-side eq where you would use it and some examples of it in my own tracks so let's go over what are the my main four uses of using a mid-side eq and i sort of relate this to like what would you use a hammer for you wouldn't use a hammer to wash your dishes uh maybe you do and you're insane but i particularly don't uh use a hammer and you don't like if you're building something you just just don't randomly hammer all over the place either you have to hit the hammer in specific places to get specific things done and that's what we're doing today so these four uses for mid side iq mid side eq that i particularly use are this a b c and d over here on the side that you can see so target a is making a sound less wide and that usually means cutting the sides and this is what i saw when i did my dissecting skrillex's ableton project video almost in all cases in which skrillex was using the mid-side eq it was to duck the sides and make whatever sound more mono and less wide and the big reason for doing that is i have another tutorial on stereo width that is to create more stereo width in your track by making things less wide so that way the things that are wide feel more wide because there's less stuff cluttering up the sides another use of it is cutting out the sub um in the sides uh so that way it keeps the sub in mono because a lot of monos a lot of big speaker systems their subs are in mono so if you have stereo sub it will just not hit correctly or your sub could completely disappear which is would be silly and you don't want that happening to you target c is making the top end of a sound more wide and it's not just any particular part of of the of the sound but it's particularly the top end of whatever sound or track that you're applying this to you and then condition target d here is using it to listen to music uh to dissect the mid-side frequencies and that one's very useful and i will show you examples of all four of these instances let's uh get into it so here i have my track uh it's called under the sun it came out on excision subsidia label it's with uh this amazing vocalist ruby chase and while i was making it i used some mid-side eq where i mostly used it was on the specific base cuts so here's an example right here where i've mostly cut the mid frequencies in the sides while keeping the mids here pretty even so um it's hard to tell what these things are doing when you're listening to them them on your own but if you're well let's go ahead and at least try [Music] and you're going to need headphones or stereo monitors to really tell the difference so that was with the cut so that's without it it sounds way wider without the cut [Music] but the thing is is that if we listen to what what is else is happening during this track in this particular section [Music] so there's like bass and there's vocals and there's drums that are going on and so i just wanted this little sound to just be this like slight accent there closer in the center here's another instance on this like base cut there it is without the the mid side eq again it sounds super wide and i'm essentially ducking the uh the mids here on the side content information and i just happened to duck some of the highs here on the mid portion but really it's it's the part to focus on is ducking these mids here in the side [Music] and that is if we listen to it it's to give this continuity between the cut sample and the other samples so here's a really extreme case um on this particular sound right there if i take off the mid side eq it's a pretty big difference there in this case i'm the mid sections are almost like treating the mids is almost like using it like a regular eq and then here on the side you can see again i'm cutting out the sub completely so that's that condition b or target b and then also that uh cutting of the mids here in the sides as well and it just it helps have the the sound just hit harder and more in the center [Music] because it just doesn't hit as hard without it and also the vocals are have like this decently wide reverb on them so i want that to stand out more than this particular bass uh sound so here's a sound that's like part of it's a layer that i later rendered out with a couple other layers into this audio up here but in this particular layer i use the mid-side eq to only boost the middle frequencies again making it less wide because there's more middle frequency content [Music] [Applause] and also i used it to cut out the sub because there was another layer of sub over here all right so also in this song um i used some mid side eq here on the master track and in this particular case i've just used it to widen up the top end and it's just barely you know like less than 2bd 2 db of gain and it's pretty hot just only really affecting the highs you know from around three thousand seven hundred hertz and up but it's mostly affecting you you know more like four thousand hertz and up and so that's that target c also in here though this is technically not mid-side eq it does have to do with mid-side information oh my gosh it's a heart i've never seen that uh i gotta screen capture that oh my goodness it's a heart oh my goodness and this song's called under the sun we are one that's so cool sorry i've never seen that that's so freaking cool to me okay um so here the in this uh ozone imager i'm essentially bringing the base down all the way so i'm getting rid of all the side information on the master channel uh 140 hertz and below and that is again part of that um that target b right there uh where we're just getting rid of the side content of the uh of the subs this also helps everything sort of stay in phase a little bit more which is this little metering here again help make it help sound more powerful and impactful when you play it back on large speaker systems now let's go to uh my other song a loner stoner so this song loner stoner it it came out on circus records and it's going to be part of this whole ep that i have coming out with them later this month i'm super stoked on and i use the mid side eq in a couple different places here for instance i use it on this lead particularly i use a magic rack that one of my magic ableton racks i specifically made to just sort of throw on two tracks to help with the phasing it's called the stereo control it's part of the magic racks volume 2. and in this particular instance i've automated it so that way in this particular section the lead is more mono because there's a lot of wide content going on there and then here during the drop i've made the lead wider so let's listen in context with that so here it is that's more mono here's more wide and let's listen in context [Music] see it's narrower her it it creates this emotional con like contained feeling and then when it gets to the drop it's wider and it creates this emotional more expansive vibe so who knew that we could use mid-side eq for an emotional effect also here on the drop race i'm using the stereo control just on the uh default settings so essentially in the stereo control what it's doing is ducking the side frequencies and boosting the mid frequencies to make up for that volume difference while also giving you control of the stereo width here and if we look inside of span my favorite plugin we can see without the stereo control [Music] just the phase is going every which sort of way and it can go out of phase even there now with the stereo control on [Music] it just stays more in phase and it's less likely to go out of phase it's just got more a stronger presence in the center part of our spectrum while still allowing it to have like that nice wide sound also i'm using a little another mid side eq over here where um again i'm ducking the mid frequency content of this sound again to you know have less width on the sides and a stronger presence in the middle let's give that a listen in context [Music] so that's with it now let's turn both of these off [Music] it's weird it like it it makes it definitely makes it more wide but like having it less wide sort of gives space for like the reverb in the snare to like really shine out and it just it making it more wide makes the whole track feel less wide in this weird sort of way and that's sort of the point uh is being able to control exactly what you want in the sides rather than just you know willy-nilly what have you accidentally show up there here's another example using the stereo control on some vocals during this build without it see it sounds super wide there again and the reason why we're lessening the width again and this is similar to that lead i showed you earlier it's that that emotional feeling of feeling constrained and contained closer in the center there you hear it there in the background see without it [Music] [Applause] [Music] see it feels wide and it feels open but that's not the emotional quality that we're going for in this particular section we want that contrast between this like more narrowness and then when the drop hits like gets wider and open and also here on the master i am using a mid side eq again just open that top end up yep uh 5000 hertz is and and up and also it's less than 2 db again right there and then another example here in ozone um i'm using the imager to make that sub into mono now a one instance in which we're making the sides of an individual element wider are here on the snare here i'm using the mid side eq to boost these lower the lower bits of the highs just a little bit more because like there's a lot of frequency content for the snare in that range and i just wanted it even wider like earlier when i was taking away the the width of the of the respace was so that way i could create more space for the width of this particular snare sample so without it and it's like uh also here on also here i am ducking the very high frequency content in the mids here so that way it's less airy and more of those ringing harmonics that are in the sides rather than just like that pure it's more of the technical terms you know and those are the three main examples and here i will show y'all the final example so here's the fourth uh situation in which i would use mid-side eq in and that is to listen and dissect the mid side frequencies so here i've got skrillex's fuji opener and i've applied my ahi's listening rack which is also part of the magicrax volume 2. and it's got these useful functions where you can just turn up the knob all the way and it will cut out all of the mid frequency content so you can just listen to the sides of this track and in this way you can really discover what elements is skrillex actually using in his sides or you can do this with any track whatsoever and you will find that some artists pay more or less attention to what free side frequency content they use and i thought that's a very interesting observation let's go ahead and give this a listen so we can hear there's almost no drums whatsoever we can hear some of the white noise we can hear the upper parts of like the bass parts we can hear uh some of the vocals the vocals are pretty wide at that pre-drop section but like there's no drums here let's listen to only the mids now [Music] that's where all the drums are the kick and the snare are all in the middle and also it's pretty yeah the hi-hat has a strong presence in the middle too let's see the hi-hat does have some presence on the sides too so it's like widening those sides but oh my goodness it's it's pretty amazing that you can tell that difference and here there's more stuff that has width to it but you can tell that that sub bass there let's listen to only the mids that that sub bass is only in the mids it doesn't have any side frequency content amazing now you can also use the listening rack to like only listen to the low end [Music] which is useful or we can only listen to the highs and you can really see here if we were to uh open up span only listening to the uh side content you can see it's completely out of phase there and if we were to cut out all the sides and only listen to the mono we can see that it's completely to the right completely mono now if we were to listen to both you'd see somewhere in the middle [Music] yes if you haven't checked out my magic ableton racks definitely go give those a download i try to price them super cheap so that way anyone can afford them and it's there's three different groupings of them there's the volume one there's the add-ons and then the volume two i'm working on a volume three at the moment but they're only like 25 or 25 dollars you know depending upon which one you're getting and like i know other people are charging 25 for a single rack and i've got like 25 racks in there for 20 bucks you know it's like and they're really useful so definitely go check those out if you haven't and if you do have them thank you so much i really appreciate your support and i hope they're super useful for you let me know in the comments all right if you all enjoyed this video please be sure to give it a like and don't forget to subscribe for more videos maybe share this with a friend and i will see you aliens in the future bye [Music] peace [Music] i just died

Channel: Official AHEE

Views: 7,924

Rating: 4.9519038 out of 5

Keywords: AHEE, Ableton, 11, EQ, Equalizer, Advice, Mid, Side, Mid/Side, MidSide, tutorial, how to, use

Id: LNvQSXB8MAQ

Length: 19min 28sec (1168 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 13 2020