Stop Using EQ Like This. (Ableton Tutorial)

if you enjoy this video consider supporting us on patreon for just five dollars a month click on the card in the upper right hand corner for more information hey guys this is julian of julian gray media today's video i want to address a problem that i see and see very often in newer musicians whether it be projects i fix on my fixture project streams or personal sessions with my students a problem i see in a lot of beginner musicians music is a fundamental lack of understanding or association between the mixing stage and the production stage contrary to popular belief getting a good mix is entirely dependent on good source material good writing and picking the right notes for your song mixing and production are inherently tied especially in electronic music where one person generally does all of the jobs so i want to show you why it's important to consider mixing while you write your music and why you might consider revisiting your writing while you're mixing let's hop into ableton so i can show you what i'm talking about sorry about the change in lighting something happened to my previous recording and i had to record this much later in the day so to start things off let's jump into ableton here and as you can see i have a chord stack put together this is just an a minor chord a root c three the fifth is an e and then we have a g with an octave and then we have another a1 down here below the a2 to prove the concept altogether that sounds like this and to start things off i want to illustrate to you the relationship between a note and a frequency and to do that what i'm going to do is just disable you know all the accessory notes of this chord i'm just going to grab the root note which is an a and then we're going to go into serum here it's just an initialized preset for now but i'm going to switch it over to a sine wave which is the least harmonically rich of all of the wave shapes in fact it is the only harmonic less wave shape and it's actually just the fundamental so if we actually grab an eq like this and we play the note you'll see as you can see you can see some activity on the spectrum here and this is probably pretty clear you guys probably have a you know a brief understanding of this is the high end this is the high mid this is the mid this is like the low end and then your subs down here but what a lot of people don't realize is that the frequencies you see directly correlate or translate to notes so if we play this and we're playing a sine wave which is a single frequency with no harmonics this is what we get as you can see we can kind of look over you know this is about 12 and a half decibels uh it's 110 hertz i'm looking down here at this little meter right here as you can see like 110 hertz uh 12.5 decibels but in the middle there in between you can actually see the a1 and this is directly correlated to a musical note so if we look at the midi key we're playing we're actually playing the a1 and as you can see the frequency that we're playing is an a1 now wait a second now that we know that every note corresponds to a frequency let's say that we want to mix a bass sound with our pad sound and we want to remove 100 hertz from our pad to make space for our bass sound if your bass is playing down here at this you know octave c1 to c2 a lot of people tend to do this where you'll you know grab an eq you do a low shelf and you just shelf off the bottom it's not directly apparent now because this is a harmonic less wave shape but let's go ahead and switch it to something a little bit more interesting so let's grab like a you know a saw wave [Music] we have all these frequencies above here if we apply that eq curve i was going to do to make room for that base for example in your pad this is what happens so we've removed the fundamental which in theory will create space for our base but look at all this that's left over all these harmonics that are from the overtone series of this note that are still in there and this will occur whenever you use any wave shape or any sort of sound that's more harmonically rich than a sine wave there's very few applications for just using a sine wave you almost always have something a little bit more harmonically rich it doesn't sound as interesting when you're just using straight up sine waves and only fundamentals you either distort the sine wave to add some harmonics up on the top you might use a saw wave so that you use you know this series of harmonics here you might use a triangle [Music] so you have you know this this scarce system of harmonics above you might try a square where you have alternating volumes of harmonics above but you almost never use just a sine wave so what happens is when you do this to your sound and for the sake of example here let me re-enable these notes what happens when you high-pass and you remove that that low note to make room for your bass [Music] sure you have all of the high-end but you also have all of the harmonics of this fundamental still in here and you end up with a sound that sounds like it's lost its foundation if we just go back to that single note again you hear how constrained that sounds it feels like a sound that's lost its integrity it doesn't have a foundation to stand on anymore as you bring in that fundamental it feels like the sound fills out because it it's all these harmonics are just harmonics of the original fundamental so back to the analogy if if we're trying to remove that note from our pad to make room for our base [Music] there's a better solution than high passing and i think you probably realize what it is now and it's something that's truly obvious once you realize it but something that a lot of musicians just don't see if we just remove the a1 note we've essentially done the same thing as high passing we've just removed all the cluttered frequencies up in this hop spectrum and now the sound doesn't sound constrained because there aren't those harmonics in there that are missing their fundamental i'll go ahead and a b high passing with that unnecessary fundamental in the low end versus just removing the note initially and you can hear how much of a stark difference it is so to start things off let's play it with the note i'm going to go ahead and remove it and as you can see even though we're we're cutting that low end you can still hear the remnants of it in the harmonics [Music] see how much noisier that sounds so when you think you're removing a frequency with an eq like this it might actually be an illusion you're only removing the fundamental and all of its harmonics are still in the sound so the solution i find and i find a lot of musicians do is to write their music so that it's harmonically compatible and one of the really interesting things about this now is that if we actually remove that a1 node there's actually no need for an eq at all if we're trying to only balance it with the base of course so if we remove the eq and then you know we put in essentially another note down there at a1 go ahead and do that really quick these two sounds blend together nicely without any competition because fundamentally the fundamental of a1 isn't in the pad so that fundamental of a1 in the base has enough space to shine you should never play too many sounds playing the same fundamental note or the fundamental frequency of that note at any given time you're trying to shoehorn multiple elements into the same note and you end up with a very cluttered muddy sounding compromised sound you never end up with a really clean sound so i always like to leave space in my arrangement so like if i look here i know that this a1 is filling out my low end in the base so i don't want to include that a1 in my pad and vice versa if i added a sub i would put a sub down here at a 0 and i know that it's not going to conflict with a1 or a2 because in terms of frequency they will never compete if i look at this now and we put that eq back our pad only gets as low as 220 which is you know the first fundamental of the series which is that a2 and everything below that is you know non-existent you could you know low pass this just for optics and peace of mind but fundamentally this is no different than this let me go ahead and do that with only the one selected [Music] yeah it's optically good to look at but it actually functionally does nothing you might remove some you know pops or clicks and micro sounds that come on your output when you're exporting or something but in principle and in technique this is the same as this and that means functionally you don't need to high pass if your notes are harmonically compatible so the reason this is important is if you write music that's harmonically compatible and and the notes don't overlap and your sounds all fit within their own space you don't need to do as much eq you don't need to correct problems and you don't have all of those harmonic runoffs that you would have if you had the fundamental in there and you tried to remove the fundamental later the only way to truly remove a fundamental is if i went in here and i found every single harmonic of that a1 and remove them if if i if i just muted these here i would have to find every single one of these lines up the spectrum to effectively remove that a1 and what that does is it just destroys the integrity of the overarching sound because some of these might overlap with other notes in the chord and then with a little bit of sound design you know if we trimmed off some of the high end from this this bass and then you know we maybe add some voices to this we end up with a really nice sounding pad and bass with just two channels that found sound harmonically rich and full and fill the arrangement out nicely because they're all filling their own space within the harmonic spectrum with no note overlap just get rid of this and then you can take this a step further with another channel maybe drop this down an octave again that's your sub let's go ahead and highlight all three of these so you can visualize it you can see here's our sub here's our base and here's our top pad cord and together they sound like this and then maybe we can give it a little bit more high end and we have a very full sounding arrangement with three channels because they're all comprising their own octaves playing a note within their own respective octaves if you think of this in terms of real music the reason why a four-piece band dynamic with a vocalist guitarist bass player and a drummer exists with the exception of the drummer who just kind of keeps the rhythm is because all three of those instruments fit within their own octaves the bass is comprising that zero to two the guitar is taking from two to like four or three and then the vocal is like three four five if you have a especially high vocalist and it's also the reason why you never have a lead guitarist playing against a singer because they're in the same octave and they're directly competing with each other for that space so i hope this helped you guys if it did make sure to give the video a like make sure to give it a dislike if it didn't let me know why in the comment section below if you have any ideas for future videos let me know down there as well i had a student this week that had this problem and i figured it would be a great video for you guys i hope it did help you guys if you want to see more videos like this make sure to subscribe i'm julian of julian gray media and i'll talk to you in the next video bye [Music] you

Channel: Julian Gray Media

Views: 55,223

Rating: 4.8810811 out of 5

Keywords: julian gray, julian gray media, julian gray music, ableton live, ableton live eq, ableton live eq 8, ableton live equalizer, ableton live eq plugin, eq tutorial, eq tutorial logic pro x, eq tutorial ableton, eq tutorial fl studio, eq tutorial in the mix, mixing tutorial ableton, ableton eq tutorial, EQ Eight, EQing kicks, ableton tutorial, how to eq, Learn EQ in Ableton, How to EQ in Ableton Live, EQ tips, Kick Drum EQ, Kick drum EQ frequency, Best EQ for drums

Id: _aygQ2l_5yU

Length: 13min 55sec (835 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 26 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/Ereignis23]

Great video. This is the exact kind of basic but very relevant info that would clear up so much for the average beginner. Simple stuff like 'hey, guess what! A note literally is a frequency and different waveforms on your synth literally are different because of their different overtones!'

Good solid foundational stuff which people can then take away and use to inform decisions throughout the process from composition through arrangement through mixing.

[u/AprilDoll]

This is definitely helpful. I make symphonic metal sometimes, it turns out that the rhythm guitar doesn't clash as much with the orchestra stuff when all the notes are E2 or below.

[u/dylanwnorman]

Beginner here. Thank you.

[u/CaptainTotes]

Oh good this video may be what I needed

[u/0n3ph]

How does this apply to recorded music? More and more I'm using real instruments, and I can't see how I can utilize this idea whilst working with these...