The Basics of EQ with Mark Rubel (Rascal Flatts, Fall Out Boy, Ludacris)

[Music] hello and greetings from blackbird studio ee i'm mark ruble director of education at the blackbird academy and also a long-term recording engineer producer i've had recording studios since 1980 writing a book on the history of american recording studios called the great american recording studios and i do various other things including forensic audio and all of that i just want to thank warren for having me on the show it's a great honor to be here and to get to talk to you uh and i thought that what would be fun to talk about today is uh just the very basics of equalization with a few interesting little tricks thrown in let me show you a little bit about this track and tell you about that and then we'll actually talk about equalization here's i'll just play a little bit of the track from the beginning uh this is everything other than vocals and uh faders are mostly close to zero and as they were recorded so here we go [Music] i'm just going to play some of the drum tracks and we will actually get some equalization here in a second but let me just show you this um this is a technique that i stole i mean borrowed from an amazing producer engineer musician here in town named bobby holland and it's called front of kick this is an aea rd4 microphone kind of their you know take on an uh rca 77 dx77 microphone um and in front of kick it's over the rim of the resonant head so at a distance from the drummer pointed at their stomach um and this is the one track that has a compressor on it going in it's a multi-band compressor and the trick really is to separate that out and i can show you some other time but anyhow this is one drum mic by itself [Music] [Music] it's nice it's a little lacking in symbols because of the figure eight pattern the microphone but if we add a little bit of the mono overhead which i don't remember what it is i think it's a um rca44 but i don't actually recall because we're blackbird and we have uh microphones but here's just uh two microphones front of kick and a mono overhead just basically right over the center of the kit [Music] symbols [Music] and sometimes i'd love to come back and tell you about some of my wacky recording techniques but just um this is something that i often do my students are very familiar with it it's a an empty five gallon water bottle in front of the bass drum with a cheap small capsule condenser mic hanging in it's about three inches off the bottom just hanging by its cable uh important point there's no water in the water bottle okay so you get a five gallon water bottle at a hardware store or whatever and just hang a mic and stick it right in front uh this is um on uh playback i have a eq3 one band which is just set as a low-pass filter very steep at about 120 hertz so we're going only for subs the thing sounds like a basketball without the filter it sounds like this [Music] so all that bullying is not really what we want but if i take everything out except the subs [Music] you get subs but you get resonant subs it's better than a sub kick so here's the kick in by itself and then i'll put in the water bottle [Music] if you're listening on laptop speakers you won't hear the difference because everything that's happening here is uh below 120 hertz so let me just show you this is um front of kick overhead and water bottle and then i'll bring in another microphone which is an ampex 1101 we call it advanced mic it's advanced power microphone that i paid eight dollars for it on ebay or something like that but it's a little uh mic looks like a bent salt shaker that they used to sell with uh ampex reel reel-to-reel tape machines uh that's plugged into a rat pedal rap pedal is a it's a guitar distortion pedal is fantastic on everything except guitar uh it's great on drums and vocals and piano and uh drum kits and stuff like that it's they're pretty good on guitar but the useful thing about is it has a filter and you can cut out the high end so this is just um three microphones and i'll bring in the distortion mic [Music] three mics distortion [Music] too much distortion [Music] just distortion and water bottle [Music] so that's a total about eighty dollars worth of microphones a five gallon water bottle and a rat pedal let's talk about equalization one of the basic tools that's at our disposal i've already made my my point for if possible trying to record without it and or mix without it but of course it's a useful tool in our toolkit and i just wanted to show you uh this very simple uh eq um it's actually when i'm mixing when i need eq i actually use the eq37 band more than others even though i have a bunch of fancy plugins and so forth and i think partly it's just out of stubbornness which i think you know uh a lot of the great wreckers who were made with minimal eq like two bands of eq and i just feel kind of stubborn about it that i just like to be able to do good things with basic tools you know somebody said to our students the other day that uh if somebody showed up to work on their front porch and they had 30 saws and they had a hundred screwdrivers they would sort of trust them less than if they had a few tools that they really knew well and so i'm i'm going with that now i'm going to tell you how to use an eq turn up stuff you like and turn down stuff you don't like okay well thanks for coming no wait there's more i just want to say some some general things about it um about equalization in general so the first rule of recording is very important is that there are no rules okay there's no right or wrong way to do any of this uh and uh whatever works in some one situation may not work in another so the only time i feel like you're doing it wrong is if you're doing it out of habit or because somebody else told you to do it including me you need to so the second rule of recording is you have to listen all the time and you have to listen in real time all the time so don't do things out of habit personally i even though i've written a few presets for plugins as favors i i'm not a fan of plugins i don't think that there are recipes or menus i think it's more creative than that so you have to really um have a goal for what you're doing in mixing uh you have to really listen and then you have to be able to you know hear what it needs and then go in and find it it's easier to um just to sort of human nature to add stuff so i'm going to add this or more low under this or that or i'm you know not hearing the vocal i need to add more vocal uh it's a good idea to try and train yourself to think subtractively so if you're not hearing the vocal instead of oh i need to eq and put a bunch of compression on it figure out what else might be covering it up or masking it uh keep in mind that the way that our hearing works is that uh and this is literally the way that our cochlears are put together here's a nice word for you it's tonotopic our ears actually separate everything we can hear into octave wide bands and if you do the math from 20 to 20k it's 10 octaves what happens is that when things are in the same octave they cover each other up masking so it's a good idea to think trying to think subtractively sometimes which is you know i'm not hearing the vocal what other instruments you know guitars keyboards or whatever other vocals strings pads are covering it and can i either well just turn them down uh which is the mixing part or can i eq them and create holes and stratify things where they will each cover different um parts of it it's easier for me to think that way because i have synesthesia so i see sound already and i have a built-in spectrum analyzer where everything every frequency is a different color uh that's something we could talk about another time so you know it's laid out with colors not necessarily the right synesthesia colors but it's laid out uh they call it eq37 band but it's really a five band eq with uh high pass and low pass filters the high pass low passer up here um i do encourage you to use the high pass filters on things um that don't have a lot of of uh low end guitars uh depending you know on how heavy you want them to be i mean i'm a fan of 50 hertz in guitars but if you're really trying to clear things out so that the bass drum the 808 the sub the bass synths uh the bass guitar can occupy that region it's a good idea to to use these things and generally we'll say try and figure out what the lowest frequency is that the lowest fundamental of the instrument is in the part that you're doing and then go an octave down from that and then i usually go with a fairly steep uh filter and one reason this is a good idea is because there can be a lot of stuff that in your track that you're not hearing you've either you don't have a sub or it's just sub sub frequency information that can eat up your headroom everything could be struggling to reproduce this especially in a digital system you know it'll it'll try to reproduce 10 hertz or 15 hertz and it can eat up your headroom so if your mic's picking up air conditioning noise and footsteps or somebody's tapping their foot or kicking the mic stand it's it's a good idea to clean things up in that way and of course low-pass filters you can you know band-limit things so they're not eating up too much other stuff or you can get rid of hiss and that kind of thing so that's the the low and high filters one thing that i will say about eq in general is that there's a tendency again to always want to boost things and you need to be a little careful for two reasons one is watch your gain structure so if you have an eq going into a compressor and you think you at the compressor set about right or limit or set about right as you add more things with the eq it's going to push more signal into the compressor and you may not realize that it's getting more and more squashed and then later on you wonder why has it gone lifeless and i've lost my dynamics so be mindful of your gain structure and look out for distortion of course uh another point that i like to make is that an equalizer is not a synthesizer it can only affect what's in the signal uh but it's not going to generate signals for you there are other ways to do that and that's something that again we could talk about another day you know i'll just say i'm a big fan of say a parallel decapitator to add upper harmonics which helps you figure out what's going on at low frequencies on things like a laptop that don't have low frequencies so there's something i call sweep to find so you know you've you've listened to your whole recording and you go okay there's a problem and then you zoom in a little bit and you go okay what what is the problem and my example would be you know two instruments are fighting each other in the mid bass and you go okay what's the problem and then you you zoom in further and you go okay it's somewhere in the two to four hundred or one to three range and then and it's only happening certain times ago that floor tom is out of tune with the bass guitar note or something like that and then you have to decide who's going to win in what frequency you know what can i scoop out what can i uh change you know what are the problem frequencies and then you can zoom in uh as much as possible and one way to do it is the way that people typically do it which is boost the eq and then you know fairly radically maybe set the bandwidth a little bit narrower and then just you know sweep through until the thing that you really don't like sticks out here are two tricks that i think are kind of cool and i hope you don't already know them one is if you've swept around and you've located the frequency that you don't like [Music] let's say it's 220. if you shift click on the gain knob it reverses the gain so if you're boosting by a certain amount it cuts it by that amount so that can be useful so you know generally we can hear things better when we boost them up and then try shift clicking and maybe it's too much then we can bring it back up a little bit here's another trick which again i hope you don't already know uh if you shift control click on a band and you touch one of the knobs it will solo that band so you can solo the five bands of the cq like this right and now we can sweep up and down we can hear what we're affecting i know there are other cues to do this but i like this because it's it's uh it comes with pro tools it's not free but it comes with pro tools and you know you can feel like a pioneer with doing good work with limited number of tools so that's a cool trick i saw that one from andrew scheps name dropping paul mccartney told me it's not cool to drop names a very important point about using um equalization which is it's useful to solo things to do what we've done here it's like if you want to identify something you don't like or that might be causing problems but try to spend as little time in solo as possible what really matters is the overall effect in the overall context and exercise your zoom your mental zoom control your mental solo uh zoom where you're able to you know zoom in on different frequencies um to go in both directions it's really easy to sort of get fixated on on something and then end up like where you're staring at the canvas from two inches away and a lot of people get stuck there it's really important to be able to to once you've identified the problem you think you've fixed it to not then be fixating on should it be 200 or 212 right but to zoom out go okay did that overall fix the problem if not then you dive back in so try to spend as little time in solo as possible i would say choices of of equalization you know i think you have to figure out um what you're trying to do are you trying to fix problems which case you might be need something like this where you can get surgical and you can uh you know very precisely put things out or are you looking for musical or you know program eq where we're going for wider bandwidths and we're trying to get more feeling um those are different approaches that may require either different tools or different techniques with something like eq three seven band also um sometimes and it's totally valid because we're doing an art we're using equalizer not so much as a problem solver but really just as a flavor and so if you're using you know eq3 doesn't really have a flavor but uh you know we might use a uh a me cube because it has a certain sound or we like the distortion or or we just like to look at the graphic interface and uh you know and the short answer for that is pulltech you know full tech is something i mean there's a tradition of that at power station and other studios where they would put them in line and not necessarily turn them on just because of the sound of the transformers and the inductors and so on you know there are other reasons to use equalizers and one of them i think is interesting which is that um because we're in a world where we're doing a lot of dynamics uh limiting and we don't have as much room to really get stuff give stuff as much dynamics as we'd like to we may not be able to do our basic job as well as we might otherwise and our basic job is to keep people interested and to pull them in and to engage them and uh you know that's one of the things that dynamics does but we really are in a world especially with pop music and certain kinds of music where we don't have the latitude to really get quiet and loud the way you might in classical music or jazz so we have to look for other ways to do it you know how do we make the the world open up when we get to a chorus how do we engage somebody or excite them and one way to do that is by opening up the frequency spectrum so we can use we can give the impression of dynamics with eqs and uh we can do that by um automating them or or you know flipping in between we can have the verse guitar and the chorus guitar something like that um and just the idea that when the when the high end opens or sparkles or the the acoustic guitar suddenly gets brighter you do get that kind of feeling of of lift without things necessarily getting louder so there are a couple ways to do me one way is to automate it another way as i imply it is just to make a copy you know just duplicate the track and then just mute everything that's not the verse in the verse version of whatever the instrument is or voice and then have another complete set of things in courses it's a in a way we're trying to simulate the way that records were made uh before automation where you would mix a verse or a chorus and then you would uh splice them together and there would be these sudden scene changes in things and that's very stimulating exciting and it's it's a little bit harder to do in the digital world where it's you're easier to sort of get one setting and just bounce it and have it just go that way all the way through and um that can tend to be uninteresting and our job is not to bore people one of the things that's nice about these uh this eq 37 band is that it you can get easy access to the automation because it's an avid plug-in uh you can go into the um the automation window and choose what you're going to automate and all that sort of thing but there's an easier way we have something we call boy scout like the the boy scout salute which is control option command it's all three of the modifier keys and in that case you can click on any of the uh of the knobs on here or any of the controls or if you want to you can just click here it's where the automation symbol is and it will say it will ask you if you want to automate it so let's say we want to automate the gain control on the top end and so i'm just holding ctrl option command clicking on it and says do you want to enable it yes i do green light comes on ready to go what we may want to do would be to just like i said automate that where you know we just go in and automate it and or draw it um so that it opens up say in in certain sections uh i'll just do that at random for a second here so we'll just go to the track itself put its automation in write mode and play it i'm going to unsolo it [Music] here comes the vocal i'm going to pull it down a little bit [Music] i'm darkening it to leave a little room for the vocal [Music] and then i'm going to boost it when we get to the chorus just so the world will get a little brighter [Music] here we go [Music] here's another trick which you may know and if you and i hope you don't but it's kind of cool i think of control and command as being this i see you right and so if you control we just automated this thing uh the the gain on the top end of the cq if you control command click on it in the window in the edit window it takes you right to that automation information and now you can see what you just did so i'm going to zoom in by hitting the letter t and there it is and we can manipulate it and change it and so forth it's a good way of not you know going and editing it and then often you realize oh actually i was panning it or that was the volume automation not the the high end uh so that's fun here's something else that i do with eq um fairly often it's um especially when i'm dealing with something that has a drum machine and especially if it's a drum machine that has some human players along with it um you know we'll obviously we'll do a lot of editing to make the the players conform more to the drums and kind of thing but sometimes you want to go the other direction make a drum machine feel more organic and feel a little bit more like it was played by a drummer so you know a typical culprit for me is a 16th note drum machine hi-hat you know every note sounds exactly the same they're all exactly the same level and it it lacks interest to me you know again from a synesthetic point of view it's monochrome it's the same color all the time and you know you want to give it a little bit of swing you want to give it a little bit of changes what's going to happen with an actual drummer who's playing they're not always going to hit the hi-hat in the exact same spot with the exact same angle on the stick at the exact same velocity right they're going to hit it at different places their volume might come up and down um and so one of the things that i'll do is go to the uh pencil tool and you can do different things like this like you can actually make it happen rhythmically according to your grid where it gets louder and softer but what i'll sometimes do is i'll just go to the random tool so it's command and six on the uh on the alphabetical side the command and number six and you can literally this will go depending on how your grid is set and of course as i said we're not to it oh click here but even just here there's the well this is the front of kick but uh you can do something like this where it just randomly opens the behind the high end of the track up and down and sometimes that just helps to give it a little bit more variation and interest and i'll do the same thing by the way for the automation of a on a panner so you know our job as a mixer is to shine a spotlight around and you know enhance and light different things so that there's always something of interest in the mix and so if i want to call somebody's attention say to something or you know draw yeah if i just want to draw their attention to something there are different ways you can do it i mean one is the obvious way is make it louder you know the way that our hearing works fundamentally even though we use it for rarified things like listening to music it's really based on um the our ability to protect ourselves right uh it's really there to alert us to danger and that kind of thing it's that's what it's all based on so the things that draw our attention are fairly basic like if something's getting louder it's coming towards us so that's going to call our attention to it but also even if you're in a fairly noisy room if there's something quiet that's moving it will draw your attention right if there's something rustling in the corner you're going to realize it because our hearing is there to protect us from you know being snuck up on so i i will tend to automate a panner if i want to draw attention to something so let's say we have a shaker in the in the track if it just sits in one place your brain is going to dismiss it just the way it dismisses like the wall covering around the room in which you're sitting your brain filters out stuff that isn't meaningful but you can just automate a little panner and if it's moving back and forth especially randomly not predictably um it will call your attention to it you can actually have it pretty quiet in the mix but your brain will will find that so uh hope that wasn't too obscure here's something else that i came up with the other day uh there are actually plugins that will do this for you but if you don't have those plugins or you just feel like doing it yourself this is a something that works fairly variably so your your results may vary but it actually worked kind of interestingly in on this track um and it's a method of making your own resonant filter with eq one which again comes with pro tools so this works partly on this because i did the water bottle trick that i told you about earlier empty five gallon water bottle in front of bass drum microphone hanging down uh it's got a low pass filter on at about 120 hertz uh it makes your acoustic bass drum sound like an 808 this is my one of my evangelisms i'm trying to get everybody to do this so give it a try and i hope it works uh anyhow um so i already have a resonant thing that i'm sending into this filter but let me show you this trick it's uh you can do this in filter freak okay because it has a knob that says resonance up here on the send i'm sending the bass drum out on bus seven and bus seven is feeding an aux input track mono uh that has a low pass filter on it so in other words i'm feeding the bass drum to an aux track it's got only uh the lowest octaves below 90. so by the way you should listen to the sun headphones or if you have a sub that's that works but if you're listening on a laptop this won't make any sense uh but if you're trying to make again if you want trying to make a bass drum sound like an 808 this is a pretty cool trick i think uh okay so here we go uh here's the bass drum uh in and um water bottle by themselves [Music] that already has some resonance [Music] i'm going to bring up the uh the resin the this other resonant one which doesn't make much difference as you know if you option click on fader it goes to zero okay if i turn up a lot you know you get some more resonance but here's the trick i'm making it a self-resonant uh eq or filter so the filter is being fed by a bus in this case number seven and what i'm doing is i'm feeding it back to itself right i uh so i have on these things being fed by bus seven i am sending to bus seven if i feed it if i feed back too much it will do this which is lovely uh but that's not really what we want so i'm just gonna slowly bring this up and uh and see what happens it gets cool about minus five [Music] feel that [Music] no self-resonating filter self resonating filter turn it down a little let's mute it and put the rest of the band in [Music] now i'm going to turn it on [Music] that's kind of cool huh and there's one other trick which is interesting i think which is if you invert the polarity so as a feeding back each time it comes in it's coming out it's coming each time it recycles through it's coming in upside down it's going to make the resonance an octave higher here we go [Music] well it's kind of a minor third [Music] again you won't hear this unless you're listening on something that has subs but again this is inverted [Music] so you can actually change that and i think especially with headphones and sub you will feel this i'm just going to show you a little bit more of it and then we're going to wrap it up [Music] do [Music] do [Music] music it's the best uh i was just going to show you some just a few other things if you notice this is um take one of three we're not using the other two and if you also notice everything that i've been playing back which like i said i tracked almost no eq you know i don't mean to brag but what the hell uh the uh but if you notice also there's no volume automation on anything this is all the tracks are are just playing straight so when the guitar solo gets louder because the guitarists played louder and uh you know they're balancing themselves just because they're they're so good um and as you know if you hold down option and you hit the minus key on your alphabetical keyboard it allows you to flip back and forth between seeing your volumes and your waveforms um and or you know you can do that with um with just whatever the individual selected tracks are here's another very minor uh shortcut but it's kind of interesting when you're eq'ing stuff there's a tendency just to always feel like it's better because hey it's louder and you know you can do that with a fader and then not have to worry about phase shift and other problems um so it's a good idea to level match things but there's something that i recommend doing which is when you've eq'd stuff select all the tracks or whatever tracks you have eq on and if you hold down shift and you hit e for eq it bypasses all of your equalizers and that way you can tell if you're doing harm uh or improving things and again it's you know um as john mcbride says loudness always wins uh and so it's it's easy to deceive oneself just because you turn up the base you're trying to mid-range you don't have the trouble and you go oh listen how it jumps out you could have just pushed the fader up 3db and probably done less harm so there are some ideas and some tips and tricks i guess you might call them i hope i hope that they're useful for you and i just want to thank warren and everybody pretty psychopro for letting me come on and babble at you it's a true honor and uh come and visit us in nashville hope you're all well and uh stay safe thank you very much [Music] [Applause] [Music] you

Channel: Produce Like A Pro

Views: 37,957

Rating: 4.9560208 out of 5

Keywords: Warren Huart, Produce Like A Pro, Home studio, Home recording, Recording Audio, Music Production, Record Producer, Recording Studio

Id: NNIDC0wd82g

Length: 33min 45sec (2025 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 06 2021