Pro audio file mixing with eq download reddit

As mixers, we love to geek out over the extremities of the frequency spectrum. We obsess over achieving deep, floor-shaking bass and airy, crystal-clear highs.

The midrange is where the core of most instruments lie. Master-mixer Jack Joseph Puig sums it up best:. The midrange should be a priority, not an afterthought. Spend more time focusing your attention here. The entire process can be broken down into five steps:. You should always be trying to solve a problem. When you start doing things for no reason. Before reaching for an EQ, ask yourself— what problem am I trying to solve? Instead, they focus on one track at a time and make decisions in a vacuum.

And so your decisions will only make tracks sound better on their own. But these decisions rarely hold up in context. Remember—the goal is to make tracks sound good together. In order to do this, you have to listen to everything together.

And you have to make decisions in context, with the rest of the tracks playing. While soloing might be fine for basic cleanup work, do the majority of your EQing with the whole mix playing. Instead, find the offending track in your mix and make the cut there.

A full band project could have upwards of 12 tracks or many more : vocals, guitars, bass, one for each drum, an overheard mic, and so on. Drag your audio file right into the track. Looking for a file to use?

Right-click or control-click Mac to download. Then, turn on repeat and press the play button! As we mentioned at the beginning of the article, a DAW is used to edit tracks. Want to learn more about EQ types? Now we can start EQing. Make sure your audio is still playing, and then add some highs by dragging up the right EQ control.

It should start to sound pretty crisp, even tinny. Now drag it back to zero. Then drag down the third control to cut out some mids. When it comes to doing these jobs, there are a number of different tools we have at our disposal.

And some will prove more effective than others. There are a number of different filter shapes as well as styles. By rolling these tones out we allow the kick and bass to push through and dominate the low end.

A low-pass filter on the electrics can help the cymbals really stand out. In regards to pass filters, there is something called slope. This refers to how fast the attenuation progresses.

A steeper filter like 12dB would be twice as aggressive, attenuating 12dB at Hz and 24dB at 50Hz, and so on. The positive of a steeper filter is that we eliminate more of the unwanted tones, but the negative is that we start getting more pronounced artifacts such as ring and ripple.

A shelf is the positive or negative combination of a pass filter and the original. Once our signal is split, we can amplify or attenuate the passband and recombine while simply taking the stopband to our output unchanged. Through this, we can brighten or darken a signal, or make it fuller, or thinner, depending on what we need. Much like a simple pass filter, we can have varying steepnesses of our slope. Quite the opposite. A gradual slope will cause a gradual increase to tones well below 6kHz, whereas a steep slope will have a faster gradient, and a very steep slope will actually cause a dip in the level right before the corner frequency.

This is why certain high shelves will have corner frequencies as high as 40kHz. The combination of a low-pass and high-pass equally spaced from a center frequency will create a bandpass filter. The passband of the bandpass … oh jeez … yeah… the passband of this combination of filters can be fed back into the stopband to create a bell boost or bell cut.

This is good for centering in a range of frequencies that we may want to adjust. For example, if we cut vocals in a boxy sounding space, we may want to attenuate the boxy tones that exist in the lower midrange. These tones usually center around one specific frequency but contain a range of frequency content.

By attenuating these tones we can effectively compensate for the excess buildup that the room is creating. Bell shapes have two parameters. Bells have slope shape as well. If we were to try to eliminate a particular tone using an out of phase bandpass filter the results would create very audible artifacts. The cure would be worse than the disease. This inductor is tuned to the capacitor to center in on one exact frequency that causes the circuit to no longer pass current.

The more exacting the tuning, the narrower the notch. For example, if we are recording in a room that has a ringy tone in it, we may want to notch that out. Or if one of the tubes in our microphone or preamp is dying and creating a microphonic resonance, we may want to eliminate that with a notch filter.

This technique involves applying a narrow boost to a signal and then sweeping it across the frequency spectrum until hearing something unpleasant and then notching that frequency.