EQ Sweep Technique

[yancrazy]

Going back to the questions about what to do before de-essing.....

Although very tedious, i would go through the vocal take and make a small dB cut to the offending Sibalance. This will help the de-esser to not have to work as hard to remove the problem....the result will be a vocal take that hasnt been drained off all the desirable higher end freq's.

It works for me.

[redsstink@gmail.com]

I use this technique a lot and it really lets an acoustic guitar shine will you slightly take the bad parts away.

[brandondrury]

Yeah, the sweep technique works on everything. I can't think of a situation in which it doesn't work.

[mightymusic]

One cool feature of the Ozone 4 EQ is if you hold down alt you automatically get a narrow sweep that you can scroll across the spectrum - quite handy!

[leolonesome]

hey guys, i'm kinda new to recording and mixing.. i just wanna know some basic terms about EQing cos i'm getting confused..

what does it mean when you say:
bottom - (like in bass guitar "bottom at 50-80hz)
attack - (like in toms "attack at 5-7khz")
snap - (like in snare "snap at 10khz")
hollowness - (like in kick "hollowness at 400hz")
sparkle -
fatness -
crispness -
fullness -
presence -
sibilance -

i just dont get it. is this another term for "increase" or "decrease" ??

hope you guys are nice enough to explain it to a newbie



.

[bholst]

hey guys, i'm kinda new to recording and mixing.. i just wanna know some basic terms about EQing cos i'm getting confused..

what does it mean when you say:
bottom - (like in bass guitar "bottom at 50-80hz)
attack - (like in toms "attack at 5-7khz")
snap - (like in snare "snap at 10khz")
hollowness - (like in kick "hollowness at 400hz")
sparkle -
fatness -
crispness -
fullness -
presence -
sibilance -

i just dont get it. is this another term for "increase" or "decrease" ??

hope you guys are nice enough to explain it to a newbie



.

First of all leolonesome, welcome to the forum.
Secondly, I'm sure someone will respond with descriptions of each of those terms, and really, they're just adjectives to describe tones. Nothing more.
One thing that I will say is that it is easy to get caught up in these terms and numbers and lose sight of the most important tool you have: YOUR EARS. Always use your ears man. You know what sounds good to you. The moment you start worrying about some of this stuff is the moment your mixes start going down the toilet.
There is no harm in learning the terms (but remember that not everyone uses the same terms to describe the same thing), as it helps in communicating some of these things to others. I'm just saying it's easy to get caught up in some of that (as I learned from experience ).

[bozmillar]

hey guys, i'm kinda new to recording and mixing.. i just wanna know some basic terms about EQing cos i'm getting confused..

what does it mean when you say:
bottom - (like in bass guitar "bottom at 50-80hz)
attack - (like in toms "attack at 5-7khz")
snap - (like in snare "snap at 10khz")
hollowness - (like in kick "hollowness at 400hz")
sparkle -
fatness -
crispness -
fullness -
presence -
sibilance -

i just dont get it. is this another term for "increase" or "decrease" ??

hope you guys are nice enough to explain it to a newbie



.

Ha ha. Don't feel bad about being lost. I've been doing this for who knows how long and I still don't know what people mean when they say that stuff most of the time. Those are words that people use to describe how something sounds. Everybody means something different by them, but once you kind of get the idea, it's easier to hear what people are talking about it. It's just really hard to describe how something sounds, and words like these are our best options.

[brandondrury]

The problem with those words is they are subjective. They mean slightly different things to everyone. There will never be an agreed upon standard for "crispness", for example.

In most cases, the general intention of these words is rather broad and depends on the instrument and genre of music we are dealing with. Attack on toms can be 5-7k, but attack on kick drum can be as low as 2k by my definition for dance-type stuff or as high as 12k for death metal. In this case, "attack" more describing that clicky/clacky component of a kick drum that you can hear on a laptop, but it doesn't necessarily describe where it lies.

I like to use the "sparkle" word. I'm never really referring to a fixed frequency. Instead, I'm just referring to a specific quality I'm looking for. A sparkly acoustic guitar tends to still have this "sparkle" even when recorded with a fairly dark mic. So this stuff gets very, very complicated and ultimately shouldn't be taken too seriously.

It's very tough to use English to convey audio stuff so we do the best with what we can. I do raise hell about w a r m but that's because I believe that phrase is completely meaningless, particularly when people don't use it in a relative way. I think that's the bigger point. All of these words should be used to describe something in comparison to something else. "I wish your bass guitar was meatier." What the hell does that mean? I don't know, but if I heard that I'd start looking at 120-300Hz to see if I could find anything that excited me down there.

Brandon

[MrRS]

where is parametic eq in cubase??

[m24p]

where is parametic eq in cubase??

You'll be able to learn much more quickly if you can learn to look up this stuff yourself. Here's a video I found by searching for "cubase paremetric EQ": Cubase 5 - Parametric EQ - YouTube


But you don't even need to use a built-in EQ, you could, for example, use ReaEQ from Reaplugs... REAPER | ReaPlugs

[aj113]

The only eq I use is a graphic. I use it for shelving, for the 'sweep' technique (boost each frequency madly one by one till you hear the problem area then cut it), I use it on the master outputs to smooth out the spectrum analysis graph and I use it on on individual channels to shape the sound. No parametrics, no multiband compressors, no hipass/lopass filters. Works for me, and saves my head from exploding too.

I guess it's just a throwback to my tape days when graphics were all that was available to us. I simply don't feel the need to use anything else.