Tditty said:
Does anyone know of a good resource for learning about this stuff? I hear people talk about "20 Hz roll off" and i don't really know what instruments should be in what Hz range and that sort of thing. I hope this makes some kind of sense. Thanks in advance.
Some good replies here, you should also bear in mind to 'judge the sounds within the context of the mix'.
It's not really necessary to know what instruments sit where in a mix to great depth, common sense tells you that. But it does help, when you add an eq to a sound, as you 'know' where to 'look' in the frequency range.
A good way to learn more about how to eq sounds, is simply through practical use of it. If you have a bass sound for instance that is too heavy, attatch an eq to it and increase the gain. ( use a medium/smallish Q width ) and 'sweep' the frequency range, you will soon know when you have hit the spot, as the sound will be overpowering ( watch you speakers )
You can then get into more depth with the eq by, narrowing the Q width ( the area covered by the eq ) and cutting ( or boosting, whatever the case may be, DEF; cutting here ).
Basically thats all you should concern yourself with. Mixing is done by your ears, hence the necessity for reference monitors, so you get the true nature of the sound to work with.
You will soon get to know which instruments sit where and your eq will become second nature.
Human hearing is generally accepted to be in the region of 20hz to 20khz, anything above or below that is irrelevant for us.
Although, I def agree with the previous post in regard to rolling off the low end. From at least 40hz, the reason is that, sounds this low contain little or no harmonics, their presence is only sub level, which will cause your music to distort at levels way below commercial cds.
These frequencies are very hard to judge without high end studio farfield monitoring systems and very tricky do get right at home through nearfields.
Prob better to roll them off.
Like you said in your post about hz roll off. To do this with an eq you could first increase the gain, then sweep the frequency to where the right hand part of the curve starts,( say its at 50hz here )Then reduce the gain to as far as it will go. The result would be a gentle 'roll off' of low end frequencies. In Reason the eq has a db line running through the centre of it, showing a value in hz and db levels, so something like that eq curve I just mentally created would mean:
At 50hz the bass level would be at 0db and 20hz frequencies would be around -40db, generally the lower you go in sub harmonics, the lower the db of those frequencies to inaudible levels.
