Re: GRcade Musician's Club - Do You "Do" Music?
Posted: Thu Aug 27, 2020 3:09 pm
It's worth doing a bit of study in transients and psychoacoustics, particularly to the area of the spectrum that we are particularly sensitive to, as Heskimo mentions. In those areas you more likely want to cut if something sounds overly harsh and brittle, or boost if it can't really stand out.
For example, both both snare drums and guitars, I'll add a bell shaped peak around 1KHz or sweep around that area with a parametric EQ that uses nodes on a curve for easier adjustments. Live has this, so does Reaper. And Live 9 or 10 even added a built in spectrometer so you can see how the frequency response curve is being adjusted by the EQ. Although, that feature already existed in Reaper for a long time, which goes to show what an amazing piece of software it is considering you can trial it forever and it costs under £100.
One thing to remember though is that when you boost rather than cut in EQ, you're increasing the sum amplitude of the entire waveform. So your sound will clip hard if you don't reduce the output level on either the EQ or the master bus. You can also (and probably should) automate this using volume envelopes during the busiest parts of tracks. To avoid that if you can't be bothered, add a hard limiter as the final processor in your effects chain, but as that's just a compressor with a hard knee, you'll smush the waveform and make it all sound muddy again whenever it would otherwise clip into over 0dB territory (so during the loud sections that you want to pop as that's probably where most your hooks, drops, choruses etc are). Personally I hard limit it to -0.2dB, giving the sound system that little bit of headroom in case itself introduces clipping, whether analogue distortion or some shitty computer or whatever.
For example, both both snare drums and guitars, I'll add a bell shaped peak around 1KHz or sweep around that area with a parametric EQ that uses nodes on a curve for easier adjustments. Live has this, so does Reaper. And Live 9 or 10 even added a built in spectrometer so you can see how the frequency response curve is being adjusted by the EQ. Although, that feature already existed in Reaper for a long time, which goes to show what an amazing piece of software it is considering you can trial it forever and it costs under £100.
One thing to remember though is that when you boost rather than cut in EQ, you're increasing the sum amplitude of the entire waveform. So your sound will clip hard if you don't reduce the output level on either the EQ or the master bus. You can also (and probably should) automate this using volume envelopes during the busiest parts of tracks. To avoid that if you can't be bothered, add a hard limiter as the final processor in your effects chain, but as that's just a compressor with a hard knee, you'll smush the waveform and make it all sound muddy again whenever it would otherwise clip into over 0dB territory (so during the loud sections that you want to pop as that's probably where most your hooks, drops, choruses etc are). Personally I hard limit it to -0.2dB, giving the sound system that little bit of headroom in case itself introduces clipping, whether analogue distortion or some shitty computer or whatever.