Okay, so now that we know roughly what the frequency spectrum is, and why we might want to manipulate it, let's look at the available tools that we have to eat. You know, like I said before the assortment of tools available are as diverse as a woodworkers tools. Like for example, all the woodworkers tools basically have the same job that is to carve away at the word, but you use different tools for different tasks, right, that makes sense. So let's go ahead and introduce each of these tools and then go through them one by one in depth. Okay, so before we get started, obviously, you need to be listening to all these examples, either some headphones or preferably through some studio monitors. If you're trying to hear these EQ changes on laptop speakers, you may not be able to hear a lot of these changes specifically down the bottom and Okay, so I brought up what I thought would be the most basic EQ I've ever seen.

If you ever started out in a band and you had your own little PA, this is probably a model of what you had. With the most basic EQ you can get pretty much which is bass and treble showing EQ. Now when the knobs are straight up in the middle, there's no changes when you turn the knob to the right and that's a boost, in this case base, or back to no boost the base, then cutting a base. And if we were to click this command, click that to get back to the top and then the treble again, you could boost that and reduce that. Now what we're going to do is play a song here, and you'll be able to see those changes have happened over here on the on the graphic. And we'll learn one of the one of the first lessons of EQ is that when you boost up, everybody knows that if you boost up all the channels you'll get distortion, right?

Well also, if Start boosting up a lot of EQ. You'll push that into storage and have a look at these meters up here when we start playing a song Okay, here we go start out because the bass liquid The bass is right now let's boost that up. Since the day you have to quit the green tapes and look up here. Very off the top. And then of course we can take a look. I'm showing by this mask class and EQ to learn about a couple of shoving your cues but I just wanted to get people up to speed who have never used EQ before that the most basic EQ you can pretty much find Okay, so now let's graduate from the most basic channel EQ to something that you might see on you know, a more sophisticated, either hardware console, or, in this case is in in reason on their, on their mixer level really nice EQ on this mixer.

So, let's go through this particular EQ. And if we just follow the color coding here, we're looking at our lows, low mids, and our high mids and then a high frequencies here. Now, let's first look at this first turn the EQ on and then you can see actually what's going on across here. Let's boost the low end here and let's see what happens. So this is called a shelving filter and what it's doing it is boosting from any particular point and you can see that point is sweepable. Very, very low and it's 40 hertz all the way up to I think this goes up to 600 helmets right here.

So a typical point of that might be, say around 121 25, something like that. So what that means is that around this point right here, and I think, yeah, you can drag this right here on the screen as well. And you can actually do the boost and the cut and where that point is, see what's going on with these knobs over here. It's quite handy, because you can do it in a graphical way here, even while you're following along, if I play press play, you can see the actual content. And in this case, this is the process content, look at the low end. Pull it down to that low end.

Okay, so back to shelving EQ is what they do is take a point, and from that point, it boosts everything on down. Just think of that as a shelf. You've got to put your books up there on the shelf, pretty kind of lame example, but it's a good way to remember that and we can do the exact same thing. Let me just throw these guys out. And we can do the same thing up the top. And we can boost around a certain frequency, very highs all the way down to 1.5 kilohertz right there.

So again, you could play some books up there, that's a shelf takes from that point all the way up, or in the case of the low end, it does it from all the way down the bottom. Let me just reset all of this. So that is the low shop and the high shop. And basically you're boosting that or cutting that or boosting that or cutting that in terms of the mid range. Here's what we can do. If we boost up in the mid range, you can see that it's boosting in exactly the mid range right there.

And it's centered around this frequency right here, which is 632, which is right on the money there. And you can sweep that up and down into your high mids or your low mids and then there's a third Control typically on a sweepable, you know, a bell EQ, and that is cure quality factor or the bandwidth, a number of different ways you can express that. But you can have that very narrow or very wide. The higher the number, the narrower or narrower, that boost or that cat is. And then of course, you can do the very same thing on zero that out to the high mids, we can boost that. Slide it around and adjust the cue right there.

Okay, we're now over in Pro Tools and I brought up the most basic, well, it's not the most basic EQ they have a one band as well. But this is kind of the go to EQ that you find in Pro Tools unless you spend a lot of money purchasing third party EQ plugins and it's almost like we've just tilted The EQ that we saw in reason on its side here we have a low and now highs. They're both shelving member, you could put the books up on the shelf, they're either boosting or cutting. And I'll just reset that with ox option clicking. And then we'll do the same thing with the top n. It's a shelving, EQ, and then you can then go across into the men's here. And then you can basically do the same things you did before, adjust the bandwidth of the cue, so that you're only just basically dealing with the frequencies you have dial in right here and you can sweep that around.

Or else you can widen that up and then adjust other than boosting or cutting those particular frequencies right there. So again, you said the cue, boost or cut and then where you were going to sweep around there. And in the case of the reason EQ, we had a low shelf and high I think there were two in between, you have three in between here. So this is called a seven band. Why is it called a seven band? Well, you have 12345 bands here or you actually have a couple of filters up here, which is still part of EQ.

Let me just zero this back out. Again, there's still EQ but what they do is actually a little bit different. Let me turn the high pass filter in here, and some people call it a low roll off. It's basically what it does is it passes the highs and it slopes down and rolls off the lows. Now how steep that low. That kind of corner is there is set up right over here six db per octave.

In other words, every octave we go it drops down 60 be another octave, it'll go down another 60 B and so on. You can make that a little sharper. 12 Db 18 right up to two For and you can see that's a very big drop off. And then you can scoot that around. So that you're just, you know, for example, a typical place, you might, might put that for a Male Vocalist, you know, around 80 or 100 hertz, because the fundamentals of you know, most male voices unless you're very white is, you know, around 100 hertz, and we'll look in that a little bit later on. So I'll just pop that out.

And the inverse is the same over here. This is a low pass filter, or a high roll off, you could say that we can adjust how steep that that curve is. And then where you're gonna actually start lopping off those high frequencies. Now, notice that each use can be built in to a mixer channel or a guitar amp or so on, or they can be standalone units that can be inserted into signal chain. Let's look at the different ways of routing any EQ. Okay, I'm at over in Pro Tools.

And if you're not particularly familiar with Pro Tools, don't really worry about it. All I'm really going to show you here is how you can route EQs across channels subgroups, and the master buss, and it would go like this. So for example, this is my lead vocal right here, what I've done is the background vocals here and I have six background vocals, instead of sending them straight out to the master. I've sent them out to bus One, two, which feeds this subgroup right here and all that means is that if I was to play this, I can write the entire so all the background vocals can be written by by this subgroup right here. So you can either move all of these up and down, or you can move it over here. But even better than that, if you're using subgroups, and you can do this on any da w or hardware mixer for that, for that.

For that instance, as well, what you would do is just assign all these over to a subgroup, and then you could put an EQ on the subgroup. So there's basically three places you could do it, you can come over here to your first Background Vocal. And this is how you do it in Pro Tools that you do it in a pretty similar way, basically, you know, in any other detail you have. So this EQ is placed on just this vocal. So you could do that. Or you could go over here to your subgroup, and breasted all of these background vocals coming over here.

You could insert it across here. And now guess what you'd be doing? You'd be E queuing the internet Higher, some of all of those background vocals as well, right there, then you could take it even further than that and then go to your master buss here and do basically the same thing go across and do a seven band EQ on that. Now, what would you be queuing you'd be queuing everything. So, this one over here, you would just be queuing this particular track. If you selected this one over here, then you'd be E queuing just all of the things within that subgroup in that instance was background vocals.

Or if you select this one over here, then you will be EQ and the entire the entire mix. Now here's the way I tend to look at it. If you're doing a ton of EQ over here on the master, then you probably haven't done a good job in terms of mixing everything else together. You really, once you get to E cueing them the the master buss, then you know it should be very, very basic tweaks, maybe, you know, one, two, maybe three DB absolutely Max, because when you think about it, just the faders here, adjust everything about EQ. If the bass track here, if you pump that up, then that's going to add a lot of low end content over to the master. So, do you kind of follow that workflow, start out at the individual track, then any subgroups and then if you have to, you can go over to the master buss right there.

Now in this example, I I'm seeing all these vocals thing is a lead vocal than a double on that and then three part harmony that a double as well. So seeing it's all me and it's all the same microphone. You know, I would have no problems going through and either bringing up a preset and tweaking then cosmetic across to each of those or else you could do this, something over here in the in the Background Vocal Group, because it's the same guy sing all the way through there if you had different vocalists, then I would definitely go through there and EQ each person differently. Now there's a caveat to what I said before about, you know, the more being my vocal, my vocal will change a lot, especially in these higher registers. If it's a three part, maybe this is a third and a fifth and octave like that.

Then once you get out there, you will, the vocal content will be a lot different in these high background vocals and it will be in these low background vocals and certainly, if you have male and female, you know, across your background vocalist, I would definitely EQ those guys separately, but if you're in a pinch, you know you could take that out there and just do all of your E queuing over here and your new background. Background Vocal Group. Like I said, that wouldn't be my first choice. But if I had to do something pretty quickly, I would do that. And then certainly over here, if you're just make a ton of EQ over there, it's probably not not a good idea should be going back. And you know, working with just your balances, maybe also some compression is some various tracks are popping through.

We'll learn how to do all that stuff in a second. But this is just kind of a good primer to where thing, how EQs get placed or routed within your mixer. There are other things like dynamic EQ, and also I mean, the esses are an interesting type of effect because they're kind of half EQ and half compressor. There's actually a Let me see if I've got time. Get a lead vocal here. Plug in B dynamics and a de Esser.

Great. Okay, so this is more in line to compression. It's actually a frequency adjustable frequency dependent or frequency specific compressor. So if you want to learn a lot about compressors looking at the masterclass in compressors so now that we're familiar with all of those tools available, let's actually see how these tools are used an action in both individual source channels and also entire mixes.