Learning how these bands sound is simply a case of playing around with an equaliser and listening to what happens as you change various values, the more you get used to ‘the sound of frequencies’ the quicker you will find your frequency adjustments, and more importantly the quicker the instruments within your mixes will begin to gel. The main area you want to be looking at in this tutorial are the lovely coloured boxes at the bottom, these each represent a group of frequencies or bands: Next you will notice two sections labelled HPF and LPF these are specific shelf filters of which you can read about in our previously mentioned article here. The first thing you will notice in the top left hand of the window is an input/output meter and gain control, this may not seem important at first but remember that boosting and cutting frequencies will cause gain changes which eventually may need accounting for…
This window may seem daunting to those who have not worked with the effect before so let’s first break it up a little…
You have probably already made use of an equaliser at some point, most likely on something as simple as a car stereo which offers a gain control for both low and high frequencies, mixing applications require much more precise values and this is where it is necessary to understand what each of the controls mean… Hands Onįor the purposes of this tutorial we will be using the 7-Band Parametric Equaliser which comes included with Pro Tools, don’t worry if these terms are confusing as we will be explaining them a little later on, all you need to be aware of for now is that this equaliser is perfectly adequete for handling mixes at a professional level. What is it?Īn equaliser or ‘EQ’ is a tool used to control the amplitude of frequencies, they come in a variety of formats but are all used for the same thing. If you have already read our article on filtering here you will probably be aware of how equalisers can benefit your productions, if not then do not fear as this tutorial will take you through everything you need to know. When it comes to mixing, the aim is to get the best sound from each instrument while making sure they all play nice with each other, ask a number of engineers how they begin working on their sessions and you can be pretty sure they will kick everything off with an equaliser.