Extreme EQ

Whether you produce your music electronically, on your computer, or in a more traditional setting, one of the most important considerations is the way your music sounds. This is, to a large extent down to the gear you use, but you will have noticed that the thousands of, say, guitar-bass-drums bands still manage to come up with their "own sound." Even though they seemingly use the exact same instruments! The same applies to music which relies more on synths and special effects. How is it that this pro band which uses the same synths you have has so much cooler sounds?

Well, it comes down to knowing your instrument, any plugins or effect units and... more often than not: a few very simple mixing tricks.

You can do an enormous lot of sound tweaking using just about any semi-decent mixer. You can shape each individual sound with just EQ to a far greater extent than most musicians realize. And if you're working on a computer, the possibilities are endless even without any of those expensive sound plugins installed. You just need a simple sound editor. We'll get into this some other time.

Here, I just wanted to draw you attention to a very simple technique which is so often overlooked: Extreme EQ.

With a mixer, you might only be using the treble and bass knobs/sliders - most musicians unfamiliar with mixing stop there. If they touch the mids, it's only tentatively. But try some extreme settings for that guitar or piano. If you're rapidly changing the mid-EQ settings while an instrument is playing you'll immediately notice the familiar "filtering" effect, so popular these days in dance music. (You can get plugins which actually do this "knob-twisting" automatically). And you'll notice that these extreme settings can completely change the character of the individual sound you're processing. Don't shy away from such experimentation. You might be shocked at just how much a sound can change with "creative EQ." The same goes for gates or compressors. Try some extreme settings and watch your sounds change character.

LISTEN TO: 229-Q/Wednesday Jun 29, 2009