Points of interest…..mastering eq

Right, I’m going to tell you the so called secrets of mastering eq. I know everybody thinks it’s the compression that makes that lovely stable full sound, but without balancing the tone, the compression wont make that happen alone.

Your 2 best allies

High and low shelves!!!.

Biggest problem in mixes are holes in the spectrum. They are what cause the unstable dynamics, and harsh mids etc etc. Let’s say the start of your track is a single synth. It’s been sculpted so that it’s mainly only covering 300-3k (very rough example). Ideally, whoever mixed it should have done some automation, so that the eq for that part fills out more of the spectrum while playing solo, but that’s not always the case.

Rather than trying to make the sound less harsh by eqing the the range that’s there, do this…..

Add upper and lower shelves. Start with a .5 db gain lift, and .63Q(or 6.3, depends on your software) . Now scan the freq until you hear the sound blend(forget the spectrum meter!!!). If you put the low shelf at too high a freq, the sound will start to squash up, like overlapping. If it’s too low, there will still be a gap between the lifted shelf and the range the synth is occupying. So find the freq where theres no overlap and no gap. Now adjust the gain until you have a more stable sound. Lift it too much and you create another problem!. Now adjust the q until it sounds natural.

Do the same with the top shelf. Now here’s an important tip…..where the synth’s main freq area and the upper and lower shelves blend, there will usually be a slight dip at that freq(or an overlap if you got the freq slightly off). So make a band of eq and check to see if it needs a slight cut or boost at the crossover point. Forget looking at any numbers, this is all done by ear. Check this pic to see kind of what I’m on about.

Bridge building

That’s pretty much how I see eqing a track…..now!. I got it very wrong for quite a while though, even if the results were still pretty good, I was cutting around all the good parts, like some kind of audio scalpel.

So what’s the real deal?….making sure all the ‘points of interest’ are prominent!!. Here’s how….

Set up a band of eq, make the Q .53 and the gain +.3 db as a starting point. Now starting with the low end (the basis for the whole sound)find a freq where the sound becomes more stable, more full. Here’s another huuuuge tip….let’s say you’ve found a nice point at 96hz, forget about listening to the bass etc, or anything around that area that just got raised. Listen to it’s effect on the rest of the sound. Fine tune the freq, by listening to how clear everything else becomes, being off by 1 hz  can make a huge difference to the clarity in the track with low freq’s. Some of the better eq’s use .1 hz  increments below 100hz.

You can go over the whole spectrum using this kind of process, but in lifting a ‘point of interest’ you may also slightly lift a bad freq. So be prepared to do a few cuts to keep them in line. Use the same principle to find a cut point, but using a negative gain -.5 db to start with. Fine tune it by ignoring the edge in the snare you’re trying to smooth(example), and listen to how everything else becomes clearer as you hit the freq right on.

Getting the Q right

This is a tough one!. In mixing, there is far more tolerance for slight inaccuracies. The freq,Q,and gain in mastering can destroy the whole sound!. What you’re looking to do, is train your ears to hear the slight overlaps or delays with wrong choices. Choosing a Q that is too narrow will cause the sound to slightly squash up when that freq area is in play. Too wide a cut will cause a delay in the sound, like it’s not all quite joined together somehow. Literally, a Q of .54 instead of the correct.53 creates another problem, and .52 even worse! (you’ll go further up the spectrum trying to fill the hole you just made). I’ll sound like a mad man until the day you start to hear it clearly .

Sections

If all this wasn’t hard enough, you have to re eq for almost every section(depending on mix quality). Let’s say you’ve had drums, bass and one guitar playing for the first part, then the vocal comes in. This will usually push more gain into certain freq areas, and also move the centre freq of the eq boosts required. Let’s say you had a boost at 2k, now the vocal has made the true center 2.7k and it needs less boost because of the extra energy from the vocal (just examples). Why does this matter??….if you’re a sloppy workman….who cares!, if however you want to keep maximum clarity right through the song, you’re going to have to change those centre freq’s for each section of the track. Along with compression and limiting changes etc.

Here we’ve hit on one of the things that makes cheap mastering a total joke. I speak to a few M E’s at various levels, so I know roughly what the going rates are(and I’m nowhere near the cheapest). However, I would love to know what one of the top companies (Sterling etc)charge for a full on “we made your album the absolute best it can sound” job. Because the bottom line is this….if you’re only paying so much per track or per album etc, the person doing the job has to make money, so there are only so many changes they are going to make for each track.

Conclusion

I’m not going to tell you this will be easy. Learning to hear all this nonsense takes a lot of time in front of your speakers. Sitting just listening wont do the job either, you have to get down and dirty with the tools and make some mistakes before you start to get it right. Keep this in mind…..a lot of mastering is about fooling the ears and brain. Hide the bad behind the good, within the boundaries of what you can get away with.

I haven’t really said this yet, but….hear it first, then adjust. The reason I haven’t said that, is because to hear the parts that are missing takes a lot more experience than hearing something there’s too much of. So I’m really only saying it for the pro’s who want to pick holes in my articles

I may add bits to this post, but for now I just ran out of steam.

Thanks for reading, I hope some of it proves useful for getting better results from your creative outputs.

Tone

(please leave a comment, so it doesn’t feel like a waste of time)