The frequency spectrum

[johnnyriot]

Hey, I'm new at being a gear slut. I just got my first board, it's an alesis 16 ch. multimix firewire, I had the onyx for a few days, but when I realized I couldn't use the EQ, I decided to spend half the money on alesis. So my band decided to record. we miked up a decent pacific set with a maple snare with: a mogami MXL small diaphram condenser, and one regular MXL small diapram condenser for overheads. These were placed parallel, directly in front of the drums. then an SM57 on the snare and hi-tom, and a sennhesier 421 on the low tom. I stuck an AKG in the kick. Now I realize I should have put some large diaphram MXL mics, one on the kick along with the AKG and one on the bottom of the snare. ANYWAY, what my question is...........
Where should everything in the mix fall when i go to EQ it? I bump the guitar around 1000 hz, the kick around 100 hz, not sure where the bass should go, and i spike the snare around 8khz.. How do you guys do it? Do I have to bump things at different frequency levels so they don't cancel each other out?

[ncCountryMike]

It's all about creating a niche for each instrument in your mix. You'll have to do more than just bump certain frequencies to get your mix to sound good if you didn't mic everything perfectly and then some.

For example. If you've got an acoustic guitar, you might try and roll off some of the low end to leave room for the bass guitar so things don't get muddy. It depends on the mix, but you probably won't need the low end of the acoustic guitar since the kick/bass guitar pretty much cover the lower end of the spectrum. But you won't notice the missing guitar frequencies because the frequencies of the acoustic guitar you listen to most fit in perfectly with the rest of the mix.

You may not have an acoustic guitar in your mix but you get what I'm trying to say. There's no one formula for how to eq stuff since everything's different so just play around with it on instruments that need it and see what you get out of it.

Just try to think of eq'ing like you would food on your plate. You want to make a section on your plate for the broccoli to be by itself because if juices from your fruit run into the broccoli's space it probably won't taste that good.

Of course don't go overboard or else you can just as easily make your mix worse than when it started. It's all about practice.

[johnnyriot]

Thanks, I seem to be on the right track. I noticed that starting with a good recording seems to be the most important thing, so I will probably starting tracking all over again and play around WAY more with mike placement and phase inversion and that stuff.. I heard wood is one of the best floors to record on, is this true? I heard about Butch Vig throwing down pieces of plywood under the drums, I guess I should try it if it worked for Nirvana. I see you are from Nashville, that's cool, I recently moved to Knoxville from New Orleans.



Johnny, Total Riot

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[matt thomas]

Yes a good sound to start with is all important, and making sure everything is TUNED including drums. tune guitars between takes.

One thing that normaly takes people ages to learn is that cutting is often better than boosting, especially with cheaper eq's.

that is, if you think something needs more highs, cut the lows instead. kind of like a glass is half full type thing.

there we go, you are now a year ahead of where you were yesterday

narco