Okay this is kind of a dumb post, but my posts have been pretty dumb as of late. Fortunately for most, they have been few and far between. However, this little tool came as a real useful surprise to me so I thought I'd mention it for those starting out mixing. For those of you who are experienced. this is probably really 'well, duh!'. But anyway...
It's iTunes, and I don't mean the store, I mean the actual app.
The reason being is that iTunes has a built in multi-band equalizer. It's free and covers many ranges. This might sounds half obvious and half weak-minded. But honestly, I haven't seen a multi-band EQ since the 80's so I honestly wouldn't think to use one for any tracking/mixing purpose.
However, before I EQ anything (which I have hardly done at all recently because I'm new and my ears aren't really acute to knowing where to knob) I now boil the raw tracks into a wav file, put in iTunes, and slide each band to full and back down. That way I can recognize where each instrument is registering on the frequency spectrum, takes notes, and learn. Then I thought, wow I should buy a...Why? It's already in iTunes.
Anyway, to me sweepable EQs are really flexible, they're not the most intuitive when it comes to honing in on a particular instrument range. The whole wax on, wax off functionality of the multi-band really helps one become familiar in where particular instruments land and can help translate the sound/Khz barrier mentally.
This was a rather eye-opening experience for me so I thought I'd share it.
(1) Comments for: Use ITunes as an EQ 
23rd August 2009
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