SOVL Report: The EQ 'Trick' That Changed My Life
So many of my mixes were coming out thin and unbalanced... why? because the ONLY advice i've ever seen online is about using a dam high pass filter!!!
What up Forum,
So the other day @GioTheGenius posted something that dug into my side a little bit.
I Felt sooooo small..
So many of my mixes were coming out thin and unbalanced... why? because the ONLY advice i've ever seen online is about using a dam high pass filter!!!
Seriously, almost every engineer seems to focus on this method for getting rid of troublesome frequencies.
however. I tried #TheGenius approach lol
So I Tried what he recommended.. and it worked... you'll be able to hear the difference big time.
So here is what I was doing before:

Though the above approach may work for some instrumentation, if the same approach is applied to everything then the mix comes out CRAZY thin..
now some choose not to HP anything therefore the mix doesn’t sound 'thin' per se.. how is everything sounding in mono? chances are these mixes that sound full may not sound too clean in mono
so after adding a stereo imager to the main outputs and switching to mono, I worked at carving out some frequencies using the approach Gio mentioned.

All I did was sweep the frequencies to find what was 'getting in the way' and slowly lower that until it wasn’t..
then I could hear there was something in the 150-200Hz range clashing with some other low-frequency content so I cranked up the mid Q, raised the gain, and searched for it... when i found the exact frequency (191 Hz) I dropped the gain to 7.7 a little more than half the sound level.
So when he says a little can go a long way.. man...
So what this DID was cut out exactly what needed to go, and brought the mix back into phase.
You can see two completely different approaches.
I recommend using the channel strip plugin for this as you get the eq, the gate, and the compressor.
After doing this method for a bit I also realized that modulation effects like chorus and flanger work 10x better.
remember, you'll have to use your ears to find those trouble frequencies.
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Updates
I’m working on a few packs that should make music-making on the MPC/Force system pretty straightforward. You can expect things like:
Drum MIDI progressions < sorry these have to be MIDI files... but I'll make sure I give you several different sequences per drum track AND per instrument...
Something Guitar Based < this is what I’m currently working hard on getting to you, stay tuned. you can hear examples on my beatstars.com/sovltron OR on my soundcloud.com/sovltron
How To's < Im going to break down some of my production techniques that are no big secret, but may not be straightforward on the force/MPC... AND some great bonuses that come with it.
So stay tuned. I've got some great stuff for you in the future.. all intended to provide value and make this production game REAL easy... Stay tuned.
Will