Large Swings in Spectral Balance Sometimes the timbre of specific elements of a mix (or of the whole enchilada) is a moving target. For example, the electric bass or acoustic guitar might sound boomy on some phrases yet be well balanced everywhere else in the song. The lead singer might have a shrill high register...
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No Sparkle and Bottom Of course, sometimes EQ boost is needed to make a mix sound great. You can generally get away with boosting extreme bass and high frequencies more than you can boosting midrange frequencies. That’s because the human ear is less sensitive to phase shift at the extremes of the audible spectrum. Even...
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I have been watching, studying, and analyzing why some musicians ‘make it’ and others don’t for a long time, and I have given up trying to come up with some magic formula that every up and coming musician can follow on some imaginary road to success. It doesn’t work out that way. Today more...
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Edgy, Fatiguing Sound Digital audio has a reputation for producing cold, brittle sound, but the problem often stems from poor engineering techniques. The most common factor contributing to an edgy, fatiguing mix is indiscriminate boosting of upper-midrange and high-frequency EQ on multiple tracks. Here’s a typical scenario: hours of mixing at high sound-pressure levels (SPLs) progressively...
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My name is Brian, I’m in a Nintendo-Pop-Rock band called I Fight Dragons, and we currently get over 200 new fans signing up for our email list every week. We officially launched just under six months ago, with 0 fans on the list.  As I write this, we have 3656 subscribers.  We didn’t add a single...
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I want to focus on some more general trends in the way we do business and interact in society today that will affect every music artist enormously. It doesn’t matter whether you’re doing Christian Rock or hip hop or whatever. Everybody will be equally affected. Massive paradigm shifts like the one we’re going through right...
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