Good day This lesson is about the equalizer or EQ. And it's common to hear people say, just EQ that a little bit. And what they mean is change the frequencies of a certain audio file to affect how it's perceived to affect how it sounds. Knowing how to use the equalizer and knowing the foundation of it will come in handy time and time again, in so many different scenarios. If I can teach you just the basics of how it works, that would be success. So let's go to our audio track mixer and put in an effect here.

And if you go down to filter and EQ, you see premiere gives you a lot of options, and some are better for different reasons. I'm going to select the parametric equalizer to show you visually how it EQ works. But all of these do similar things. And we can get into that. Once you select an effect and put it on the rack, you can often double click it to pull up more controls. And this window here does look like what audio mixers use because of this.

Now, it might not be as fancy and as robust as some of the higher end EQs that come in logic or Pro Tools that you can buy as a third party product. But it is pretty much there and it can achieve everything you want. So this line right here, that's our EQ line. And right now it's flat. That means nothing is being affected. So I have a piece of music in here.

And when I play, it shows us the EQ it shows us the frequencies that are being played from the music. So when you listen and you hear a low bass note, you'll see frequencies pop up over here, we're looking at this like a graph. Down here are the frequencies. And here are the decibels for the volume. How loud this. So down here is zero frequencies that's as low as you can get in the human ear can't even hear that.

All the way over here is up to 30,000 kilohertz. Knowing some of these numbers, just memorize them will help you, for example, the five k range is called the presence range. And that's where vocals are when you have a dialogue or a voiceover. They'll be around here. When you have kick drums or low bass notes. They're over here.

High pitched frequency noises are up here. So that just knowing those few things and thinking about them when you've approached the EQ will let you know Where to get started. So for example, if I, for some reason needed to cut the bass out of the song, the bass frequencies are down there and you can tell actually have a really low bass note in the song. Right there, and if you're listening through your laptop, you're not even gonna be able to hear that. Now, you'll have to have over the ear headphones or big monitors. Look at the frequencies from the zero to 50.

They're way up here. It's a huge bass note. But let's say we don't want it. Maybe it's muddying up our sound when our phones try to play it and It's not working. So we can drag it we can grab a point on this EQ line and start drawing a curve down. Now when we play that it's much softer on the bass, but everything else hasn't been affected except for this.

You could bring this back up. See all sorts of things here and really get in there and kind of draw your desired curve. I'm going to reset this going back to default. And let's say I wanted to do the opposite. I wanted to take out the highs of the song. Do something like that.

Listen to how the music changes as I drag this around. So I just added in a lot of high frequencies and now it took them all out. And that's back to normal. Great. So that's the intro to an equaliser. Let's take a look at some of the other equalizers premier has for you.

The High Pass and low pass are good for doing really quick things similar to what we were just doing. Now a high pass is just what it sounds like. It's allowing the high frequencies to pass through, which means they don't get touched. What that does get touched or the low frequencies those don't get to pass through. So the curve we drew where the where I lowered the bass, that's what this is doing. So this cuts out a lot of bass, it starts at this frequency and cuts out everything under it.

So if I took this dial down to 10, that's barely cutting out anything because that's on the very left of our graph. But as I start dialing this up, it's gonna cut out more and more. Cut out everything and bring it back down. Just as a fun little fact, that's actually how how DJs do their sweets are called sweeps, EQ sweeps, and they've got knobs that actually look like this on their DJ consoles. And as they turn it, they're sweeping the EQ cutoff range, and it gets that they can bring it up to really high frequency really high frequency. And then when they bring in the bass of the next song, that's what makes it such a dramatic drop, because they were, they took out all the bass frequencies, and then when they bring it back in with full bass, a full spectrum of EQ, it's a big impact.

Low Pass is similar. It just works the other way. All the low frequencies pass through and the highest get cut. So those are useful. Let's say you have a microphone track, and there's a little too much bass from the studio. Maybe isn't a studio, and the goes right up on the microphone.

And the mixer applied too much, too much compression or whatever, and there's too much bass. If you just quickly apply a high pass to it, and dial it in. That's a really quick, easy way to do EQ and that'll be across your entire track. Another one that I like is the knotch filter. And this is useful if you have a, like a constant noise in the background. Maybe you have your refrigerator running in the next room, or there's an air conditioner, something that's making a constant noise, because you can dial in where that frequency is on the spectrum and just take out that notch.

If it was right there, you could just take that out and everything else would be pretty much unaffected. So it's a really precision tool. See as I sweep this, let's say you have a dialogue track. And you see some noise right here. And you can tell that your vocals are around the five k region, but you've got this constant noise up around 10 K. You take one of these notches and bring that down right at 10 K. And that will get rid of a lot of that noise for you. I recently did some shoots with a motorized slider.

And we had to have the slider pretty close to the subject who was being interviewed. And so unfortunately, it's very close to the microphone. I used a bunch of different noise removal methods to really dial in on that slider noise because it was constant. It was the sound of a high pitch sound of a small motor. I was able to dial it in on the knotch filter and just remove that frequency and it cleaned up the sound So much. So this is also really helpful one for getting precision EQ.

Now you don't have to use the audio track mixer, if you go into effects and type. Yeah, like I usually like to type in EQ, you get the same things. And you can drag it onto your clip. And then it shows up in your effects controls, and you can edit, same thing, it'll do the same thing. When you're doing big overall effects like EQ, I like doing it on a whole track. That means you have to be organized with your tracks.

So it's a give and take. You can do whatever method you want, you can apply it directly to the clip. Just remember and let's say this is Bo. And we have a bunch of different clips that we've edited together for our story. And they're like this, and you start doing EQ on like that. And you set an edit and you dialed in, you want that EQ, it's easy to forget to copy and paste that to all your other clips, especially if you bring in a new one.

It can start getting pretty confusing, and that's why I like having just one instance of it on that particular track, and then if you need to change it, you're only changing it once. So that's the power of using EQ in the audio track mixer. All within