Okay, here's where we get absolutely spent forever going into every little aspect of what's down. We could easily spend a semester, but I'd rather just break this down into the least you need to know. That way you can kind of relax a bit and know that I'm just not going to drown you in theory, okay, but I will give you the basics. So let's break it down. If we are to reproduce an reinforced sound, then we will need to know what this animal is right? And we'll break sound down into its three main elements that is volume, tonal content and environment.

At its core, sound is changed in air pressure. If I was to slip, snap my fingers, it sends out waves in all directions of air pressure, those waves of pressure make their way to my ears and vibrate my eardrum in sympathy with those waves and you perceive it as sound if they only know Aaron, hear it couldn't hear anything because sound is changes in air pressure and get this Your ears are so sensitive to differences in air pressure that you can hear me a whisper and an absolute yell, just rub your fingers gently next year. Can you believe that your ears pick that up and a massive rock concert in fact, you can perceive trillions of different levels in sound don't miss what I just said is a so sense that they can perceive about 11 or 12 trillion different levels of environment it would be like designing a scowl that could work better and an apartment but at the same time at is absolutely extraordinary.

We then have tunnel content or the frequency spectrum, as is can also detect the rate of those sound waves. If I play this sound mastery on acoustic guitar then boy perceiving, we perceive that as an E on a musical scalper, what really happened was your eardrum was pushed back and forth, in sympathy with that sound and your brain counter that as happening at 2.41 times a second. I mean, can you believe it counted the waves. And you just perceive that as an Iraq, the next ring has your brain counting as a net exactly 110 times a second or an AI, that then these are the rights of the other states. That By the way, a shortcut the saying 110 compressions of air pressure waves a second is just to say 110 hertz. So for example, when I say 440 hertz, for example, I'm saying that the sound wave is vibrating at 440 times a second.

Once we get into the thousands of hertz, we say kilo hertz or k for short. Humans hear roughly from 20 hertz to 20 kilohertz or waveforms that cycle from 20 times a second to 20,000 times per second. We tend to lose our topping as we age but to hear some pitches and Let's hear a sweep from 20 hertz to 20,000 hertz 20 kilohertz It's kinda like how light is broken up into different wavelengths of color through a prism, or a rainbow sound lives in a certain area of the spectral bandwidth. And depending on how complex the sound is, there are all sorts of overtones and harmonics to any sound. So keep in mind that while I guitars fundamental pitch range is about 80 hertz to 2000 hertz. There are many more overtones and harmonics that vibrate at high pitches above that.

So, I mean, why do we need to know this? Well, when we get into mixing EQ at pace, know where each instrument kind of lives in this tonal spectrum. Also, if you need to kill a feedback frequency, it pays to kind of know where that problem frequency lies so that we can fix it. The last two elements we'll look at is the interaction of the sound with its environment. We've seen that the sound of my voice is just a series of waves that vibrate your eardrum but those words Waves radiate out in all direction. And we can imagine that my voice is like ripples on a pond going out or direction, then what happens when they hit a wall, right?

Some of those sounds get passed through the wall, some reflect off the wall and then bounce around, off the back wall here under the theater of the people of everywhere. And a brand combination is so amazing that it uses these reflections as clues to the environment that we're in. Listen to these recordings and see if you can try to place the environment. Okay, we've learned that the three basic elements of sound are volume tokens. And environment will be deal. What's it a fizzy water we have to break these guys down anyway?

Well let's take one at a time. Volume is surprisingly important, as it allows you to blend different sounds together. I mean, what's the most obvious thing you see on any sound console faders right here faders allow us to mix relative volumes of tracks or add channels here, bring one part of the band up above others it's also important to know in terms of volume, in terms of how far you can push a signal for distortion, and how low you can go. A while still staying out of the noise floor. headset recording levels of volume is a big one. The tower content also has consequences.

In terms of channel con, content, check this out. The pitch or range of pitches where an instrument lives is very important. Now unless your instrument is a tuning fork, your instrument will have a range of pitches that will play For instance, the human voice ranges from about 80 hertz to about 1100 hertz. This equates the lowly of a guitar all the way up to the top string that's about three and a half octaves, check out this video and sing along to see where your vocal ranges So you can hear that I have a range of just under three artists, Mariah Carey can apparently hit five octaves. That isn't that is a lot. But let's go to average sing his range for about two and a half octaves.

That means that your average vocalist, fundamental frequency range or band of frequencies that it lives in is from 80 hertz to about 1100 hertz, when we have overtones and harmonics that go much higher. But if you know where all of your instruments that you have on your mix kind of live, then you can mix a whole lot better. This is a ridiculous example. But if you had instruments in your band, which is bass guitar, Berkland, czar Fine, then life would be pretty easy because they live in completely different parts of what we call the audio spectrum. Now, do you remember back in high school when we could split light into a spectrum of cars and blues to read through a prison with sound is very similar. Check this next thing out.

I have a band Pass Filter on when I play a song through, it splits up the sound through all those bands of frequency ranges from the very lows through the mids to the highs have listened to this Do you hear how we have a palette of audio going from the bass, the bass notes all the way up to the highest sounds like a triangle. We'll learn a little more about them as we progress through the course but I just wanted to kind of introduce Due to the idea that all the sounds we hear live in a certain neighborhood, in our audio spectrum and our job is to not you know, get too many things happening in a certain neighborhood or else it's going to be hard to hear them individually may tend to mask each other. And lastly, the environment sound interacts with the environment that it lives in.

You're not a hearing the sound of my voice directly, but also off of the walls and so on in my environment. I actually have a shotgun mic just out of the frame here that's zero right into my vocal right now. And it sounds pretty clean right here. But if we should take we should so the other mic Oh, by the camera. Okay, you can now hear the difference. This sound is way more affected by the environment of this room than if we were to shift back from a lot cleaner here.

So you can hear what the environment can do to a sound if we move microphones around the sounds Source closer and further away then we will have a differing ratio between the direct sound and the surrounding environment here we can add environment artificially like an echo like this, this this, or maybe a really short Echo, like this slap, like this sound, or massive reverb that makes me sound like I'm in Madison Square Garden. In the case of mixing live sound in really reflective environments, you probably not want to add any environment because there's just so much echo in the room naturally. In that case, you actually might want to treat the room with acoustic absorption material. So basically, there we have volume, tonal content, and environment, three elements of sound that we'll learn how to massage mix and control throughout this entire course. Volume is expressed in dB or decibels.

The tonal spectrum is in So kilohertz and the environment is expressed in language like dry sound like what you're hearing here and wet. And the ability to control these characteristics will make you a really good engineer. Now we'll learn about all these elements in a very practical ways. As we go through each course. I just wanted to kind of give you a heads up in this example here. So let's get an overview of a whole PA system and look at each component within it.