Hi, and welcome to the EQ masterclass, my name is David wells. And I can't believe that we finally got this comprehensive course together on this subject that touches so many of our lives as musicians, music producers and audio engineers, when you think about it, I really don't think that there's any other subject that comes up more often than EQ. And it's quite often the least understood, or what I'd call the Phantom fundamentals. From the first time you got your, your hands on a guitar and you had bass, mid, and treble controls, we used to have them on as stereos as dedicated knobs, but nowadays, they quite often conceal in hidden menus. And we certainly see them on every facet of recording and live sound. I mean, look at all these different types of EQs.

Yeah, this is so many different types. Now, here's the promise. Could you imagine that at the end of A few hours, you will know how to work any of these issues without even breaking a sweat. That's the promise. That's the goal here. By the end of this course, you will be able to just stare down any EQ, whether it be on a mega top of the line mixing console, or the latest newfangled piece of software, a plugin, you won't even blink or break a sweat.

And why the heck am I so excited about this? Well, if you've seen any much trainings before, you know I get the biggest kick out of teaching people the unchanging principles of audio because I don't know about you, I'm going to be living and just I'm going to be a musician doing live and recording. All this stuff the rest of my life. I'm a better musician and audio engineer than I was back in my 20s and I have famously vowed to be the best guitarist slash audio engineer in the nursing home in my ears. I'm a lifer, a musician for life and I know that we are kind of connected in this way. Because we both share a passion for music and audio, and I really want to share with you everything that I know.

So a lot of you will probably be familiar with my story. I started playing music at around age 15, but soon quickly started recording and got fascinated with these tools of the trade. I was a program his synthesizer designing sounds and also jingles for local radio stations in my teens, but it was really in my travels to Los Angeles in my 20s that I got involved in working with some of the biggest names in music, including Michael Jackson, Whitney Houston, Rita Franklin, Phil Collins, a bunch of other folks. It was a mix of being the right person at the right time with the right group of contacts. That just led me straight into learning from the absolute best in the business. And my passion is helping other musicians know this stuff called so today's lesson is is everything you You need to know about EQ, you know, I just want to teach you everything about EQ.

So let's get started right now. So what is EQ or equalization of it gets the dry definition might be something like this, like the process of boosting or cutting specific bands or ranges are the audio frequency spectrum. For corrective or creative purposes, I might just say something like it's just messing with the frequency content of a sound. Just as a photograph consists of an assortment of different shades and hues of colors. Any sound has a mix of low mid and high frequencies. In a photo editing program says like Photoshop, you can boost or cut only certain ranges of the color spectrum, like boost the blues, maybe cut the reds and so on.

By zeroing in on a specific range of colors within the spectrum, you can Make the sky bluer or increase the saturation or maybe change the the color palette because the color balance wasn't set up in the camera or be completely creative with your palette of colors as well. Well, same thing with audio, you might want to correctively maybe pull out some of the lows on a vocal track where the microphone was too close to the talent or creatively knocked out some frequencies on a vocal to make it sound like it was coming over. Maybe an old radio, there are a ton of things, really a ton of things you can do with EQ. But they all come down to this common thread, that we're manipulating the frequency spectrum to either fix a problem or creatively spice things up. So here's a short list of things that you might have might want to be able to do with EQ.

You could take out the nasal the quality of a vocal, maybe decrease the harsh S and T's in a vertical, increase the punch of a kick drum, maybe carve out some competing frequencies in layering guitars to give them some definition. Maybe even make some cool dance music effects where the whole mix sounds like it's coming through a radio. And of course, do things like blend vocals together even get a better guitar sound through your app. In short, if you want to polish the sound of any element of your mix, or even your entire mix, then EQ can be a way to do it. So let's look at a shortlist of the tools to be able to tweak EQ. Now while there are a ton of different EQ devices, let's break them down into a few groups that you're most likely to come across.

First off instrument amps like guitar amps, and so on. Channel strips like what you find on any recording or live mixer. Graphic EQs that might be a piece of hardware Like this, or maybe even on a mixer, or maybe even inside your computer. We also have standalone EQs that can have you tweaking wide or narrow bands of frequencies. And they might be in a game, they might be hardware or software versions. We'll go look at every type of EQ using the tool section later on, but I just want to quickly touch on this, there are a bunch of different ways to achieve the same goal and that is to carve and modify the tone or frequency spectrum.

It's almost like listing the tools that are used in woodworking how many tools when you think about it either to cut wood, we have band saws that make big massive cuts to wood down to find standards and routers, even drills when you think about it. That's a way to cut cut wood. We're going to learn what types of change we want to make. And then like a master craftsman will decide what type of tools to use. But before any of that. Let's look at sound itself and the basis of the frequency spectrum.