I don’t have much to write about this week besides the book I keep talking about, so I’ll just say a couple things about this random article I read today that gives the “top ten signs your music is amateur.” Thankfully, I don’t think my music suffers from any of the things he listed, but I remember when it did. I remember calling up Digi (ack, this is hilarious and embarrassing) after producing my first track, and asking them why the volume was so low compared to my other CDs. Sheesh, was I clueless. In my defense, at that time everything I knew about recording came from my Pro Tools manuals, and they don’t talk about that sort of things in the manuals. I also suffered in the beginning with the preset issue and the looping too much. However, I think I managed to avoid pitfall number 9, “misuse of EQ/compression,” by just not using EQ or compression at all on my first record. Or maybe non-use is, in itself, misuse, but it forced me to learn quickly how to get exactly the sounds I wanted through mic placement and instrument arrangement and just the simplest volume and panning type of mixing. I kind of wish I could go back to those simpler times before I knew all about EQ and compression – there was a sweetness there.

Anyway, I wanted to take a bit of issue with this guy’s advice about EQ. He says, “So by now, you’ve probably heard of compression and EQ, two tools that are used to sculpt sound. EQ seems straightforward enough, but you should always check which frequency you are modifying, and make sure that you aren’t just randomly turning knobs.” I agree up to this point (duh – random turning of knobs usually won’t end in a professional product), but then he says, “To avoid this, use a spectral analysis plugin to view which frequencies your track is using. FL Studio has a decent spectrum analyzer included. Use it in conjunction with EQ to make sure you can see what you’re doing.” I disagree with this approach. This is basically telling people to use a visual crutch from the beginning, which I think discourages people from listening carefully. It would be easy to fall into the trap of becoming so reliant on visuals that without them, you’re lost. One example of this for me is the way I’m so reliant on seeing the waveform when editing. I almost don’t even need to listen some of the time when editing because I can see so precisely what I’m doing. As a consequence, I never actually use audio scrub in regions I’m editing to find the right cut. This would horrify the old school tape editors, who could make perfect cuts using only their ears, razor, and tape. My controller has a scrubwheel that has never been used, other than as a novelty when I first got it. So maybe I’m just being overly old-school thinking that this guy shouldn’t be advising people to EQ visually. Maybe it’s like everything else, where good old-fashioned listening isn’t so crucial anymore and you can make good-sounding stuff if you have enough good-looking UIs in whatever software package you’re using.

Ironically, he goes on in the next piece of advice to bemoan the crutch that autotune has become, complaining about the attitude, “why should I learn to sing if I have autotune?” Indeed, why should an aspiring mix engineer learn to hear EQ frequencies and compression subtleties if she has a UI that shows her where all the problems are?