Recording - April 2015 - 72

Tune Into The Magic Frequency-Not

Guest editorial by Scott Dorsey
Editor's note: It's customary for
Recording to do a fake article or review
or NAMM Show entry for its April
(Fool) issue. We've fooled people a
bunch of times over the years; Scott
himself wrote an article on how to create the ultimate loud recording that
had people yelling in indignation, and
at least one of our April Fool fake products has ended up being turned into a
real one. But this April, I'm changing it
up; I'm letting Scott step up with an
anti-April-Fool editorial, in which he
takes a topic that should be in the
realm of April Fool jokes, but is taken
too seriously by too many recording
musicians, and gives it the pounding it
so richly deserves. Here's your mallet,
Scott.-MM

there is clearly a buildup down there,
how do you know that it's in the recording and not in the monitoring system?
Small control rooms tend to become
boomy. Smaller low-grade monitors
will often have a little boost in the
lower midrange to help you not notice
a lack of bass extension. So you can
wind up with a congested and boomysounding playback without anything
being wrong with the recording.
From this we can infer Rule One: if
you're boosting or cutting the same
thing every time on every recording,
something is probably wrong with
your monitoring.
Now, this isn't to say that lots of people don't have lower midrange issues
with their tracking rooms that cause
their tracks to all need EQ. But how do
you know? You need to have monitoring that you can trust to really know.
(If you're using the same room for
tracking and mixing, you'll have the
same problems at the same frequencies for both recording and playback-and you'll never be sure where
you are.) If you're finding yourself
having to fool around a lot down in
that region, it's time to start looking at

My guess is that many of these people have low frequency problems or
distortion issues of some kind that
are causing a more cloudy and
smeary, less detailed sound. They are
boosting in the presence region to try
and compensate for that, but boosting
doesn't really compensate for those
issues. In the end it doesn't even hide
them very well.
There really aren't any magic frequencies to boost or cut. There are
only problem frequencies in a given
room or instrument or mix, which are
specific to that room or instrument
and mix. It's your job as the engineer
to identify them. That's the hard part.
There is one place, however, where
simply EQing away certain frequencies
will benefit you far more often than it
will do harm. That's removing the stuff
that you can't actually hear. There's
nothing but noise below 75 Hz on many
tracks. There's nothing but noise above
20 kHz on all tracks. Take it off.
If you're putting together a mix
from a lot of individually recorded
tracks, get in the habit of highpass filtering channels somewhere below the
lowest frequencies that need to be in

There is one place where EQing away certain frequencies will benefit you
far more than do harm. That's removing the stuff you can't actually hear.
A while ago, an online forum that I
hang out in was visited by a self-proclaimed expert who wanted to tell
everyone about a secret frequency
that, when boosted, made everything
sound better. Reading this, it
occurred to me that I have heard similar things many times over the
years... and that whenever anyone
says this, it almost always indicates a
serious problem somewhere.
For example, I have had a number of
people in both recording and sound
reinforcement tell me that "there is
always something wrong at 180 Hz, you
should always take that out." This can
actually be true in many cases; a lot of
smaller rooms have room modes that
coincide to make them boomy somewhere in that area. The thing is, if you
are recording and you hear that it
sounds congested and boomy and
72

RECORDING April 2015

acoustical issues. There have been a
bunch of recent articles in this magazine about that very topic.
The second place that you hear people talking about is in the presence
region. In the case of the online
"expert" it was 3 kHz, but you'll hear
people talk about anywhere from 3 to
6 kHz as being a place where "you
absolutely have to boost in order to
get more clarity."
I suspect some of these people have
hearing problems, and some of them
have monitoring issues. The truth is
that if you boost in that region, you
will get a more forward and detailed
sound... but the downside of this is
that a more forward and detailed
sound is also more fatiguing. Doing
this on one track can make it punch
through a mix. Doing it on everything
just makes for harshness.

the tracks. Noise down there can
build up. Likewise, if you're recording
to a medium that can record ultrasonics, you might want to consider lowpass filtering at 20 kHz so you don't
actually record ultrasonics. Some
folks might claim there is important
ultrasonic material up there, but
more likely it's material that is just
moving the meters without being
heard and making your tracks less
loud with no real benefit.
There are no magic numbers.
There's no one frequency that will fix
everything. If there was, they'd design
every MP3 player to boost it.

Scott Dorsey
(dorsey@recordingmag.com)
thinks about this stuff a lot.



Recording - April 2015

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Recording - April 2015

Recording - April 2015 - Cover1
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