Quote:
Originally Posted by shoyoninja
There is one singular difference when it comes to sound engineering: Your main source of information is not visual, its sound. If you keep up this approach of using a certain cut at a precise frequency, trying to measure stuff to match results, etc, the tool will work against you.
You see(lol), when Yep tell us to use our ears, he doesnt mean to only listen for things that sound bad and then try to fix it somehow. You need to hear and understand what is wrong, what it lacks and what it has too much and then use the right tool to get it like you want it. The things that you cant detect and fix like this, are, for now, out of your ability to do.
Lets say that you want to paint a canvas. You did your masterpiece, but there is something wrong with it. It doesnt look like you think it should. You believe that the problem is on the color used to paint the water, somehow it doesnt look right. You cant hope to fix the problem using a photometer or trying to decompose the spectral components of the colors. Maybe there is a brush technique that can do it, or another color that needs to be blended in some parts... Looking at wikipaedia and trying to do what another painter did to fix his river may or may not work, since chances are that his river was on a completely different scene and thus required different colors to make it look good.
You will only be able to decide with precision when your vision can see the problem, compare it to the mental projection of what you want and conclude what kind of interference will do it.
When it comes to audio, its just the same, but instead of our eyes, we use our ears.
Do you believe that the painter can learn how to do this just by reading books? Of course, information on colors and perspective will help the learning curve, a LOT. But what he needs to learn is not theoretical info, he needs to develop his vision. He will do it by painting in different ways, mixing colors, analising other painters works, always using his eyes.
Humans do not use hearing as the main source of sensorial information. We use our eyes. We tend to look into analyser tools, spectrographs, osciloscopes and presets. Thats why the simple rule Yep proposes of using the ear is not as simple as it looks.
It simply requires trainning. For exemple: The 5.2khz thing you just said. Great, you match the curve, but you say yourself that it doesnt sound quite right, so what is the use of that? Do you hope that someone who will listen to the recording will put the thing into an analiser and look for the eq curve?
The information that you need to learn is not the eq curve itself. You can write it down anywhere, or make a preset with it, doesnt matter. What you need to learn is how it changes what you hear by trying it out on many different situations. Simple trial and error. And there is no way to write this down in a book.
Sure, I can tell you: 5 Khz is the presence range, boosting or cutting will make the sound sorce seem to be near of far. It can be used to bring something out in the mix while keeping the overall volume level. But it will only be usefull when you actually tamper with it, and become familiar on how it changes the sound, so that when you listen to something that lacks or has too much it, you know right away what to do.
BTW: If cutting it on this range send the sound source far away, like hiding it from you, why do you think Van Halen uses it like this? The answer is quite "Van Halenish" :P
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Hi Shoyoninja, I'd simply argue that my analytical tooling doesn't have sufficient resolution to tell me the full story. If you can precisely define every charactaristic of a paint or a sound and then reconstruct to those parms, the results have to be identical.
Seems artists in particular like to reject the idea of "recipe" or "formula"... yet they are everywhere. Consider cooking, right? Loads of recipies out there that get reasonably close. Same for painting really. There's all kinds of techniques, paint formulas, projections, and so on. Even moreso in engineering.
If you can't reproduce results, it simply means you haven't figured out the formula accurately enough yet.
Would you accept such variation in production goods like cars, etc.? How about drug formulations? Or say explosives composition or other things with high risk. Of course not.
Geez, it's almost the definition of professionalism or production grade output of anything that the formulas are known and executed well enough to have consistent results.
Of course that's in the direction of creating from scratch. Trying to reverse engineer anything can be a little tougher, for the reason we are discussing. Accurate enough analytical tooling may not be available.
As an aside, here's an interesting "Rig Review" of Billy Gibbons live rig. (Granted that's not recording.) At time 08:43 you see that he's using a fancy equalizer to make a Tele sound like a Les Paul as much as is possible... now Billy has the fingers, if it was only about that, he'd not need that equalizer. The guitar tech states... "The secret its... we take a G-chord from Pearly Gates... and make all the other guitars have that same EQ curve on a G-chord... we correct it with this equalizer..."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6DrxfrbbF8
In any event, I do hear where you are coming from. Since the reverse engineering tooling isn't there yet(probably why amps sims aren't perfect yet, perhaps) one must use one's built in tooling (ears) and do best one can.
However, that doesn't mean that the industry doesn't or shouldn't have "formulas" or recipes. In fact it's full of them. 4/4 is a formula. A major scale is a formula and so on.
As to the final EQ curve of Eruption... who knows why the final curve is that... it may have been Donn Landee, right? Ed wasn't the only one who worked on that recording.
In this one at 03:27, Satriani says outright... "You can't play the song without this device..."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MaO0y...feature=relmfu
This is part of my whole arguement. My experiece tells me that most combinations of equipment don't sound in the room like famous recordings. Some do on occasion, but rarely. Therefore the difference would seem to lie in what the producer/engineer did afterwards. Clearly moreso in some genres that others. I'd say it had *alot* to do with the high period of pop rock, say starting with the Beatles (or even Sam Phillips and slap back echo) and peaking around U2-ish, time wise.
Bottom line would seem to be, it ain't a science yet. But I'd argue those who are closest to it do have techniques they repeatedly use.