Quick Question

[Ridiculously Garrett]

So, I'm fairly new to music production, and I'm unfamiliar with some of the terms/edits/settings stuff, and I wanna learn more about it. Sure I could just google this one, but I wanna hear from some of you experts. What exactly is EQing? And what does compression do? And lastly, what do sound gates mean? Is that just the dynamic between treble and bass, or is there more to it?

[Jorito]

Okay, here's a very short explanation (should get you at least Googling in the right direction).

EQ-ing: using an equalizer to change the sound in a certain frequency (e.g. the low mid and high parts of a sound). You can use it to either boost (make louder) or cut (make less loud) a part of the sound. People sometimes call it to a smart volume control for a very specific part of the sound. EQ is pretty simple to understand and difficult to master

Compression: a sound typically has loud parts and low volume parts (e.g. a singer has parts where she sings loud and some phrases where it's close to a whisper). Compression is a way of dealing with these volume differences, where you can boost the volume of the less loud parts so the difference isn't as big. Basically you can say "when you hear a sound this low, drop it in volume by 3dB but leave the low volume parts as-is". There's a lot more to it than that, and it's less easy to understand than EQ but an equally powerful tool.

Finally, not sure what "sound gates" are, but in general you could consider a gate to be like another volume control. You typically use it when recording, where you want to keep the sound of your recorded instrument, but none of the background noise and hiss. So essentially you say "if the sound volume is lower than -20dB, drop it entirely". Again, an oversimplification, but enough to get you Googling.

I've found the Ozone Mastering Guide an excellent resource for explanations of this kind of material, even if it's mostly aimed at mastering. It does explain EQ and compressor (dynamic) well and gives you some use cases as well as other sound shaping concepts that can also be applied to mixing. Check it out here: Ozone Mastering Guide - iZotope

[Ridiculously Garrett]

@Jorito

Aw sweet, thanks! Those short little explanations really helped a lot. Anything I can do to learn more is such a help. I'll be sure to check out that resource. I've got a long way to go before I master all this stuff. Heh. Master mastering. I'm not funny.  But anyways, thanks!

 

[timaeus222]

Jorito got you covered, but you might see "sound gates" called "noise gates" out on google, I think.

[Jorito]

Ah yeah, that was the name I was looking for. Don't use 'em much, myself.

[timaeus222]

I usually only use those on drums. For example, sometimes I want a snare to have the resonating characteristic to a room, but maybe I want the reverb to cut off so that it's not a long decay tail. I could lower the decay time, but it doesn't always achieve the same effect as noise gating the reverb itself. An example of a plugin that does noise gating is FLOORFISH.