Why must quality be such a thing on this site...

[Nicholestien]

Well, I guess you are right GT. This board has my apoligies.

[Geoffrey Taucer]

Ok, back with a bit more of a response.

EQ, compression, and production in general takes a long time to master, as has been said before. I'm not surprised you haven't mastered it in 7 months; it took me about a year and a half between my first submitted remix and my first mix to make it past the judges' panel (and that one ended up not going on the site anyway, but that's a different story altogether). And even then, the mix was collaborative; I didn't do all the production myself.

A good tip is to just do what sounds good, when it comes to EQ/compression; don't feel that you absolutely have to EQ and/or compress everything, but also don't be afraid to experiment.

[SnappleMan]

Many people don't even know what EQ actually is. I mean, yeah, you can know what it is in technical terms but that doesn't mean you know how to apply it to music.

The best way to learn about what the purpose of EQ is in music is to learn about a full orchestra and what it's composed of. Every instrument in an orchestra has a specific range, no other instrument in it's particular family (woodwinds, strings etc.) shares that exact range. This means that those instruments are naturally made to fit between each other and fill gaps in the frequency range we humans can hear.

Now, applying that to EQ is simple. Since electronic instruments don't always have a designated range, and with processing we can change the frequencies and characteristics of the sounds, we have to EQ things so that they fit together without overlapping too much. Most people here use EQ as en effect to make it BOOM TSSS, and the main problem this place has in terms of quality of music is that most of the people don't bother to use Google and learn about what makes music work on a technical level.