Hey everyone!
Hope you’ve had a great month! Here’s a reminder that our Mixer Mixer meets tomorrow! Fourth Tuesday came up quick this month! Here’s the details:
The fourth Tuesday of the month, May 23rd at 7:30 pm
Rec Room Recording studio in the basement of The Arts Federation
638 North Street in Lafayette
We can share recordings and mixes and just learn from each other in an encouraging, nurturing environment! Hope to see you there!!
July Workshop Update
We’ve finalized many of the details for our July Workshop featuring Ronan Chris Murphy, Liz Redwing, and Steven Memel. They are all very accomplished in the music industry and are based in Los Angeles. Ronan will be offering a recording workshop all week, Liz will offer music business consults to attendees, and Steven will be offering a 3 day vocal and performance workshop for artists. It’s going to be amazing.
We are able to offer this workshop to our community at a SUBSTANTIAL discount to what you would have to pay to travel to LA to attend clinics by these world class mentors and coaches. This is because we are receiving some generous donations from members of the community. It really is a win, win, win!! More detail including the coach’s biographies are available on the workshop Eventbrite page. Sign up and tell your friends!!
We are still accepting donations to help underwrite the workshop and keep it affordable so everyone may attend. If making a donation interests you then please let me know by replying to this email and I’ll get back to you.
EQ - the most powerful tool in your arsenal!!!
We had a great meeting last month. We heard a lot of fine work and great effort in writing, recording, and mixing. I asked the attendees if they thought that I should write a basic introduction to EQ for the next newsletter. They thought that would be incredibly helpful. So, here goes!!
EQ is an abbreviation for equalization. It is the powerful tone control on mixers and in digital audio workstations like Garageband, ProTools, or Logic that allows you to change the tone of a mix or track. We are all familiar with the bass and treble tone controls in car stereos so you know the drill. The EQ on actual and virtual mixers and plugins is like that. You can adjust the EQ to have your mix or track’s tone range from dark sounding, to beefy and warm sounding, to shimmery and detailed, to bright and harsh sounding and everything in between. That is what EQ controls and it is perhaps the most powerful tool in your arsenal when you are mixing.
But how should you learn about using EQ so you can then practice and become proficient? One of my favorite online video coaches for mixing was Graham Cochrane. I say was because he is not making mixing and recording tutorials any more. He’s now a business coach. But his mix training company, the Recording Revolution, is still operating and another fine teacher of mixing and recording basics, Joe Gilder, now runs the site. There are a ton of great, free tutorial videos on that site. I looked there to see if they had free EQ tutorials that I could link to for this newsletter and, sure enough, at the top of the web page is a link to “Free Guides.” Go ahead and check this out at https://www.recordingrevolution.com.
Clicking on the “Free Guides” link leads to a page with five free video guides listed. Fourth on the list is “The Simple Guide to EQ.” Perfect!! Click on that and it takes you to a 7 part training guide to using EQ. All for free. He has also written an EQ checklist pdf to go with this 7 part training. I reviewed all the videos yesterday and they were classic Graham Cochrane. Really good! And the more you watch these videos, the more you learn. There’s always something I pick up every time I watch them.
So I would suggest you click on those links, download his EQ Checklist and watch those videos. If you’re a beginner, that should get you to the point where you are comfortable talking and asking questions about EQ. If you’re experienced it is a great review and may remind you of some tricks that you forgot about or you may hear some new tricks you can try.
You should know that when you enter your email to get Graham’s EQ Checklist you’re also signing up for the Recording Revolution email list. This is NOT a bad thing as they occasionally send out links to new free videos. The site also occasionally has sales where you can buy the old Graham Cochrane courses for a bargain. Graham’s "Mixing University” course, for example, is a classic! It is the standard course that we want everyone working and interning in the studio to take to get them up to speed quickly. It’s simply fantastic.
So, to sum up, I encourage you to go through Graham’s free guides and sign up for his email list. This free training is guaranteed to help you improve your mixes and take them quickly to the next level. As always, if you have ANY questions about things on the videos, go ahead and ask me. I’m happy to help you out.
All the best,
Neil