An Ear Training Method
In this post I'm talking about ear training in the recording/mixing engineer sense rather than in the musician sense (I'm a big fan of EarMaster software to help with that, by the way.)
Ideally you want to know what moving the EQ around is going to sound like before you do it. Instead of blindly sweeping the EQ around you want to go in with laser focus and move exactly the band that will get the track sounding the way you want it to within the mix (and that's important to remember; you don't care what it sounds like when it's soloed only how it sounds within the mix as a whole.)
Being able to do this will save you a lot of time that you would have been spending randomly sweeping EQs around looking for the sweet spot and it will also keep your ears fresher.
I believe this ear training method I'm about to share with you will help you to reach that ideal by training your ear to hear exactly what each EQ band sounds like so that you'll know where you want to cut or boost the EQ.
This is how it works:
(1) Bypass your EQ plugin.
(2) Picture the EQ cut or boost you want in your mind.
(3) Move the EQ so that you think it will sound that way.
(4) Activate the plugin.
At this point you want to notice the difference between how it actually sounds and how you thought it would sound.
Keep at this until you are able to consistently EQ to the sound that you want with your EQ bypassed.
Tags: Ear Training, EQ
Leave a Reply