What's the Decision?
by Jonathan Wyner
I always find it interesting to look at the origins of a tool. It often reminds me of the way the tool is useful.
It's easy to fall into a rut using tools in particular ways. For instance, take an equalizer in the context of recording or mixing a drum kit. It is a common practice among engineers to apply a touch of brightening (2-6kHz) to accentuate the bright part of the drum sound (the transient), and find some midrange frequency that muddies the sound (2-500Hz) and might interfere with the sound of other instruments and cut by some amount. There's nothing wrong with this as standard practice, and in fact it might be exactly the right thing to do, but why are you doing it?
In a perfect world you would have the perfect drummer playing the perfect kit in the perfect room, choose the perfect mic and mic placement, and at that point the recording would be, well, perfect and EQ would not be required. Unrealistic, perhaps, but the point is that since we live in an imperfect world, one role of EQ is to compensate for that. It's a corrective tool we use to remove undesirable sound—and accentuate the desirable to some extent—by changing the timbre or spectral content. Some might say in this scenario that EQ's primary function is to restore a sound to its ideal state: make a drum sound more like a drum, or a piano sound more like the ideal piano, given what might be a less than ideal source.
Assuming you're still with me, you're probably asking, What other ways might I be able to alter the sound without EQ? But this is exactly the idea that engineers use when choosing the microphone they use to record and where they put it in relationship to the source in every instance. The frequency response of a microphone varies from one to the next, and the distance from a sound source will also influence the recorded sound. This is, in effect, an EQ decision in the sense that you are adjusting timbre by making the decision. Changing from one mic to another can be thought of as a corrective EQ measure. In fact, if you make the "right" change, you are likely to get a much more satisfying result than you would with corrective EQ.
The same principle holds true for mic preamps (they all sound different) and A/D converters, but let's look even further. If we explode this idea to the proposition that every device you run a signal through changes the sound, you can use this as a way of intentionally altering the timbre of a recording not only for correction but also creative effect.
Sometimes you are not simply looking to compensate for a less than ideal recording. There are some obvious examples, such as re-amping a guitar sound. The amp or amp model you use will color a sound. If you record a sound to an analog tape, that changes the sound too. There is really no limit to how far you take this. For instance, have you ever put your ear right next to a paper towel roll and listened? The roll is an acoustic filter. It's band-limited and resonant in a particular way. So now imagine miking a sound through one. Suddenly the idea of EQ is altered, all sorts of creative options for filtering and changing a sound present themselves, and your recording takes on greater variety, interest and personality because you're not simply relying on the same tool to get the sound you're after. There are an infinite number of options for creating filters, some more subtle than others. Your tools are microphones, acoustic environments, analog and digital circuits and your imagination.
If you want a fascinating example of someone who is quite adept at unconventional uses of filtering, listen to the work of engineer/producer Tchad Blake. He is famous for filtering sounds in unusual ways in order to achieve the sound he's after, and he keeps an arsenal of lo-fi, interesting gear around to make the recording sound the way he imagines it should.
Jonathan Wyner (www.m-works.com) has recorded, mixed and mastered more than 5000 records during the last 23 years, spanning every musical idiom (and some nonmusical idioms as well!). He is a professor at the Berklee College of Music in Boston. His credits range from the extremely well known (James Taylor, David Bowie, Aerosmith, Bruce Springsteen, Kiri Te Kanawa) to the idiosyncratic and independent artists/labels. A 2007 Grammy nominee, his most recent production began airing on PBS in March 2007.
