Ableton Forum

Hey guys, when Eqing a reverb send should you take off the low end on both mid and side or just side?

Best,

Lee

Would say your mindset is not right at this situation. It depends on your aim and goal. You are asking which color is the best, yellow or orange?

Great post mate because It's a very powerful mix technique and I myself am always confused by this. The comment above is the classic "there are no rules when making music etc" but eqing in this way can really clear up your mix but it does really depend on what frequency content is in your mix currently.

There are lots of guides online but I love the fabfilter tutorials:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NilfCElGJ2c

Hope this helps

i'm not saying there are no rules. i think music is about rules. but you simply don't equalize just because. you equalize to clear your mix for example.

good link although it doesn't explain phase in depth.

JMFOne wrote:Great post mate because It's a very powerful mix technique and I myself am always confused by this. The comment above is the classic "there are no rules when making music etc" but eqing in this way can really clear up your mix but it does really depend on what frequency content is in your mix currently.

There are lots of guides online but I love the fabfilter tutorials:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NilfCElGJ2c

Hope this helps

SouthSideSamurai wrote:Hey guys, when Eqing a reverb send should you take off the low end on both mid and side or just side?

Personally I take off the low and high end similarly in both channels, but that's a taste thing. If the reverb mud things up in the lows, then is that what you want? And if it doesn't is that what you want? I do use light compression on reverb as well, but haven't tried mid/side there. Would probably be interesting.

JMFOne wrote:Great post mate because It's a very powerful mix technique and I myself am always confused by this. The comment above is the classic "there are no rules when making music etc" but eqing in this way can really clear up your mix but it does really depend on what frequency content is in your mix currently.

There are lots of guides online but I love the fabfilter tutorials:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NilfCElGJ2c

Hope this helps

Thanks homie! this helps alot!

I think the issue here is that when EQ-ing, it's never a case of "you always do it this way." It's entirely dependent on the material being processed. So it's impossible to respond to the OP's question with "Yes, always cut just the Mid on a Verb return" or "Yes, cut both the mids and sides..." etc, so I agree with the contrarian poster that the mindset of the original Question is "off." Is the Return channel, on your current track, receiving a large amount of mono low frequency content? Then perhaps cutting just the Mono, and not the sides, will help clear up the mix. But outside of a given usage scenario, there really shouldn't be an all-encompassing answer to the Q, imo...

-M

That's exactly what i've meant about the mindset. hi-five mholloway.

here is not bad info about mid/side, easy to read: https://www.izotope.com/en/community/bl ... rocessing/

*If a mix sounds muddy, try reducing low frequencies in the side channel with a low shelf filter. This might be useful, for instance, to surgically EQ the mud out of hard-panned guitars while preserving the vocal and kick drum in the center of the mix.

what SIDE actually is. i think it's important to know: two signals with completely opposite phases in left and right speaker and if you would try to sum them(with utility plugin make 0% width for example) they would completely cancel each other out. this is good to know when you boost things, because you can fuck up your mix.

http://www.uaudio.com/blog/understanding-audio-phase/

prprprpr wrote:
what SIDE actually is. i think it's important to know: two signals with completely opposite phases in left and right speaker

This is also called reversed polarity in this context. I think using reversed polarity makes it easier to distinguish this from time based phase issues. Both terms are in use, which is good to be aware of in order to not get confused.

I'm not sure why there are explanations about mid/side like

"it's very easy to convert from L/R [stereo] to M/S and back again with absolutely no loss of or change in sound quality"

(Computer Music Mag nov 2012)
when it's clear that panned sounds don't retain their panning. While this should perhaps be expected that's a loss and quality difference that must be weighed against the benefits.