My experience with EQ and compression always makes stuff sound poor, toppy and shite.
Ive ditched the mastering limiters and all that to concentrate on a decent mix not ive ditched the EQ and compression apparently the theory goes that it should sound great without all that crap so obviously these EQs and compressors are overrated.
I dont really know what to do next,
Im not nearly half as good as the majority of the dudes on here but i have to throw my input on this one...."the theory goes that it should sound great without all that crap..." that theory meaning it should sound good going in and THEN you can make it sound better coming out when using the eq and compressors if need be,sometimes you dont always have to do it,sometimes you do...dont take the approach of "i can just fix it in the mix"...take the approach of "shit in,shit out"...if your tones sound pretty sweet going in, and u learn your eq's comps, other plugs, etc...then there gonna sound twice as sweet coming out...if you record a muddy fizzy feedback everywhere and overall shitty tone going in...then no matter what you do to it its not gonna be a pretty picture on the way out...if your not hearing any difference in your eq or you feel your making it worse then you wanna move on to the next questions...
1 are you taking the time out to mic your gear up the way you want it to sound,are you messing with the knobs on your amps,preamps,pedals etc to help get the tone you are trying to achieve,
2 are you using actual monitors or just a cheap pair of computer speakers....both can work depending on your budget,goals for overall sound,etc, but sometimes you might have to listen a little bit harder in certain speakers to hear the difference and to be able to tell if its helpful or destructive eqing,
3 are the monitors placed properly..(im aware mine arent for anyone who saw my setup in the post your setup thread lol but i do still keep the factors in mind,i just dont always apply them
),
4 do i know what im doing? if your still new to it then chances are your gonna make mistakes,guys that do this for years and years still find themselves sayin "ahh shit" from time to time...take the time to do the research and learn what each thing does to each sound,
5 is this the right type of industry for me, if your not willing to take the time out to do the tons and tons of research that is to be done with engineering then you might just wanna stick to playing the music and having someone else handle the production end of it.
If you look all over this forum there is a shitload of helpful guidelines and stuff for almost every aspect of engineering..from which DAW would suit you best...all the way down to which types of guitar strings you wanna use...read the stickys at the top they are filled with tons of help and check
this one...when your looking around try not to search for topics as a whole Ex. "how to mix metal music" but try and break it down...figure out what the given problem is and then search for that Ex. "my guitars are sounding real blurry" or "my drums dissapear in the mix" or "my vocals are sounding really distorted" then take it from there and search each problem as it occurs..
keep in mind that its not always the gear,it can also be the user, some of the guys on here get kickass sounding productions with cheap or free equipment so just do your research man,google that shit,youtube that shit,whatever you have to do to help you out theres information everywhere all you gotta do is search for it...if i came off like a dick then my apologies but i feel someone had to say it
All drum VSTi's on the market most definitely are not shit, I've had Superior 2.0 for like 4 days and I already see such potential in it (but it definitely requires some tweaking; one thing that's bothered me in A LOT of S2.0 clips I've heard is a weird snappy unpleasantness to the snare, which I discovered comes largely from the room mic if it hasn't had any cutting/filtering). If you don't feel too confident in your tweaking skillz, however, I'd go for a Slate pack (3.5 EX is either out now or very very close to being out)
