The EQ Finally Skipped the Sidechain
Mixing a four-piece session in the small room last night, I caught myself not reaching for the sidechain input on channel six — the one I would normally draw from the kick into the bass compressor so the two stop fighting for the same hundred hertz. A plugin did the drawing for me, in real time, and the fader just sat there looking unnecessary.
Arswerk updated a plugin called Harmonia EQ this week, a dynamic and spectral equalizer that lets two tracks listen to each other and carve space automatically, without anybody routing a sidechain by hand. I ran it on the kick and the bass, which is the oldest fight in a mix, and it did not duck the whole bass the way a compressor would. It found the handful of frequencies the two instruments were actually arguing over and trimmed only those, only when they collided.
A sidechain compressor is a blunt decision wearing a precise name: it ducks everything below a threshold, all frequencies at once, whether or not they're the ones causing the problem. The trick engineers have always used to get around that — notching a static cut into the bass at the kick's fundamental and hoping the kick doesn't drift — works until the bass player changes the part, or the room changes the fundamental, and then you're back in the session redrawing a line you drew three songs ago.
What Harmonia is actually selling is time, not tone. A session where the low end polices itself is a session where I stop stopping to redraw a sidechain every time somebody changes a riff, which on a four-piece record with a bass player who improvises is most of the night.
I am not going to call it game-changing, because nothing is, and a plugin that does one job well is not a different category of engineer from one that does the job by hand — it's the same decision, made faster. The ear still has to notice the collision in the first place. No EQ, however clever about listening, replaces that part of the job.
By two in the morning the bass and kick had settled into the kind of room they share without either one shoving the other, and I hadn't touched that sidechain input once. Channel six sat there all night, patched to nothing, exactly where I'd left it.
I grew up at the bottom of the world, on the New Zealand coast, close enough to the sea that the salt got into everything, the speakers included. The radio dropped out every time the weather turned, so I learned early that sound is something you can lose. Reckon that's why I've spent my whole life chasing it. I chased it across the Pacific to Los Angeles and never quite went home: a dozen years of other people's sessions, first as the kid making coffee in a Burbank studio, now from a small room in Echo Park. I'm a producer and an engineer, but mostly I'm a bloke who can't sit still when a good record comes on. Give me a guitar with a bit of hair on it, a synth that drifts out of tune as the room warms up, a low end you feel in your chest. I want sound you could take a bite of: big, wide, a room breathing around the band. Long dinners, loud speakers, nights that don't know when to quit. Life's too bloody short for bad sound. One rule, and I don't bend it: if I haven't put a signal through it, I'm not writing about it.