Learning Ableton: Week 3 — EQ and Compressors

Week 3: EQ and Compressors

This week, was about the fundamentals of EQ and Compressors. I reviewed what I kind of already know about EQ-leveling and delved into compressors. Not super exciting, but hey it felt like I should know this next in my weekly self-taught Abelton class.

The YouTube vids often get jargony and into to the weeds. The take-home idea is that you want the instruments to sound clear and not muddled. The biology of our ears is that when we have conflicting sounds at different frequencies, we can’t make sense of it.

There is an actual science to putting the sounds together. You can create muddy effects if you want, but you need to do this deliberate, and make crisp soundscapes, music, etc that pop the different decibels of sound.

The compressors can help with this, reducing a specific instrument. We’ve all been to movies where we can’t hear the dialog over the explosions of an action sequences. That’s poor sound mastering at work.

Here is the GitHub Repo is link to my weekly explorations.