The visual elements:

A song, is not a song. A song is a picture or movie on your TV screen.

The mic is a camera, and when you record you’re filming a movie. Different cameras capture a different texture and could make for a whole different experience. As you already know, black and white doesn’t look the same as color, and to a closer extent, footage taken on a Cam Corder has a different feel than scenes captured on Hollywood cameras. Bringing up the rear of course, we have the ever present crappy cellphone cameras, which capture the worst images of the best experiences – just like a crappy computer-mic! We’re going to get much deeper into cameras …err….microphones… a little later lesson. Back to your movie…

After you record that movie you want to stand back in your own glory of course and watch it on your high def TV. So you power up that cutting edge technological dynamo, you pop the movie in, kick your feet up, smile to your self and lay back with the remote as the feature starts. But wait a sec…as the movie begins to play, you notice that the images on the screen are blurry as hell! The colors are way wrong, half the guys look like the hulk , and you can’t tell if that’s a fist or a nipple! Thanks to the shitty image control all your creative genius and hard work, all the hours pouring over the script, its all turning to shit!!!

Okay okay, breathe deep… we definitely gotta adjust this image… How? By playing with the Image Controls. And those Image Controls, which are sound controls, are:

Sharpness; Yes!! The big boy. Sharpness controls how intense or how subdued your picture is. It turns up or down, the vividness of what you’re seeing. That’s Treble, or HIGHS.

Contrast; With Contrast you can make the elements in the picture stand out against the background and pop off the screen, or you can press them all flat. This is MIDS.

Color; With Color you can go so high that all the pigments in the image just bleed together and become mud, or you can reel it back to the point that it’s so thin it’s near black and white. This is Bass, or LOWS.

(Brightness is Volume and Tint is warmth and you can ignore these for now. I only told you because I know you’re curious )

And of course there’s the ‘sweet spot’. What makes it all worth it. The point where nothing is in excess, nothing is too scarce. Everything comes together and creates that breathtaking perfect image. You create this image through EQing.

Now nobody has to tell you what’s right, you feel it. You instinctively know, just by observing how much is too much, what you need to turn down, what you need to turn up, and what you need to not fucks with. And you adjust it till that image is right to you.
Congratulations, you now know everything you need to know about EQing. Experience will teach you everything else you need to know.

This image is just for illustrative purposes. You probably already had an image like this constructed in your mind:

Maybe now would be a good time to tell you that if you have Cool Edit, none of this will mean anything to you. Cool Edit has one big sloppy slider turning the color up and the sharpness down simultaneously . No individual EQing (Image Controls). Stop dickin around with presets that aren’t going to do what you want to do. Trash your Fool Edit and step up to Audacity which is way more capable, way more expandable, and it’s free.

Now here’s everything you need to know about mics: Different quality cameras are better at capturing different aspects of the image. For example, some cameras are better at capturing vivid Color than they are at capturing sharpness and contrast. Mics are the exact same. Some mics are better at capturing Bass, or LOWS, than they are at capturing highs and mids. When you know your voice, you’ll EASILY be able to discern which is which. But how do you know which is which without hearing them? Easily. By looking at the peaks and valleys on the mics Frequency Response Chart. You probably had an “aha” moment by now and figured this all out, but Peaks in the Low frequencies means strengths in Bass. Peaks in mids, means strength in mids, and so on for the highs. Of course…better quality cameras/(mics) are stronger at their strengths and better at their weaknesses than shitty cameras/(mics). Obviously, if you have a bassy voice you’d be better off with a mic that’s good at capturing bass (lows). And the same is true for mids as well as highs.
Congratulations, you now know everything you need to know about Mics. Experience will teach you everything else you need to know.


BTW, in the example above, the TV is actually your headphones or monitors. But I wanted to take that factor out of the equation for clearer illustration. In reality, different TVs can definitely make the same picture look different, and cheap TV’s, though you can tune them, make EVERY picture look like shit. The exact same holds true for headphones and monitors, just as it does for mics and cameras.

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