From the course: A Mix Engineer's Glossary of Techniques

Designing frequency specific location - Pro Tools Tutorial

From the course: A Mix Engineer's Glossary of Techniques

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Designing frequency specific location

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- [Instructor] Panning moves throughout a mix can give you a location illusion that can give a mixed motion and a subtle way to keep the listener interested without knowing how he's being kept interested or she's being kept interested. And also, there is a frequency-specific device I use to achieve different location points in an already stereo track. So I'm going to pick on a keyboard again and show you something that can be very useful and subtle and musical all at the same time. Again, thanks Adam Yaron for letting us have "Back in My Life." (calm music) So here's a stereo pad, goes through the verses without any sort of fancy processing on it. That's just the sound of the pad, it's lovely. Now just left alone, I've opened up this pan EQ device. And just to help sort of let you know what it's doing, let me move it around some. So I'm taking a particular frequency spectrum between maybe 100 and 2K, and moving both the frequency itself, see this line here is moving between 900 and 2.1K, so you can hear that little sweep. And then letting it bounce around from left and right, gives a very subtle motion to this track and, thus, the appearance of location changes. Now, I can leave these locations alone, pick different frequencies, this is a minus frequency. See these knobs on the right moving? You'll, as I move this crosshair, you'll see the changes I'm making represented in these pots here on the right. So you can see the gain of this device is turned way down. (soft music) Subtle, you can affect the Q ratio, wide or narrow. And you can leave it standing, so I can choose a frequency. This one is a rather low frequency around 700. And then put that off to the left and leave it there and select a frequency somewhat higher in the 2K range. And leave it there and listen to the width you get. Subtle, and it's going to come back around. (soft music) But again, giving it a dimension that it wouldn't otherwise have, and then of course, when you start moving those things around, you can get some really lovely effects. And you can automate this device, and I'll show you something that's fun to do. So if I switch to automation and kind of select all of them, now the whole device is automated. So I can do one at a time. (soft music) Go higher in the frequency range. So that's one. Now I'll do another. (soft music) Now I'm getting a swirling left-right motion. So the listener's getting treated to some spacial effects that are so subtle. It won't be immediately apparent, but in the track, there'll be a motion implied and perceived that is both subtle musical, giving it width, location, and hopefully that's the sort of thing that gives it height, as well. Now, that's not specific just to keyboards, you can do that, but it is a very effective device to use for those pads because of the inherent subtlety in the pad itself, and the sweep of frequencies you can achieve with this device.

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