Hi everyone, Dennis Foley from Acoustic Fields.
Today we’re going to talk about Spectral Balance.
Spectral Balance is a term that Mastering Engineers use constantly and let's just break
it apart.
Balance of Spectrum, so balancing all the sounds that are in your mix so that's really
a big important function of a mastering engineer and the goal of mixing engineer is to give
the mastering engineer a balanced spectral analysis so to speak.
So what is Spectral Balance?
it's the relationship between everything, vocals, drums, guitar, bass, piano, anything
that you're recording.
It’s the relationship to that energy with the other energies in the spectrum so in the
frequency response.
So it's a relationship based on strength, amplitude, bandwidth, how much energy the
instrument produces, at what frequency versus other frequencies and other instruments, how
each instrument sits in the mix and you've heard this term many times.
It's a way that engineers bring up something or decrease something in the mix and how they
position it in the mix and vocals are really critical with this because vocals are a big
component of how we connect to music emotionally so how the engineer positions the vocal in
the mix will have a lot to do with whether the vocals are more involved or less involved.
Harmonies, background vocals, a lot of this are important in Spectral Balance.
This is the overlapping of instruments because all instruments share common frequencies,
even drums.
Drums go a little bit lower than most instruments but symbols and high hats and things like
that can get in the same frequency response range as guitars and other higher frequency
producing instruments.
So when they overlap we have cancellation or reinforcement occurring so if you get too
much energy at certain frequencies… and we struggled with this back in the analog
days with tape, when we had too much energy at a certain frequency it saturated the tape
and you couldn't hear anything or the other end of the spectrum is you hear too much,
a big strong kick drum, overwhelms all the other instruments in the mix.
So Spectral Balance is very important in our mixes, very important to the mastering engineer
but equally important in room sound so when we design rooms we have to keep this Spectral
Balance term in place because it's important to make sure that the room can handle all
the frequencies so that the mix engineer can get all the frequencies through the microphone
into the recording process and then at the other end the mastering engineer can balance
everything out.
So this is why I paid special attention to our carbon and our foam technologies and our
rooms are noted for very high resolution and very smooth response curves and the reason
they're known for that, especially in the low end is because I want to make sure you
hear everything.
I want to make sure that you can hear everything in the music and not everything in the room
so that's why I paid special attention to our carbon technology and our foam technology
and the rates and levels of absorption that those two technologies exhibit.
They complement Spectral Balance and they do a better job in the low end than anything
currently in the market place and I’ll stand behind that with the money back guarantee.
So I’m really passionate about balance and Spectral Balance because I want to hear everything
the artist is doing when they're singing, when they're playing and mainly what the engineer
is doing when he’s recording to that.
So good quality sound like we always say is a combination of doing a lot of little things
correct but mainly in the correct sequence also.
So this is why I've spent years and years with this technology and getting these foam
curves, absorption curves and our carbon curves correct.
So I hope that helps define Spectral Balance for us and the very important term in both
our rooms and in our recording engineering process.
Thank you