Hi guys!
This is a problem I’ve had since I started making music. I produce House music and I like to use any means to tidy up my song, so that I can make it that bit louder during the mastering process.
In every other tutorial people tell u to cutoff the lowest frequencies of any instrument (20 - 25 Hz), because they need alot of energy and space in the song, but we can’t hear them or even just feel them. But every time I set a cutoff, the volume of the sound actually goes up by 1 to sometimes even 3 db, without any hearable difference (it sounds a bit thinner but in no way louder)! And it’s not only like that with the bass-frequencies. This effect is strongest when I set the cutoff near the root of the sound and decreases the further away the cutoff is. Only after a few thousand Hz the volume actually decreases like it should. How can that be? I mean, if I cut something OFF, then there should be LESS there afterwards, no? O_o
I don’t think that this is due to a too high Q. I always turn the Q only so far up, that there is no hill visible on the curve. I’m using the StudioEQ from Cubase 5, but another EQ I tried (Gliss I think) does the exact same thing. Is this normal, some weird bug, or simply what u get from using low quality EQs (people say that the Steinberg EQs aren’t the best, but I’m not sure if that’s really true)? Any help would be greatly appreciated! Thx!