[Mike Rivers]

muzician21 wrote:
Thinking primarily of vocal tracks, how intensely should you expect to
eq something? Should the sound of the mic be mostly "good" as is and
should need only mild tweaking or is it often pretty radically
altered?

It depends. If you want the recording to sound like the
singer, then you should do minimal EQ. If you want to change
the sound, then do whatever suits you or the song. The
reason why people fuss so much about finding the right vocal
mic rather than using EQ is that you want to be sure that
the mic doesn't fail to capture something that's an
important part of the sound. You can't use EQ to put "air"
in a vocal if the mic rolls off 15 dB between 8 and 20 kHz.
Similarly, you can't get strong proximity effect from a mic
that's been intentionally rolled off at the low end to
reduce proximity effect. You can get rid of a certain amount
of harshness caused by mid-range peakiness by using EQ, but
it's better to find a mic that doesn't emphasize undesirable
characteristics of the voice.


--
"Today's production equipment is IT based and cannot be
operated without a passing knowledge of computing, although
it seems that it can be operated without a passing knowledge
of audio." - John Watkinson