Sonar & SoundForge 8 (Spectrum A)

HI, I use Sound Forge, and though its' an earlier version, it has the spectrum analyzer.

Of course analyzers can be found everywhere, and they all do the same thing--display the full spectrum of your project's frequencies.

I empathize with your question, because after being lectured about how I should try using the analyzers, it still seemed like magical Voodoo to me, to make EQ decisions based on what I saw. And unfortunately, despite various threads on the topic, I never got straight forward answers that satisfied me.

I can say that the idea isn't to take out all the spikes. One spike, for instance, could be the frequency of a constantly occuring snare sound for instance--smooth that down and suddenly you've wimped out your snare.

All I can see is that the analyzer will give you a generalized overall view of where the frequency saturations in a project are residing. You really can tell at a glance if a recording or track is way too bass heavy, or too screeching in the highs.

One program I found interesting to use, at least in its demo form, was HarBal. In that program, you find a good CD reference recording--load that in first as a reference, then load in your 2-track mix. The two spectrums will be superimposed on each other in the display--two different colors for easy identification. The idea is to make changes in your mix's EQ based on how it differs from the good pro reference recording. That helped me quite a bit.

But--I still feel that there really Is a great amount of Voodoo and Art in using these displays, and I doubt any two engineers would make the same mixing decisions based on what they both could see on the same read out.

Randy
rbowser