Hivemind Times Issue #55

Welcome To The Hivemind Times!

Loyal reader it’s Graydon. Writing you now for the 55th consecutive week this time with a special hot edition of The Times. 

Did you all notice we dropped a brand new game (Hivemind Countdown) that I am actually pretty good at?! If you haven’t seen that go watch. Oh and we dropped our PBR fest recap that includes interviews with Devo, Mannequin Pussy, Japanese Breakfast and more?!

Hope all of you are doing well and have an amazing labor day weekend dialed up - lord knows we earned it. 

Enjoy the random stuff we have packed in this week's letter.

- Riley & Graydon

WEEKLY PLAYLIST

Jazz Fusion? Smooth Jazz? Modern Psych Jazz? Detroit is hosting the largest free jazz fest in the country this weekend and you bet your sweet ass I will be in attendance. Hiromi Sonicwonderland is on Saturday and my excitement is palpable. 

I’ve made you all more classic old school jazz playlists before but a whole modern world exists that blends the elements of funk, soul, and RnB into the wild world of jazz that can be a great gateway for people into the genre.

And save your breath if you’ve got some strict definition of “jazz” and some of these tracks fall outside of it - you’re the annoying one and no one wants to hang out with you.

Enjoy the freaky tracks!

- Graydon

CRONK’S UPDATE

I love distractions, especially at the workplace. And what better distraction than a god damn 3D printer. Tony got this thing for $50. We have had it set up next to our desks all week, ripping away. It's bad ass, we are mind-blown. This is the gadget of all gadgets, you can make a gun with it. It's bad ass and insane.

Here are some of the things we printed out…

YouTube Playbutton

Small hotdog and big hotdog

Dachshund toy

Tony printed out a bike but I have no picture. So yeah I would highly recommend a 3d printer.

- Cronk

QUINN’S CHEMISTRY CLASS

The four fundamentals of mixing part 3: EQ.

I got kind of carried away with this one, kind of a stream of consciousness about the basics of mixing with EQ, sorry if this one has too many words. By the way, I got pulled over last weekend and had to pay $500 to get my car out of the impound lot and I have court on Wednesday. It's so over.

EQ:

EQ is short for “Equalization” and it refers to the process of manipulation of the volume of specific bands of frequencies of a sound or groups of sounds for various purposes. EQ is mainly used to achieve mix balance, sculpt a sound to give it desired tonal characteristics, or sound design. When it comes to mixing, the first use is obviously the most important, while the latter two uses are implicitly involved in the mixing process. 

In order to understand how EQ is used in the mixing process, it is important to think about the frequency spectrum in a specific way. The average range of frequencies that the human ear can detect are between 20 Hz-20 kHz and we are going to imagine this continuous spectrum consists of 4 main bands of frequencies; sub, lows (bass), mids, and highs (treble). 

Sub: 20-120Hz

Lows: 120-500Hz

Mids: 500Hz - 4kHz

Highs: 4kHz+

These frequency bands are not set in stone and if you ask different people they will tell you slightly different things, however in a mixing context, I believe breaking them up in this way is the most productive. You will also see people breaking up each of these 4 bands into even more bands, but I am trying to keep it simple. 

Also, a lot of people will say the sub range ends at like 60Hz and this is true for many speaker systems, but I have seen plenty of subs that have crossovers as high as 120Hz and even higher so I take this into account when I am mixing for maximum translation across all speaker systems.

The main thing you want to be thinking about when you are EQing a mix is to make sure you are carving out space in the frequency spectrum for each element in the mix. The name of the game is SUBTRACTION, focus on removing frequencies to achieve a clean mix before you start boosting things. Boosting frequencies will often trick your ears into thinking something sounds better, when in reality it just appears that way because it is louder. 

When you have been recklessly boosting frequencies on everything, the combination of every sound will result in a very muddy mess. In general, you want to subtract smaller, focused bands of frequencies and slightly boost larger, wide bands or shelves.  Each element should sit in its own frequency band in order to not clash with other elements. 

To do this, first, identify which band(s) each element is mainly sitting in, then, determine which elements are sitting in the same band and subtract frequencies from these elements so they fit in the spectrum like puzzle pieces. For example, say you have a track with a kick, snare, hi-hats, lead synth, bass guitar or synth, and a melodic synth. The kick and bass will sit in the sub and low end. The snare and lead synth will sit mainly in the mids with some high end information. The hi-hats and melodic synth will sit in the hi-end with the melodic synth dipping into the mids.

Start with the lows and subs, cut everything below 120Hz on every sound except the kick and bass. I almost always cut out as much low end on every sound as I can without negatively impacting the sound. This process is getting rid of the “rumble” which is not usually very audible on one element by itself, but when you combine all of them across the whole mix, you can get phasing issues that will completely ruin your sub and low end mix, resulting in less power and unwanted dynamics. 

To get the kick and bass to work together, you want to take a high Q-value bell curve, boost it a ton, and sweep around the low end of the bass with just the kick and bass playing until you find pockets where they sound absolutely terrible and muddy.

Once you find these spots, reduce the band to a negative value until the kick and bass aren’t fighting each other. Also, cut out as much low end on both of them as you can without touching the fundamental frequencies or reducing the power. This process can be very finicky and often requires more than just EQ to fix, but it is a good starting spot.

Now, the snare and lead. After taking out all the unneeded low end information, the snare will have a very obvious and loud fundamental where the “punch” of the snare is hitting, you can carve out a small pocket in the lead where the snare is hitting. Some snares will have some abrasive high end in them that can be removed, or you can remove the frequencies that are shared with the hi-hats, as they are often played at the same time anyway. 

You also want to consider that most synths have a lot of high end harmonics from saturation or distortion in them, you can carve out some pockets here for the hi-hats or melody. I often will low pass or put a high shelf on the lead and attenuate the very highest frequencies out to leave room for the sounds that sit only in the high end. When it comes to the mid and high end, panning and composition can and should be used to get sounds that have a lot of frequency information in common to sit together in the mix. Maybe, just don’t have them playing at the same time too often.

With hi hats and melodic sounds, I usually just worry about any abrasive or grating resonant frequencies and spend time sweeping around with a high Q bell and removing anything that hurts my ears. Our ears are very sensitive to anything above 4Khz so it is important to take time with this. Panning is also very useful here.

Make sure you don’t take too many frequencies out resulting in things sounding thin or weak. Once you have finished subtractive EQ, it is time to move on to additive EQ. Using a separate EQ for addition, you can go ahead and pull wide bands of frequencies up to bring out the pleasant frequencies where they are needed.

This sort of EQing is really subjective and up to taste and I just realized how long this article is so I’m going to end it here.

- Quinn

SPORTS

Impact of the Micah Parsons trade

This man is now the highest paid non quarterback in the NFL inking a 4 year $188 million dollar deal with the Green Bay Packers. This makes the NFC the undisputed toughest division in football and instantly makes the Packers a Super Bowl contender. 

The pack rarely make offseason splash moves like this but notably after signing Reggie White in ‘93 and trading for Charles Woodson in ‘06, championships were soon to follow. 

This franchise will love this man forever if he continues on his pace of about 13 sacks a year and generally disrupts GRAYDON IS GAY protection and how opposing teams have to run their offense. 

I’m excited. I hope he doesn’t rip Jared Goff’s dick off in week one but hey, this is why we watch. 

The anticipation for this NFL season cannot be any higher….Unless the Browns trade for Mahomes.

- Graydon

VIDEO GAMES

I bought the new Madden!

It’s pretty much the same as all the others but if you want that smoke dm me…

- Graydon

THIS WEEK’S COMICS

MERCH