It was at that point that I knew I had made the right decision to move to Spain and attend audio engineering school. It wasn't exactly the most likely of places for an Icelander to find themselves, but this is where my real education on EQ began.

Like every other audio engineering student at the SAE Institute, I quickly scrounged up enough money to set up a small home studio. One of the perks of the ludicrously high tuition was that they supplied you with a MacBook so all I had to get was an interface, a set of monitors and a cheap condenser microphone.

This would be my studio away from the studios at school, but it would also be where my most important education happened.

I quickly formed a band with a friend from the U.S. and we started writing songs together. Because of my home studio set up, we could easily record our songs and they became my extracurricular studies away from school.

However, what I didn't realize is that I only scratched the surface of the power of understanding frequencies and knowing how to EQ.

When we played our mixes to other people outside of our basement bedroom it sounded horrible!

I remember the first time this happened. We were having a few beers with friends and we thought, "hey, why don't we play our latest song?"

We were naive and didn't understand how important EQ is to making your mixes translate to other speaker systems so as soon as I hit play I realized we had made a terrible mistake!

It sounded boomy and ugly. The balance was all wrong and I still remember how boxy and devoid of low-end the kick drum was. It was painfully embarrassing to listen to and all I wanted to do was to turn it off in front of my friends.

Even though I had gotten the hang of EQ'ing live bands, I still had a lot to learn when it came to EQ'ing my home studio mixes.

I never wanted to have that experience again. I wanted to be proud to show people my mixes. I wanted them to be impressed by how good they sounded.

Knowing that the key to making professional sounding mixes was EQ, I set out to learn everything I could.

Along the way, I passed along a lot of what I learned to my fellow students. They kept asking me for help and I realized that I had a bit of a knack for teaching others.

In fact, that was the year Audio Issues was born. I loved helping my fellow students so much that I created Audio Issues to spread the knowledge even further. 

I laugh at it now but to begin with it was a huge embarrassing struggle.

Remember, I was in Spain, and trying to teach my fellow students about EQ in broken Spanish got pretty comical at times. Complex EQ concepts aren't exactly something they teach you in Spanish 101.

In fact, my classmate Idar from Mexico, who actually became one of my first Audio Issues customers, loves telling me how much they laughed at my awful Spanish in the beginning. 

But I showed them!

Since I had already thrown myself into the deep end, I thought I might as well teach myself how to swim. By the end of the year, not only was I conversationally fluent in Spanish, but I also graduated at the top of my class. 

I'd like to think that the constant questions about audio I got from my classmates had something to do with it. The best way to teach yourself anything is to learn it so well you can teach it to others.

These EQ concepts don't really change much over time, and luckily for you, I've gotten even better at explaining how you can create separation between the instruments in your mix with EQ.

I've put all that together in my Ultimate Guide to EQ, my EQ Strategies course, that teaches you everything you need to know about EQ to make better sounding mixes.

Check it out here:

www.EQStrategies.net

P.S.

Tomorrow, I'm going to talk about one of the biggest problems everyone has with their mixes, yourself included.

And then I'm going to show you six ways to solve it!

What is it?

You'll have to wait for tomorrow's email to find out ;)

Cheers,

Björgvin