COLLIN JORDAN: Hi. I'm Collin Jordan, and we're here at the Boiler Room, my music mastering studio in Chicago, Illinois. I've been doing this for 10 years now, and I've had the studio for about five. Today, I'm going to be showing you some of the mastering equipment that I use here in the studio.

This is the Avalon AD2077. It's a mastering EQ. It's a class-A, transformerless analog EQ, and it's my main analog EQ, actually only analog EQ here in the studio. I use it mainly for general boosts and cuts. It's a great tool for sweetening up a mix, for example maybe just a dB or two at 25k which is called a simulated Baxandall curve, and that's really good for opening up the air of a mix, which is a typical thing that mastering engineers do. Maybe, you know, a dB or so at like 7k or something would also be a good example of something that would be used to make a mix just pop a little bit better.

I tend to use it more for the high end than the low end. I think it sounds better on the top. The low end is good too, and occasionally I will do some boost down low to maybe fill out the low end, make a bridge between the kick and the bass, and the rest of the mix. But overall, I use it in a very subtle way because it does have kind of its own sonic signature which sounds great, but if you push it too far, it can sound -- it can be too much just because it is such a recognizable sound.

I tried out a bunch of different analog EQs and this is the one that I like the best. There's plenty that have a very minimal sonic signature, and I didn't want that for my analog EQ because digital EQs are much better for that kind of thing I think. This one just sounded really sweet to my ears. It had a nice personality to it, and I don't use it on everything, but when I do use it, it does -- it sounds great.

I tend to use it maybe on most of the stuff that I work with but one thing that it can do is get a little harsh quickly, so you need to be pretty subtle with it, and if you've got a very harsh mix coming in then you need to be kind of gentle with or maybe not even use it at all. It can really pop the instruments, especially vocals, snare drums, guitars, that kind of thing. It's really amazing how it can take something that's kind of muddy and you can use it to highlight certain elements.

Nowadays, the tendency is to make -- everybody's kind of making the new pet sounds with a hundred tracks that you can line up in Pro Tools and so that stuff tends to get pretty crowded, and this is excellent for bringing up the details of that, sort of the typical home recording with too many tracks. It can be great for separating out the instruments and the vocals.