HarBal Harmonic Balancer

Harmonic Balancing has nothing to do with Feng Shui but everything to do with creating balanced frequencies in a recording. We perform an EQ balancing act...

Two of the most difficult aspects of mixing and mastering are to get a good harmonic balance for individual tracks, and to balance tracks in an album as a whole. Typically, you adjust the harmonic content of each track during mixing and hope they all fit together, tweaking here and there if they don't.

HarBal was designed to make this process easier. Open an audio file and the program analyses its frequency content. It produces a graphic display consisting of three lines - the average energy content of the file at different frequencies, the peak energy content, and the mean of the two.

Immediately you can see if there are any harmonic troughs or peaks. Using the Gain Change cursor you simply click and drag on the spectrum to change the shape of the curve. In other words you can visually balance the entire audio frequency of a track. You can playback the original and the new versions and click a button to do an A/B comparison. It's easy, but it's worth remembering that while adjustments can be done purely on a visual basis, it will help if you if you know where sounds and instruments sit in the mix.

Good references

Being able to change a track's spectrum in this way is neat enough but there's more. After creating the perfect settings for a track, you can save the new filter as a reference file which can be displayed while processing other tracks so you can use it as guide.

The program comes with several reference files for common music genres including rock, contemporary, rhythm and blues, hip hop, jazz, jazz fusion, folk, techno and classical. These are excellent starting points and if you have a song with a poor balance you'll soon be able to whip it into shape with these.