This course will teach you how to understand some of the popular adjectives used to describe audio.

This course consists of the explanations of popular adjectives used to describe audio.

Dark - this means the signal sounds vintage, to understand what vintage sounds like listen to some old recording and study the tone. Dark sounding also falls under colored.
Bright - this means the signal has more high frequencies. If you want to make something sound brighter add some high frequency to it. Bright being the opposite of dark can be great on some vocals.
Clean - clean means your signal is pure and accurate. This is a modern sound, the opposite of vintage. For example a clean mic pre means it doesn't change (or color) your sound. So what you put in is what you get back. Solid-state or transformerless is generally clean.
Colored - this is the opposite of clean. Coloring your sounds means changing the tone from the original signal. Colored can be associated with vintage and sometimes dark. Different gear has different colors. If you listen closely you can hear differences between different pieces of gear.
Muddy - this the second hardest term to explain, but here we go. Mud is a build of low mid frequencies (200-500hz) that makes the signal sound cluttered. Mud is not a positive thing and should never be taken as a compliment. It took me a long time to distinguish what mud was.
Sterile - sterile means ultra clean. This is good for say orchestra where you usually want as little color as possible. Sterile can also come off sometimes as “too clean", meaning its so clean it's boring. These type of pres are crystal clear though.