How to Eq Absolutely Anything

Thanks for downloading this free eBook! I’m excited for you to jump in and start learning how to effectively use EQ on anything you come across. If you haven’t already done so, you can also sign up at www.homestudiocenter.com​ for free weekly emails about home recording. Enjoy!

Rob Mayzes  

Good EQ Is The Key To Great Mixes It’s easy to ruin your recordings with EQ. Most beginners do. Using EQ when mixing is completely different to using an EQ in your car or on your iPod. Yet most people don’t understand this difference. It’s easy to resort to EQ charts when you first start out. But this will make it harder to progress as a mixer. Instead, you need to learn the various ways in which you should be using EQ. You need to train your ears so that you can apply EQ with purpose. And you need to develop an approach that works for mixing. I want to show you exactly how to do those three things. Want to feel comfortable applying EQ to absolutely any instrument or voice? Then read this book (it will only take 30 minutes).

 

   

EQ’s Place In The Mix   When mixing music, there are four main tools that you should focus on. Volume, panning, EQ and compression. Anything else is a distraction at first and should be ignored.

Get comfortable with EQ and compression and you will be able to use more complicated tools such as limiters, reverb and multi-band compression a lot more effectively. Volume and panning are relatively easy to understand. It’s how loud the instruments are in relation to each other, and where they are placed in the stereo field. Sounds simple, but don’t underestimate the importance of these factors. These are the building blocks of any great mix. Next we have equalization. This vital process is the main tool that we have as mixers that allows us to shape sounds to our liking. Whereas volume balancing allows us to control the overall level of an instrument or voice, EQ allows use to zoom in to a sound and adjust the volume of the individual frequencies. With EQ alone you can remove nasty elements, exaggerate pleasing elements, make things sound different and create space in your mix. The final essential tool, compression, isn’t discussed in this tutorial. If you want to master compression, you can e ​ nroll in this free online course​ that I created

But Wait… What Is Equalization? Every audible sound sits within the frequency range of human hearing. A high pitched sound, like a drum cymbal or hissing sound, resides in the top end of the spectrum. A low pitched sound, like a bass guitar or kick drum, resides in the bottom end of the spectrum. Every instrument has a fundamental frequency but also has higher overtones and harmonics that give it’s character of sound.

An organ sounds different to a bass guitar because of the different overtones and harmonics. With equalization, you can adjust the character and tone of a sound by boosting or cutting these different frequencies. It’s important to remember that you can’t completely change a sound with equalization. You can’t create new frequencies. You can only remove or exaggerate what’s already there. You couldn’t make a car sound like a duck. But you could make a Ford Mustang sound a bit more like a Ford Escort…

Master The Frequency Spectrum

The frequency chart from I​ ndependent Recording (click for interactive version)​ shown above is useful in two ways. Firstly, it allows you to see where different instruments sit on the frequency spectrum. This gives you a good indication of whether or not your mix will be too busy. If you have too many instruments in the same range your song will start to sound cluttered and muddy.

Secondly, it allows you to visualize the different frequency ranges and how they sound. The best thing you can do when you start mixing is learn the frequency spectrum. This one small feat will have a huge impact on how quickly you progress as an home recordist, mixer and engineer. Notice how the spectrum is broken down into ‘Sub Bass’, ‘Bass’, ‘Midrange’, ‘High Mids’ and ‘High Freqs’. These are your five key frequency ranges. Listen to how each of them sound: Listen on SoundCloud Learn the numbers for each of these ranges. Once you’ve done that, take a look at the descriptive ranges on the chart. Terms like ‘Warmth’, ‘Fullness/Mud’, ‘Edge’ and ‘Air’. Here’s a table containing the most important frequency ranges:

Sound

Frequency Range

Rumble

25Hz - 40Hz

Bottom

60Hz - 90Hz

Boom/Punch

100Hz - 170Hz

Warmth

130Hz - 220Hz

Fullness/Mud

250Hz - 450Hz

Honk

450Hz - 1kHz

Tinny

1kHz - 2kHz

Crunch

2kHz - 4kHz

Edginess/Brittleness

3.5kHz - 6kHz

Sibilance (in voice)

4kHz - 10kHz

Definition

6kHz - 10kHz

Piercing

8kHz - 12.5kHz

Air

15kHz - 20kHz

Load up an instrument and experiment with boosting and reducing each of these frequency ranges.

Remember, though, that they are only guidelines to get you started. Once you become more familiar with the different areas of the frequency spectrum, you will never need to refer to a chart like this. Here are some examples of different frequency ranges on an electric guitar. Each example included a narrow boost of just over 10dB for some of the frequency ranges in the table above. I used a drastic boost to make the differences obvious. Listen on SoundCloud   Use ear training tools to train yourself to recognise different frequencies. Start off with free tools like E ​ Q Match​ and the ​PureMix ​ rain Your Quiz​ and then move on to paid software like ​QuizTones​ and T Ears.​ Over time you will start to recognise different frequency ranges and everything will become clearer. Never use EQ charts when mixing. Especially don’t use EQ charts specific to a particular instrument. Doing this will hinder your progress and will prevent you from training your ears. There are several other techniques that you can use instead that will be discussed in the next section…

The Different Types of EQ That You Need To Know

There are a few different ways in which we can adjust the volume of different frequencies. Filters allow us to cut out everything above or below a certain frequency. A low pass filter will let everything below the set frequency pass through the filter. A high pass filter will do the complete opposite.

Shelves attenuate or boost everything above or below a certain frequency by a set amount. A high shelf set to 10kHz with a boost of +3 dB will boost everything above 10kHz by… you guessed it… 3 dB! A low shelf would do the opposite.

Bell curves boost a frequency and its surrounding frequencies at a set point. You can set the frequency, the gain and also the bandwidth/Q (this dictates how wide or narrow the boost is.

As well as these three different ways to adjust frequencies, there are also different types of EQ interfaces. Graphic equalizers consist of lots of bell curve faders across the whole frequency spectrum. They are used mostly for live sound and adjusting speaker systems.

Fixed equalizers consist of a few fixed frequencies. Sometimes they are bell curves, sometimes shelves. These are used in basic analogue mixing desks and guitar amps and aren’t very versatile due to their fixed frequency positions.

Parametric equalizers are what you will use most for mixing. These allow you to boost or cut any frequency you want using bell curves, filters and shelves.

Semi-parametric equalizers are also very useful for mixing. These look similar to fixed EQ’s but allow you to change the frequency that you are adjusting. Most analogue modelling EQ plugins use this interface.

How The Pro’s Use EQ Now you have an understanding of what EQ does and an awareness of the frequency spectrum. But how do you put this knowledge into practice to start getting better mixes? I mentioned earlier that there were four main ways in which you can use EQ: ● ● ● ●

Remove nasty elements Exaggerate pleasing elements Make things sound different Create space in your mix

Before we look at each of these processes in more detail, I want to give you some general guidelines for using an equalizer.

The 7 Commandments of Equalization 1. Be as subtle as possible with parametric EQ’s. ​The less, the better. A boost or cut of 3dB is a good starting point. The only exception to this rule is when using top quality analogue gear/desks and their software replica’s. In this case, the colouration of the EQ is desired and you can turn those knobs all the way to 10! 2. Don’t rely on EQ to change a sound after recording.​ Get a good sound in the recording phase. 3. Cut instead of boosting where possible. ​Boosting frequencies will raise the volume of the instrument/vocal and start eating up headroom. Using cuts also forces you to be more strategic with your EQ moves. If you want something to sound warmer, cut the highs instead of boosting the lows. 4. EQ for a reason. EQ with purpose.​ Have a small goal that you want to achieve with every EQ move. If it doesn’t need EQ, don’t use it for the sake of it.

5. Don’t apply EQ in solo.​ The listener will never hear the track in solo, so never mix in solo. An instrument that sounds awful on it’s own might sound great in the mix. 6. You can be drastic with filters. ​Don’t be afraid to cut everything below 200Hz on a guitar or cut everything above 5kHz on a bass. It will give more room for the other instruments. If the guitar sounds too weak on it’s own in a different section, automate the filter to bring the bottom end back in. 7. Use lots of small EQ changes rather than a few big ones​. In my experience a good mix is the culmination of 100+ small moves, not 10 heavy moves. Awesome! You’re 80% of the way there. You now know a lot more about EQ than the vast majority of home recording enthusiasts (and a surprising amount of engineers I know, too). Stick to these guidelines and you will be off to a running start. Once you have more experience, though, don’t be afraid to stray from the path and experiment. Everyone has a different mixing style, and you need to develop your own opinions and techniques. Now let’s take a look at those four main processes in a bit more depth.

The Four Key Processes

#1 - Remove nasty elements This is one of the main ways in which we use EQ. A lot of people might refer to this as subtractive EQ. It’s important to focus on getting a good sound at the source when you’re recording. If you don’t like the tone of a guitar, move the mic or change the amp settings. If you don’t like the sound of a vocal, chose a different mic or ask the vocalist to take a step back. However, despite your best efforts, there are always going to be elements to a recording that you didn’t intend to record. A persistent ringing on a drum. Sibilance in a vocal. A prominent room resonance. Using a narrow cut we can remove these obvious problems in our audio. A surgical cut should always be narrow if you are targeting a

particular group of frequencies, and due to the narrow bandwidth you can be a bit more drastic and go for a -5dB cut. Just make sure you apply these cuts with the whole mix in and listen out for a reduction in the bass due to phasing issues (applying any sort of EQ will mess with the phasing slightly). If you’re struggling to find the problematic frequencies that need cutting, try using The Altitude Mixing Technique. This involves sweeping an extreme narrow boost up and down the frequency spectrum till you notice frequency ranges that pop out at you. For a simple, easy to follow guide of how to do this download the free Altitude Technique Step-By-Step Guide PDF. You can also remove larger displeasing elements of the sound with a subtle, wide cut. If a vocal sounds muddy you could remove a lot of the bass with a -3dB low shelf. If an electric guitar sounds brittle you could add a wide cut between 4kHz and 6kHz. If you can hear too much of the snare wires on the snare apply a -3dB high shelf.

#2 - Exaggerate pleasing elements Now that you’ve removed the bad stuff and prioritised subtractive EQ you can use some subtle, wide boosts to emphasise the good stuff. This step isn’t necessary, and quite often cuts are enough to clean up the instrument. As long as you are subtle with your boosts, there is no reason to shy away from them. If you can, use an analogue modelling EQ plugin for this purpose. If not just be sure to use wide boosts of around 3dB. If a vocal sounds warm a subtle boost could emphasise this warmth without making the vocal sound too muddy. If a guitar isn’t cutting through the mix too well you could boost it at 2kHz to give it a bit more presence and crunch.

#3 - Make things sound different So far you have learned how to use EQ as a tool that can chisel away at your mix and shape your song. You can also use EQ as an effect to change the character of a sound that’s low in the mix. Subtle EQ moves are important for the key parts of your song - the vocals, the drums, the bass, the lead guitar. But

background instruments and overdubs that are low in the mix can be treated more artistically. Think about the ‘telephone’ vocal sound. This is a great example of using EQ as an effect rather than a tool. Experiment with drastic filters and boosts. Don’t be afraid to cut away large chunks of a sound that is low in the mix to create more room for the main parts.

#4 - Create space in your mix You can also use cuts to make room for other instruments. If a bass guitar is prominent around 120Hz (you can use a frequency analyser or a good old b ​ oost-and-sweep​ to find the most prominent frequencies), try cutting the kick drum in this range to give the bass some room. Whenever you boost an instrument or vocal, try cutting the same frequencies in the other tracks. Boosting the vocals at 2kHz and 4kHz? Cut these frequencies in every other instrument and vocal. This is called frequency slotting and it’s essential for achieving separation and creating mixes that sound full and clear (not muddy and cluttered).

Bringing It All Together You can apply these techniques to any instrument or vocal. Experimentation and practice is key to developing your ears. Whenever you start to apply EQ to an instrument or vocal, ask yourself what you are trying to accomplish. Are you trying to make a vocal more exciting? Add some air with a high shelf boost above 16kHz. Are you trying to make a guitar sound more aggressive? Start with a 6dB boost around 2kHz, move the frequency up and down until you find a sound that you like and then dial the boost back to 3dB. Rather than just resorting to an EQ chart, start experimenting with drastic changes to hear what you’re doing and then reduce the boosts/cuts to 3dB once you’ve accomplished an exaggerated version of the sound that you wanted to achieve.

Action Steps Now follow these action steps to complete your transformation into an EQ ninja: Action Step 1 ​- Load up a project in your DAW of choice. If you don’t have any old projects to open, import a song from your music library. Action Step 2​ - Choose an instrument or vocal to focus on. Something that plays a key role in the song. Action Step 3​ - Listen to the loudest section of the song on repeat with the full mix in and focus on your chosen part. Are there any nasty elements to the sound? Ringing? Room resonances? Sibilance? Harshness? Muddiness? Brittleness? Too bright? Too bassy? Action Step 4​ - Write down your first impressions. Action Step 5​ - Think about the frequency ranges of the words that you wrote down. Did it sound brittle? This will be in the high mids somewhere. Too muddy? This will be in the low mids. Action Step 6​ - Load up an equalizer and experiment with narrow and wide cuts between -3dB and -5dB to remove these unpleasing elements. Action Step 7​ - Load up a new equalizer, either a parametric or semi-parametric and use a wide 3dB boost to emphasise the best element(s) of the sound. Action Step 8 ​- Cut the frequencies that you boosted in the other instruments/vocals by 3dB. Action Step 9​ - Bypass all of the EQ plugins and listen to the difference. Action Step 10​ - Tell your friends about this eBook! It helps us to grow and keep the lights on. Simply use one of the sharing buttons below or direct a friend to t​ his webpage.