To round off his series on the basics of EQ (previous posts here and here) Graeme Allen offers some basic tips on beginning to address EQ in your own recordings.
The biggest problem area sorting out the EQ in your mix is usually the lower end of the spectrum. As we’ve seen, if too many of your tracks have a lot going on below 500-600Hz then your overall song can end up sounding quite muffled and boomy. One way to combat this is to ‘roll off’ the bass on anything that doesn’t need it - basically anything that isn’t drums or bass. Rolling off the bass on an EQ plug-in looks a bit like this:
The frequency at which you roll it off depends on what you’re using it on. Often the low frequencies give a nice, warm sound to things like acoustic guitar. So it’s a compromise – the more bass you roll off the easier it will fit in with the drums and bass, but too much and it’ll sound too thin and tinny.
More specific EQ can be used to get rid of some unwanted frequencies in your music. There’s a handy little method for doing this.
1. Make the width (or Q) of the EQ as small as possible
2. Make the gain (volume) as loud as possible
3. Move the frequency around until the annoying frequency pokes out
4. Pull the gain right down
If that doesn’t make sense, here’s a video to demonstrate. It’s a basic drum track. Listen to the snare drum. The beat is in 4/4, and you can hear it being hit on beat three of every bar. The snare’s ringing frequencies are giving the whole a nasty ‘boink’ sound that is interfering with the natural ‘bite’ we’d expect from a snare. We want to work out whereabouts in the spectrum the unwanted sound is, and dig it out.
About forty seconds into the video I pin it down to a location just underneath 200 Hz, and then kill that frequency completely. Voila - no more boink. If you look at the Hz scale you can see I’ve used the parametric EQ to focus on a range of frequencies between 100 and 500 Hz (where I know the boink is likely to be) and then remove the ‘bad’ frequency very precisely without taking too much of the overall sound with it.
I wouldn’t normally cut the signal by quite that much, as I would want to absolutely minimise the loss of wanted frequencies, but for demonstration purposes it works well.
I’ll go into more detailed EQ tips for specific instruments in later posts. As per usual, there aren’t really specific rules to this kind of thing, just some basic guidelines. It can really take a while to get your head around exactly what kind of approach to EQ is right for each part of your mix. My advice is to keep practising, and listen to loads of music!
Use songs as references when you’re mixing to see what kind of sounds the pros are getting from their tracks and eventually you’ll start getting an insight into the tricky world of EQ. Next time I’ll talk about the slightly trickier world of compression, another fundamental process involved in mixing.
Graeme Allen is the MD of Amati Studios, a company that works with some of the best mid-sized recording studios in the country.
In addition to his technical skills, Graeme is a first class musician in his own right, playing rock, blues and jazz guitar and classical violin. Visit his website at www.amatistudios.co.uk.
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