EQ Tips and Tricks
5 min readEQ is perhaps the most important effect available. It allows you to make small or large fixes to the frequencies in music and can be an essential tool in cleaning up a mix. For this reason, it is important to have a good grasp of what can go right and wrong, and a few of the more advanced tricks. This guide offers some really cool tips and tricks for you to try immediately to improve your EQ technique.
Always start with a high-pass
It sounds extra picky, and yes, people do keep saying it, but it is true. If you have a bunch of sounds and instrument recording, you can free up a lot of headroom from the low end.
Try a little experiment. Download a free mixing practice song (this site has hundreds of great options) and check the meter before you start mixing.
Take note of the loudest peak value. Now add an EQ to every track and high-pass at 20Hz. Below this frequency is sounds we can’t hear.
You may find that when referencing the meters after adding all the high-passes, that there are a good few dB of headroom extra to play with.
Take note of the options, you have shelf and low-cut options and can determine the steepness in many EQ plugins. Some work better than others. Test for each instrument and you might find that different sounds have different needs.
Start low, work high
Following on from the previous point, this can be a great trick for extensive tidying of a sound. If you are looking for a quick fix of a single frequency, then feel free to skip this step.
Because the lower frequencies have more weight to them and can take up more headroom, you should tidy them up first. Once you have cut all the extreme lows out, it is a good idea to deal with the mix-killing mud.
Muddy frequencies are normally around 200-250Hz, but can be lower depending on the particular instrument.
These frequencies really add up across multiple instruments and clog up the mix with a low-frequency sludge.
Once you have these fixed, you will have a much cleaner sound. A lot of beginners will hear a muddy take and try and fix it by boosting the highs. If they just narrowed down on the exact problem frequencies, they can have a much more precise fix that doesn’t take up more headroom.
Remember the context
What’s your process with EQing? I bet you select the track, solo it to isolate the sound, then try and fix what is wrong.
It turns out you might need a workflow fix yourself! One mistake I always made (and often keep making) is to forget the context of a track in the song.
What I mean by this is that you are mixing a small ingredient of a song to the other ingredients.
If you solo a track, yes, it is easier to hear the problems. You must realise that you are missing the interactions with the other sounds. Making a track sound perfect when solo’ed is dangerous – some tracks aren’t mean to sound perfect by themselves.
Think about a rhythm guitar in a track with lots of instruments. You might want to cut a lot of the muddy frequencies out, add a lot of bite for it to cut through, and scoop out some of the mids to make room for the vocalist.
This might actually sound pretty rubbish in isolation, but along with the other elements, it sounds right.
Don't ignore the power of M/S
Mid-Side (M/S) processing is a really cool feature available on many pro EQ plugins. What it does is divide the sound up into two channels, one which has the middle sounds (in the stereo field) and one with the side frequencies.
It works by looking at what sounds are present in both left and right channels and what sounds are distinct in each channel and instead of processing on an L/R basis, it converts it to M/S.
The reason we like M/S processing is that it can really enhance the spread of sounds.
You can have the weight of a sound punching down the middle while the shimmery highs are boosted on the side frequencies.
It is also a great way to tweak a mixed track. Let’s say you have a nice vocal in the centre and backing vocals panned left and right, you might want to touch up the backing vocals a little bit, or add a bit of warmth to the main vocal.
Mid/Side processing can allow you to do this (though not perfectly).
Chain position
EQ or Compressor first? Distortion before or after EQ? These are important questions and yes, it does make a difference.
The easiest way to think about it is that EQ is generally a “fixing” plugin, while effects like reverb or distortion add new characteristics.
There is good reason to have an EQ before an effect: you want the sound to enter that process sounding good, because fixing it afterwards can be difficult.
Distortions are especially vulnerable to too many low frequencies and so an EQ beforehand can really clean the sound up.
That said, however, EQs can also be important after the fact. You might want to bring out a character of the distortion or remove some resonances that are highlighted by a reverb effect.
In this case, you might want to add an EQ after the effect.
Of course, in some cases, you might simply need to have an EQ before and after the effects chain, but don’t go overboard and place an EQ every other effect as this will just make mixing too complicated.
Automate your EQ
If you want an easy riser in dance music, or want a subtle way to raise the energy, why not automate your EQ.
Try adding a small boost in the mids, and as the energy rises, automate it to sweep up the frequency range, leading up to the chorus or the drop.
Perhaps you want to remove the lows to thin out the sounds before a bass heavy drop, just automate it.
You may even find that at one point your singer gets too close to the mic and the proximity effect kicks in too much. Just automate the fix to that specific section.
