Dialogue EQ Explained

dialogue EQ is one of the most important things we do in audio post-production to really get the best possible sound out of the dialogue for the project in order to do this we generally would have the dialogue already edited and then at least in my case it's always the first thing I approach when I sit down to mix is eq'ing and leveling the dialogue but the very first thing is really listening to all the dialogue and giving it the best possible EQ that I can so this is a lot easier to show you on the computer so let's jump on my system and I'll show you how I go about it all right I pulled up my favorite EQ which happens to be the Fab filter Pro Q3 but you definitely don't need to use that um the EQ that comes with Pro Tools is very good really any uq that gives you this kind of a layout should be fine so I happen to have pulled up some bands here I have a five band EQ so for dialogue we always want to set some filters first the most important is the low filter sometimes people record with a low filter when they're doing their location sound but I prefer that they don't record with any filtering and let us do it all in post-production so we want there to be full range audio uh and then we can filter the low end here so you call it a high pass filter but I'm going to turn on this filter here generally 24 DB octave is a good setting for the slope that adjusts the slope of the low filter so 24 DB octave is good right now this is set at 35 Hertz and that is too low that's very low base for dialogue we really can take this up to 80. oftentimes we start at like 78 but we'll just start at 80. so that just is going to filter off any low Rumble extra Bassy sounds or hits or things that might have come through if the boom hand if the boom was moved around and they're handling noises this really helps with all of that not necessarily going to take it all out but usually we need nothing below 80 Hertz for dialogue so I'm also going to set a high filter or a low pass filter now not as critical but a lot of times there's just information up here that you don't need so right now you see it's at 18 uh kilohertz or you know 18 uh 18 000 Hertz so we can take this down I don't like to go too low on this I I start out with it around say 12 12 and a half really just taking off this very high stuff that really isn't doing anything for us in the dialogue so this is pretty standard as a matter of fact I would recommend that you set up eqs with a similar high low filter on all your dialogue tracks all the dialogue should be filtered at around 78 or 80 Hertz on the low end and around 12K on the high end the next thing I like to do is pull down the low mid EQ you want a bell shape not too wide not too narrow and sweep this around I usually start with it around 500 Hertz this is where microphones tend to pick up a lot of thickness in dialogue or what I often call boxiness just sounds a little thick and a little wonky for lack of a better word so I find that the first thing to do after you set your filters is come down here and sweep this up and down and you'll find as you listen that this is going to start to clear up and just make the dialogue feel more natural in most cases there's always an exception to this rule some dialogue will be missing low mid-range you might actually have to boost but that is very rare and almost never happens 95 of the time I'm taking some modest amount of low mid-range out of the dialogue to clear it up somewhere between sort of 301k okay somewhere in that range and usually it's hovering around this 500 mark now I like to do that before boosting High mid-range a lot of people think well my dialogue feels dull I better take this and boost the high mid range by the way this is set to a shelf and I really want it to be a bell curve so I'm just going to set that and then on this EQ I can hold a button and set the the cue or the shape of that bell curve so that's probably about right for adjusting you know low mid and high mid so a lot of people will say my dialogue feels dull I'm just going to jam up the high mid the problem with that is that this will also bring up harshness or sometimes brittle characteristics in the dialogue and it can make the dialogue sound too brittle or too harsh now you may need to add some of this but if you go for the low mid-range first kind of bring out whatever you need to to start to make it sound better then you can go here and just see if a touch more brightness in the high mid range usually around this 5 6K is where you're going to find that to be most useful whether that really helps but don't bring this up so much that you start to get a brittle or harsh sound to the dialogue one of the nice characteristics about this EQ is you can actually set a little compressor on just that frequency range that can actually dip any of the harsh frequencies that start to come up that's sort of a special feature of the fabfilter EQ you certainly don't need that but it is a nice little feature once you get into more advanced operations with EQ but I would say a lot of the time my dialog eqs look something like this a little dip in the low mid around 500 and a little boost in the mid-range around 6K with my filters high and low at 80 Hertz the more important one set like this that generally works on a lot of dialogue and sometimes if I'm mixing really quickly I'll even set up a very mild version of this EQ and put it across the track and then go and adjust each piece individually once I have this setting kind of pasted on so you'll often find that some version of this is going to work really well what I often find is that overall some people's dialogue might just be a bit too Bassy if that happens you can pull down you know somewhere around this low 100 Hertz 120 or oftentimes what I'll do is take this EQ band and change it to a low shelf then I can sort of pull that in and just be tapering off that low end and again I can sweep this around sometimes it helps to bring it as high as the low mid-range sometimes it's better just to touch the low end but if the dialogue is still feeling too thick after you've taken out some of this low mid then a low shelf might be your friend and who knows maybe it doesn't have enough bass and it's going to need a boost in the low shelf but low shelf can be really helpful once you're fine-tuning that EQ the other thing that I find out is uh that once I set an initial EQ kind of on its own because I'm just listening to that dialogue clip I don't worry about it too much I set the EQ pretty quickly and then I move on once I come back through the project and I'm mixing everything the music the other dialogue the effects I definitely can reevaluate whether I've set the best EQ for that clip of dialogue so I am often fine-tuning my eqs when I come back through to mix in the effects and the music I also like to click the bypass on and off as I play the the clip to see how my how my EQ is improving the sound to see if I've done too much or too little and oftentimes I'll listen to other pieces of dialogue in the same area to make sure that whatever changes I've made to this specific piece of dialogue are going to match well with the other pieces around it there you go there's really an overview of how I approach EQ for dialogue I hope you found this useful check my page for other videos and as always like comment and subscribe

Channel: Tom Efinger

Views: 11,836

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Id: Z3n3VwoqpWU

Length: 10min 14sec (614 seconds)

Published: Sat May 20 2023