Is EQ confusing to you? This may help

no no no no no you know sometimes i watch one of my old videos and i cringe just a little bit uh today is one of those days that i'm cringing in 2016 i made a video about eq but i i don't think i really did a very good job of explaining just how critical and how important an eq or an eq pedal can be first of all we need a guitar part to really demonstrate this with as i'm playing through a deluxe reverb of course it's reissue and i'm going to play through the boss ds1 as you probably figured out by now and let's manipulate the eq around it first to talk about some tricks around that and try to understand eq a little bit better [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] okay let's start with the clean tone this is my clean tone right here on a clean tone oftentimes you don't hear uh subtle eq tweaks i think you kind of tend to hear those subtle tweaks on like a distorted tone a little bit more but there's still some general things with eq that we can want to do so overall here's what i would kind of say some different frequency bands are going to get you when we're talking about guitar tone [Music] all right so let's start at about 80 hertz 80 hertz is generally going to be more of a rumble uh more of a thump and you're probably going to hear it more in like a distorted tone in fact a lot of these eq options when you put the eq after any sort of distortion you're going to find that it you sort of hear the sound of it a little bit more just because of a lot of different things going on with compression and harmonics and that sort of thing so overall let's start with the clean tone we'll go to the distorted tones after each one but we'll start at 80 hertz [Music] [Applause] [Music] now generally 125 hertz to about 150 hertz or so that's generally going to be where you find the bass controls on a lot of guitar pedals is generally around that area sometimes a little bit lower but usually i find about 120 works about the best for guitar pedals it gives a little more bass content to your ear so to speak [Music] 300 hertz to about 400 hertz sort of gives it this roundness to it so a lot of times if there's too much in this frequency frequency spectrum here it tends to sound muddy [Music] [Music] 650 hertz to about 800 hertz or so that generally is what we are we would generally call that a lower mid-range tube skimmers for example are about 720 hertz or so that's kind of where they peak in the middle uh for the most part and then something that's more like the klon type of circuit that's a little bit more like 1k so let's check out let's check out this lower mid-range [Music] so [Music] now we get to a little bit higher mid-range it's about 1k 1000 hertz to about 1200 hertz [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] 2.2 k to about 2.8 k or again 2200 hertz to about 20 800 hertz is generally a lower treble so sometimes you'll see tone controls around this this frequency but usually it's a little further up [Music] and about 5k to 6k or so this is a little bit more of a higher treble um just as far as guitar pedals are concerned because of course the speaker takes off a lot of trouble the frequency spectrum but generally this is where i tend to like more of the treble controls on this this sort of range and yeah it's a little bit more satisfying to there i think [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] now around 8k or so is going to give you a little bit more what i would call presence or sizzle clarity that sort of thing it's a fairly high frequency speaker the guitar speaker cabinets generally take off a lot of this so as we're adding to it um you know it's not going to get incredibly bright generally but it's going to still add quite a bit of presence [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] and then 10k is a really high frequency sometimes you don't even hear it in the actual amp that much just because again speaker some people tend to feel like this kind of gives it air of a sort and there's a lot of pedals that actually don't a lot of eq pedals that don't even have this this area on their sliders so let's see what 10k does [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] all right which brings me to a little extra bonus a little extra tip that i like to use so rather than using eq whenever you have like a really crispy top end i like to do this a lot with vox style amps and fender style amps on clean tones especially because sometimes you'll hit just like certain notes you're like oh that one's really bright rather than using eq to try to carve that a lot of times when i'm working with the daw i'll find that frequency then i'll use a de-esser instead because a de-esser is kind of like multi-band compression but you're just compressing the high end in certain frequency areas so it's not like it's actually eq'ing it it's just compressing whenever it goes over a certain threshold i know that sounds very technical but you can kind of see it so this is uh just a simple de-esser in logic pro and whenever i exceed the threshold you'll see this little area here will be yellow it's just showing you it's compressing so first of all i like to find that frequency so let's find that when you use a narrow cue that's that's the cue right there big o cue big ol narrow cue i'm looking for things that are going to kind of ring out in a weird way as i sweep across this [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] okay do you hear that whistling sound that's what i'm looking for i look at that i'm like oh that's about 3.1 k so rather than use eq i'll go to my de-esser turn it up just for smash right there i'll try to take it quite quite out with a de-esser [Music] i noticed that little yellow area area that was popping up that was basically telling us that it's compressing just a little bit on those frequencies at those points at that time [Music] [Applause] so with the de-esser you're not really changing the like the tone like an eq you're just kind of eliminating some maybe some harsh frequencies that a particular speaker may have or even mic'd up in a certain situation maybe the mics just doing weird things or maybe overall in the context of the band you're just hearing us this weird frequency and you're like what is that odd noise let's see what it does on distortion [Music] i notice you can really hear a ton on the distortion so let's try the de-esser as well on that [Music] [Applause] [Music] now if we compare that to the eq it's just a different sound [Music] so there you go two different approaches to fixing the same problem all right so what's the point of all this anyways basically it's this eq pedals and eq in general is one of the most important things you can do to your tonality guitar tone vocal tone bass tone even drums so it's really really important in the context of having an actual eq pedal again you can sculpt all kinds of things this might even be even more important than what guitar you're using or what pickups you're using in my opinion of course and also um as we saw if i wish there were a lot more de-esser pedals i don't i tried to find one i didn't even see one i think there was one kind of a few years ago that was just more like a a simple filter it wasn't really like an actual de-esser there are some kind of multi-band eqs i haven't played them so i don't have a a really good opinion on it but um yeah i i would like to have one on my board maybe i should make one i don't know so hope you enjoyed this see you later

Channel: Wampler Pedals

Views: 75,801

Keywords: wampler, pedals, guitar, effects, pedalboard, wampler pedals, guitar effects, guitar pedal, guitar pedals, EQ, wamper, whompler, wompler

Id: azkCmRGWjuo

Length: 13min 54sec (834 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 13 2022