Understanding Frequency & How to Use An Equalizer (EQ)

okay in this tutorial we're going to take a closer look at frequency and Equalization uh frequency is one of those uh Tools in recording that is is so critical that is very important for anybody looking to further their career or further their skills in recording that they truly understand what frequency is all about and how to use the equalizer so let's get started so sound is vibrations that tra through the air um sound also travels through liquids gases and solids these vibrations are caused by any vibrating object such as vocal cords or guitar strings or speaker cones now the rate at which sounds vibrate is known as frequency so if you can imagine you have all these sounds going on around us so they're all all these sounds are arriving at our ears in vibr vibrations and so you got all these vibrations coming at you and the frequency is just the rate of that vibration when you think of frequency think of pitch in music so you might think of a low pitch like a really lowkey on the piano okay or very high pitch um like a violin okay so frequency is similar to that you know low low tones have low frequencies whereas High tones have higher frequencies however frequency is an absolute and precise measurement okay while pitch is somewhat of a relative term typically expressed using letters so if you get you know a few musicians together they might all agree that the song that they're playing is going to be in C the key of C so they might tune accordingly to one another but as Engineers we go for a much more absolute precise numerical um metric when we're looking at frequency so again let's think about sound as being vibrations okay and when we break those vibrations down to their smallest component we call that a cycle all right when you so think of a cycle as like an s on its side what you're looking at here is a sound chart okay and you're looking at one cycle so it starts at the center line all right goes over the center line crosses it and comes right back to it and so with frequency we measure these Cycles in seconds so this particular cycle you're looking at would be one hert or one cycle per second and of course Hertz is the unit of measurement for frequency if we were to look at another sound and let's say this next sound has three cycles per second so starts at the center line goes over over it crosses it and comes back that would be one cycle and then we do the same thing crosses over comes back crosses over comes back so this particular sound would be three cycles per second or three Hertz so as you look at these we we we actually can't even hear sounds that would be this low on the frequency scale it would be way lower than what we're able to hear but this chart gives you kind of a simplified way to view the nature of frequency so if you look at lower frequencies which would be the chart on the left you could say that lower frequencies have larger waves so you see that's a pretty big cycle so that's a much larger wave they have slower waves because if you compare the chart on the left to the chart on the right you know in one second the chart on the right there are three of those Cycles in each second so those would be much faster whereas on the left you just have one cycle and you could also say about lower frequencies that they have longer wavelengths whereas shorter or higher frequencies have shorter wavelengths so again that's a pretty simplified view but the reason that's important is because when we look at the frequency range of human hearing we can hear from 20 Hertz on the low end all the way up to about 20 Kilz on the high end and really when you look at those lowest frequencies all the way down to 20 HZ a lot of those lower frequencies are really felt more than they would be heard same on the high end you know there comes a point probably around 15 or 16 khz where we no longer can really hear those frequencies but you you might be able to to feel those frequencies so let's look at what this means for us as audio Engineers okay every instrument every musical instrument that we record whether it's you know guitars keyboard bases voice they all have you know a fundamental frequency that is somewhere along this frequency range and so let's start with the subbase you know your subbase is going to have a frequency uh fundamental of around 40 Hertz and so what this would mean for example is if you are mixing a subbase and you really want to bring out those low low tones in that subbase you could boost 40 Hertz on your equalizer and that would in effect give you a little more of that subbase sound or you know those tones that really make the subbase what it is moving right along your bass guitar has you know fundamental frequencies that would be somewhere between 60 to 80 Hertz so again you want to bring out the bottom bring out the kind of the roundness in that bass sound you could look at those frequencies between 60 to 80 Herz and then you'd be able to boost the frequencies that that really bring out you know those lower tones in that base that you're you know that you're that you're going for and you know we'll talk about you know in just a moment if you have a range of frequencies that you're choosing from when eqing a sound there's a way that you can use that equalizer and sweep and go through those ranges until your ears tell you you know what the appropriate frequency is and we'll look at that in a moment 100 htz is where you really get the the thump in that kick you know your Kick Drum if you really want that kick to really attack and thump hard you could boost 100 htz to accomplish that now there's a frequency at 300 htz which is called the mud frequency and actually those mud frequencies can be anywhere from 300 htz to to 500 htz and even a little bit higher on some instruments but mud is a lack of clarity it it's kind of when you're listening to a sound and it just sounds a bit muffled it just doesn't have that Clarity that you would hope for you could use your equalizer and you could reduce those frequencies around 300 htz and that would reduce that muddiness and in effect give you more clarity to the sound and this is an important frequency um really important because a lot of times we do go for clarity of our sounds and sometimes when we're recording in environments or in rooms that that maybe aren't as um you know acoustically sound for lack of a better word you could decrease that mud to really eliminate frequencies that might be keeping your sound from being as clear as they could be 1,000 Hertz or 1 kilohertz of course uh kilo is 1,000 so 1 khz would be the snare that would be you know if you're really shooting to get that snap on that snare to make that snare really crack uh you could boost those frequencies around 1 KZ give or take and you would really bring out you know that particular sound in the snare 2 to 4 khz is the range where you're going to find the vocal anunciation this is an important range for a lot of Engineers particularly home studio Engineers who spend a lot of time recording and mixing vocals you know if you really want to make the Annunciation of speech um clear um if you really want to you know give those vocals a a really polished sound you know in addition to cutting that mud you could boost some frequencies in that 2 to four kohtz range and you would accomplish it 5 kertz is the presence frequency so if you're trying to just bring overall presence um to a particular sound or a group of sounds you could boost the frequencies around 5 khz 6 to 7 KZ is approximately where you're going to find Cil civilence is that hard s sound sometimes when you're recording and you get done recording and you just hear that s that just won't quit you know that is definitely a problem when recording vocals and if you don't have a dser which would help you to really smooth out or eliminate that s then you could use your equalizer and really try to shave away or cut away those frequencies in that s six to7 khz range and you'd be able to reduce that sibilance and and really what a DS does is it really does focus in on that frequency range and allows you to you know reduce that hard S and F sound which is also known as sibilance 8 to 10 kilohertz um is a frequency you could boost to really bring out the sizzle and your high hats and symbols and really give you that brightness it's also known as the Shimmer frequency um sometimes you can add a touch of that Shimmer to a vocal to really bring out that breathiness or airiness in a vocal so this is your your your brighter frequency range is up in that 8 to 10 khz range and 10 to 15 khz is again could also include some Shimmer frequencies that's where your air is at and additional brightness so ultimately you're going to use your ears and you're going to be able to learn to use an equalizer to sweep and kind of find those frequencies which are going to have you know positive impact on on your sounds another thing I have to note there's a lot of instruments that aren't on this chart um because there's only so much room here however many instruments are in the mid-range sound or mid-range area so you have guitars you have posan you have obviously vocals and synthesizers a lot of instruments fall in what is known as the mid-range which could extend as low as 167 Hertz all the way up to maybe five or six KZ so one of the challenges of engineering is finding a way to really allow each of these sounds to have their own space within the mix and so it's really important when you're equalizing that you're able to really bring out the best in all of your sounds but not use the equalizer in such a way that you're boosting the same frequencies on multiple sounds so that you don't really have good separation between sounds so keep that in mind there are a lot of sounds that are going to overlap in terms of the frequencies that you know that the sounds are based upon but um it's your job to not only know the ranges you know to use on The Equalizer to make something sound better but also understand how to sweep how to actually use the equalizer to sweep around and find that ideal point for each sound so sounds resonate or vibrate at their fundamental frequency which is the lowest frequency of a particular sound and at their harmonic frequencies which are kind of other natural frequencies so I'm talking right now and so if you were to boost my vocals in that 2 to 4 kertz range you'll definitely bring out kind of the enunciation of speech but there are also frequencies that could be posi uh positively impacted by using an equalizer there's other harmonics that exist in my vocal besides 2 to 4 kerz so for example if you look at a base okay A a base let's say has a fundamental around 80 Herz and harmonic frequencies are typically whole number ratios of that fundamental so if the fundamental is 80 htz there would be a harmonic that would be somewhere around 160 htz and then if you add 80 to that there'd be another harmonic around 300 240 htz and then 320 HZ and you could go on and on so there are times when you know you really want to do less on an equalizer obviously you know don't want to go boosting you know four or five or six different frequencies but if you are looking for other frequencies that could add you know polish to your sound then you can know just by what that fundamental frequency is what other harmonic frequencies might come into play individual sounds have unique frequency responses and characteristics obviously and uh humans are most sensitive to mid-range frequencies so we're looking at 200 150 Herz up to 5 khz some will say you know mid-range is all the way down around 167 Hertz up to you know 5 or 6 khz but we're going to be most sensitive to those frequency ranges so when we're mixing music and producing music you really want to keep that in mind and you don't want to have a lot of clutter a lot of Sonic clutter in that range you want to have good separation within the sounds that are in that range frequencies beneath 40 HZ are often considered noise or or Rumble um whereas frequencies above 15 khz give or take are normally felt and not heard so that could be best described as air so The Equalizer is a tool that is used to adjust the volume of frequencies that's what it's designed for it allows you to raise or lower various frequencies so that you can you know at times correct an issue with a sound sound and sometimes allow you to really um accentuate you know tones within a sound that are going to bring out the best in that instrument so equalizers are used on individual sounds for shaping by boosting or cutting frequencies that are unique to the individual sounds kind of like what we discussed before every sound has its own unique frequency and its own unique characteristics um equalizers can also also be used on groups of sounds and the entire mix as a whole to again shape the sound to to add more polish you know to take away maybe mud or lack of clarity cutting or reducing the volume of a frequency or frequencies is often times more useful than boosting a lot of frequencies you know cutting is a little more of a graceful process you know sometimes again uh of often times you could have a sound that isn't clear is Muddy and I know I've mentioned that a few times but it's very common to to get rid of those frequencies that are creating that that mud um a lot of times those frequencies in that very low end under 40 Hertz or so will completely cut away because we're not really hearing those sometimes those sounds or frequencies are more or less mud or noise or I shouldn't say mud but are more or less noise or Rumble and so we want to cut those frequencies away a lot of times just cutting can do a great deal for your individual sounds typically a band or range of frequencies is boosted or cut so it's an entire band it's not necessarily one frequency but there it's it's that frequency that you're highlighted as well as those frequencies around it that get boosted or cut the width of a band is referred to as the Q factor or or Q so and and we'll look at that in a moment it's much easier when you're able to see it on an equalizer but just remember the Q is the width um of the the bands of frequencies that get impacted when you're boosting or cutting the volume of a frequency itself is raised or lowered in decb or DBS so let's take a look this uh equalizer here is called the eq3 7 band and it's uh one of the equalizers is available um on Protools and when you take a look at it along the bottom of the graph on the right here you have your frequencies right along the bottom so from 20 htz all the way over to 20 khz so that x axis from left to right is your lower frequencies going over to your higher frequencies along this y AIS on the side you have your decb or DBS so right along this Center Line is zero right at zero nothing is happening the frequency um is is flat basically you're not doing anything at all but then you have the option to either increase a certain frequency so if you increase it you see you get positive DCB or you can decrease so you can reduce or get Negative decb if you're decreasing a particular frequency so again when you're looking at it's flat frequency response it means it's unaltered so this particular equalizer is color coded so you have these these dots red orange yellow green and so on and so forth which basically correspond to frequency bands down here within these various frequencies that you can then go in and manipulate so if we were to look at this green band which says the frequency is two th000 or 2,000 Hertz or 2 kilohertz um you will see that it's unaltered the the dot is right at zero so it's unaffected at all so remember that Flat Line means an unaltered or flat frequency response so again looking down at these bands at the bottom the frequency is in this middle area you can see F req so most of the time what we're going to do is we're going to set the frequency that we want to impact okay that we want to raise or cut which we do with the gain which is on the bottom here so gain once we decide what frequency we're going to manipulate we can either boost it or cut it using this gain knob or actually going up to the dot and pulling that dot down or pulling that dot up is going to allow us to raise or lower that particular frequency and then the Q is right on top here and the Q is typically a number so the lower the number The Wider the Q The Wider the frequency band the higher the number okay the more narrow the Q or more narrow the frequency band all right so again the Q factor or Q is how wide or narrow is the frequency bandwidth so when you're boosting go ahead and use a wide bandwidth so you could use a low Q for example one and then on the eq3 7 Band by default the Q is already set to one so you could basically keep it there but when cutting use a more narrow bandwidth for example you could use a three so if you use that higher number that's going to give you a more narrow bandwidth and then another thing to keep in mind if we look at this LF stands for low frequency the HF stands for high frequency then you have high mid frequency mid frequency and low mid frequency so this filter affects the shape of the actual frequency um envelope and and we'll look at that in a moment but you really want to pay attention to the the shape or the the frequency filter that you're using and again we'll look at that in one second um but that definitely is going to have an impact on what it is that you actually do and again on these um these couple of bandwidths up here at the top are what's known as your high pass filter which is right here and your low pass filter which is here and on these you also have a Q has a little bit different number the Q on the high path and low path are basically measured in decb so typically the higher this number here the sharper or steeper the curve on that q and the lower the number um the less steep the curve is and then you also have a frequency there as well so let's look at these frequency filters or types of frequencies when you see this particular shape here it's known as a high pass filter and a high bypass filter rolls off or Cuts frequencies that are below a given frequency so you're going to determine what frequency you want to basically select and everything under that frequency gets rolled off or cut everything above that frequency passes unaltered so it's called high pass filter everything higher than your the frequency you set passes unaffected everything lower gets rolled off then you have your peaking filter which is your typical bell curve so when you see that symbol there this is your typical you know it look kind of like a mountain you know or a valley your typical bell curve and this allows you to boost or cut a specific band of frequencies very common filter type there the peaking filter your low shelf filter it affects all frequencies that are under a given frequency so let's say for example you set your frequency at 100 htz if you have a low shelf on and you decide you're going to boost those frequencies everything under 100 htz gets boosted if you lower your low shelf everything under 100 htz gets cut so your low shelf whenever you hear these shelv and frequencies especially on a low shelf everything beneath that frequency gets impacted by whatever you're doing boosting or cutting the notch filter which is the shape here it cuts an entire band of a given frequency range so using a notch filter is like surgery when you want to completely remove a certain frequency from a sound you could use a notch filter and it would completely get rid of a certain frequency and you again set the CU of that Notch and typically with a notch filter you have a very narrow que because you want to be very specific about the frequency that you want to get rid of and again it's more like surgery Sonic surgery then you have your High shelf filter your high shelf similar to the low shelf it go it's going to affect all frequencies um but in this case it affects frequencies above a given frequency so if you set your frequency at 10 khz and you have a high shelf on if you decide you're going to boost that everything at 10 khz and above gets boosted if you want to cut it everything at 10 khz and above gets cut so it has more of a global impact when you use the these shelving filters they have more of a global impact on the sounds beneath a certain frequency which is in the case of a low shelf or above a certain frequency in the case of a high shelf and again with shelving the impact happens on the on the frequency you select as well as those frequencies under it in the case of low shelf or above it in the case of high shelf and then you have the low pass filter which is the opposite of the high pass filter this is going to roll off or cut frequencies that are above a given frequency so let's say again let's use 10 khz if you set 10 khz as your frequency to use on your low PA everything above 10 khz gets rolled off everything under it or lower pass through unaffected so low pass let all those frequencies lower than what you set pass through unaffected everything above them gets rolled off so these frequency filters are important because you'll use different equal ERS sometimes you know you're not even really paying attention um and you just start boosting or cutting you just want to be careful as to exactly what you're doing you could have a high or low shelf on and not even know it so just keep that in mind so there are some rules and I put that in quote to Equalization and the reason I say rules is because you know it is good to kind of understand the fundamentals and understand the basics but honestly um Engineers do things differently you know everybody has their own style and their own method and a lot of times in engineering there's there's more than one way to do a number of things but these general rules are going to kind of you know get you off to the right start or make sure that you can kind of develop a consistent process that's going to allow you to have you know a more professional sound okay so number one you want to listen first you know listen to what it is that you're that you're going to equalize and make sure the EQ is necessary and also just listen and try to hear here for yourself what might need to be done to um make a particular sound come across a little better between two speakers okay what's going to really add to that sound or what do you need to kind of remove from that sound just to make it sound better or make it sound more natural so you also want to consider cutting or decreasing before you boost you know cutting can have a a really positive impact on um sounds that you equalize cuz a lot of times what you're cutting is mud or places where you don't have a lot of clarity or maybe you're cutting irritation maybe on electric guitars you have some frequencies in that 2 to four Kilz range that are just irritating and you can kind of cut those sounds so consider cutting before you boost another thing and again we're going to look at this in a second you want to sweep certain frequency ranges to determine appropriate bands that you do want to boost or cut sweeping um is just really one of those techniques that is going to just be a part of your arsenal of tools you know you can have a general idea of what the appropriate frequencies would be to boost the kick or to boost the snare or vocals but every kick is different every snare or vocal is a little bit different so you don't necessarily want to get in in habit of just using specific frequencies for specific instruments all the time you want to sweep you want to use your ears and kind of sweep around until you find you know the best adjustments for the sound that you're mixing at that time again use a narrower Q when cutting that's going to be a higher number use a wider Q or a lower number when boosting and be sure to use the correct EQ filter type we just talked about that you know make sure you know if you're trying to just boost or cut and you just want to use that typical peaking um filter make sure it's on that and not a shelving filter so for whatever you're trying to accomplish use the correct EQ filter type a little goes a long way when you're equalizing you know and be careful not to overdo it it's real easy to to boost sounds a little bit too much they start to sound unnatural and sometimes you can even add you know ear ation to a sound or add a lot of civilence to a sound because you're adding too much even on the bottom end you know you can add too much to those those low frequencies and really add muddiness or lack of clarity so be careful with that um and also you can be a bit more liberal when you're boosting higher frequencies than lower frequencies remember those lower frequencies have really big waves they take up a lot of space between two speakers and so if you're going to add or boost some of those lower frequencies you know you don't want to go too overboard with it now with the mid-range and higher frequencies those are smaller waves right and so sometimes you can afford to to boost a little bit more on that higher end than you would on the lower end but at the end of the day use your ears you know use your ears and just don't go too far and at the and also just when you've done all that you've done your equalizing you think you got the sound you want listen again and do before and after comparisons you know and just make sure that you have corrected the issue that you intended to correct um or that you've complemented the instrument sound that was your initial goal all right the last point I want to make before we actually take a look at doing uh some Equalization with the Protools equalizer is that there are different types of equalizers okay and a couple of the more common types are paramet metric and graphic equalizers now with a lot of our digital software right and these plugins that we're using many of those equalizers are parametric eqs similar to the EQ 37 band The Equalizer on the bottom there is a graphic equalizer now the parametric equalizer is is variable meaning the frequency the que and the gain can be set according to your specific needs and it's it's the the most flexible of equalizers and and real common in in our digital equalizers um your graphic equalizer is an equalizer where the frequency bands um for cutting and boosting and bandwidth are typically fixed so you don't necessarily set what the frequency is going to be or what the bandwidth is going to be those are set by the manufacturer and then you can determine if you're going to boost or cut so if you look at this graphic EQ on the bottom the frequencies are already set along the top and you have a fader here that you can basically boost or cut car stereos are a good example of fixed band equalizers so you might have a bass and a treble you can't dial in exactly what frequency you want a boost with the bass it's already preset same thing with the treble so that's basically you know the differences between these two very common types of eqs you know the parametric is more you know variable and the graphic equalize is basically set by the manufacturer let's take a look at um how we're actually going to apply Equalization to a mix um so in front of us we basically have a mix that's broken down into kick and snare and then you have some some overheads which are symbols we have some guitars and bass so we have several instruments that we're going to be um equalizing so what I'll do is just take a little time here to to just show you one approach to Using an equalization that's definitely going to um improve your sound in general um so let's just take a minute and listen to what it is we're going to be working on all right so so basically this is a a jazz project and regardless of what the genre is you know if you have a mix in front of you that is completely separate where you have separate tracks then you're going to have to go through and equalize um the individual tracks and you want to equalize these tracks based on their own frequencies their own unique frequency characteristics so let's start and look at the kick so you notice on this particular track and and this is Protools here that we're looking at um under our insert column we already have a compressor set up um there are different ways to approach The Equalizer some Engineers feel that you should equalize before you compress others feel you should compress before you equalize um getting started here we are compressing first but we're going to look at projects down the road where we will actually use the equalizer first um so it's this insert column and Pro Tools that we're going to use to actually insert our effects and based on the order that you have your plugins that is the order that your sounds get processed so if the compressor is first on the list it's going to compress first and then go to that second plugin which in this case will be equalizer so we're going to hit plugin EQ and we're going to go to the eq3 7 band and here it is all right and so I'm going to solo this track which is the kick and I'm just going to play it and I'll turn it up a little bit so it can be heard okay okay so the first thing that we're going to do is we're going to use our high pass filter and right now on the eq3 7 band the high pass filter symbol is already selected for this band here hpf high pass filter and I'm going to turn it on all right and when I turned it on if you look at this graph here something has already started happening all right the next thing I'm going to do is I'm going to set the frequency to about 40 HZ cuz if you remember in our earlier discussion um those frequencies under 40 HZ a lot of times are considered noise or just low-end Rumble so we're just going to get those completely out of the way by cutting those frequencies under 40 HZ so if you look at this chart now you can see this dot this gray dot represents 40 HZ and so what is happening is the frequencies under that 40 HZ are slowly getting taken out now we want to increase this Q so on your high pass filter the Q is in decb so we're going to type 18 use 18 DB and you see now we have a much steeper curve so now this highpass filter is is more aggressively getting rid of or rolling off the frequencies under that 40 htz and again the nature of the high pass filter is whatever your frequency is everything higher passes it's unaffected everything lower gets rolled off so you're going to start with this High Pass filtering every time you equalize okay and that again it's going to start us out by getting rid of any low-end Rumble um or any type of low-end noise that might actually be or exist on the track the next thing we're going to do is cut the mud now again this is a parametric EQ so it's variable meaning we could choose any one of these bands to go ahead and set as our mud frequency band but we're going to settle in on this low mid frequency I mean it's the closest to 300 HZ so just kind of makes sense to use this one and your mud is is really technically in your low mid frequency range so we set our frequency to 300 HZ we're going to cut our mud so when we cut mud we can cut it anywhere from four to 6 DB okay um in the case of like your lower frequency instruments like your bass and your kick I'm not going to really cut that too much because I don't want to take the body away from that kick you know the kick still needs bottom in its sound so I'll cut that by about 4 and a half DB all right so I I'll bypass my setting for a second to hear my before and after that's before and that's after very subtle difference but I can tell and I know that I've gotten rid of some of that mud and I've use the low pass filter to get rid of any low-end Rumble so we're going to do this every time we approach equalizer we're going to cut first and we're going to cut in this order High Pass filtering and then reduce the mud next I'm going to focus on the frequency that's going to really bring out the thump in my kick um but before I do that let me go ahead on the low mid frequency and raise that Q I'm going to raise that Q up to about two right now because remember we're going to have a more narrow Q if we're cutting so if you look at this frequency range here if I increase that Q you see how narrow that gets so the higher that Q the fewer frequencies that get impacted around the frequency that I set if I lower that Q so I lower that number the bandwidth gets wider so more frequencies get impacted around the frequency that I have actually told you know The Equalizer to focus on so in the case of cutting again we're going to use a more narrow que so so we'll just put it up to about two you know two or three is fine so we'll just we'll just go to three for now so we've cut our mud we've used our high pass filter now we're going to focus on the fundamental of the kick and remember from uh the frequency chart we just looked at 100 htz is going to give us you know really that that thump of that kick okay so I'm going to change the filter here over to our peaking filter and this low frequency is already on 100 htz so I'm going to do a little sweeping so I'm going to raise that frequency all the way up I'm raising it up so I can really hear the impact of boosting that frequency then I'm going to sweep a little bit I'm going to go a little bit higher than 100 HZ and then I'm going to come back and go a little bit lower than 100 htz so as I get lower it's the tone is a little rounder to me as I get higher it has a you know it's not as round of a tone so I kind of prefer a little bit of a rounder tone so in this case I'm going to go right about there for my frequency and then I'm going to bring the gain back down and really on that low end you really only need to boost maybe two to three DB and it's going to you know it's going to have a the impact that you're looking for so now I'll bypass so before and after so as I look at my kick this is basically what I would need to do on this equalizer and then I could move on to my next instrument now there's a lot of different theories when it comes to using an equalizer there are different ways to approach The Equalizer the approach that we're going to use again is to do our cuts and then find that one frequency that's going to really enhance the sound okay the sound that we're actually equalizing so let's take a look at the snare I'll solo this snare and this was a live band recording so you do hear other instrument sounds um in the background you just get a microphone bleed um and on a lot of especially on your drum instruments you will get some bleed because you have multiple mics on the drum set um in fact I think what I'm going to do is go down and actually look at the Guitar let's look at this guitar here and I'm going to add an equalizer right the eq3 7 band again I'm going to start out at the highp pass filter and turn it on and set my frequency to about 40 htz cuz we're going to roll off everything under 40 raise my Q to 18 that's step number number one step number two let's cut the mud so I'm going to go to my low mid frequency band I'm going to reduce my mud that sounds pretty good to me so anywhere from 4 to 6 DB will be good the less mud you cut the more bottom or body you're going to leave into that sound the more mud you cut the thinner that sound's going to get so I'm going to cut that about five DB and then I'm going to increase my Q you know and again that Q anywhere from two to three on a que is going to be fine um you just want to more narrow bandwidth when you're cutting as you do when you're boosting all right so let me bypass that in here before and after so [Music] far so I can I can hear that slight difference a little more clearer sound when I use that high pass filter and cut the mud now for the guitar you know I'm going to look at a frequency range between 1 and 3K but I'm going to sweep just to be sure so I'll go to this mid frequency band which is already at 1K and I'm going to take that all the way to the top and again when we're sweeping we go extreme just so we can really hear the impact of that frequency boost and then I'm going to sweep a little so the more I go towards [Music] 3K I get that type of guitar sound as I come back closer to 1K just got a little bit more of a fullness to the sound so I'm going to go right there once I found that I'm going to go ahead and bring that gain back and when I'm boosting my middle range frequencies up to my high frequencies I can have a little more of a gain boost than I would look for on my lower frequencies so I'm going to I'm going to actually boost that by about four DB and then again I'm going to do my before and after that's before that's after so again a little more of a polished sound and that's really what we're going for here so you're going to use this method on all of your sounds you know the high pass filtering and the mud is going to be consistent on every instrument that you use a EQ on what will change is that fundamental frequency that you're looking to boost and that's what that initial chart was for so if you're dealing with a vocal you should know that 2 to 4K is what you're going to be boosting if you're dealing with a bass guitar 60 to 80 htz is what you're going to be boosting if you're dealing with with symbols and overheads 8 to 10K is what you're going to boost and you want to sweep to really find uh what's going to sound the best so that's a little bit more information on using the equalization and what frequency is all about the best thing to do at this point is the practice the more that you use the equalizer the more mixes that you actually are involved in the more this type of information and these techniques are going to become second nature to you so I hope you enjoyed this tutorial and definitely have a lot of fun [Music] mixing

Channel: Samori Coles

Views: 734,972

Keywords: frequency, eq, frequencies, sound, audio, engineer, audioengineering, hertz, Hz, KHz, 440hertz, tune, oscillation, sinewave, tutorial, equalizer, sae, Bass, Pro Tools (Software), Timbre, Tone, Hints, Tips, Treble, Mids, Production, Music, Studio, Recording, Help, Tricks, Equalization

Id: YohhkNB7FOk

Length: 44min 42sec (2682 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 07 2013