Use EQ The Smart Way

I always tell people, if you can get EQ and compression right then your mix is almost done! Seriously, these two tools are your best weapons against a crappy mix. They are also your worst enemies if you don’t wield them properly. Today I want to talk about how you should think about EQ in particular and use it the smartest way possible.

Carve Away What You Don’t Need

To be honest, the more mixes I do, the more I realize that my professors and mentors were right, you should aim to cut with EQ rather than boost as much as possible. There are three fundamental reasons for this that I’ve only come to grips with after years of doing the very opposite.
 
The first reason you should think of EQ as a carving tool is that there are so many competing frequencies among the instruments in your mix that when you throw up the faders you can instantly run into problems of tracks masking each other, covering up other parts. Want your kick drum and bass’ bottom end to pop out? Then cut out all the sub 150hz stuff on every other track using a high pass filter. It’s like you peeled back a wall that was covering up your low end. Now the kick and bass have room to shine.

The same is true as you move up the spectrum. Is your snare drum having a hard time sticking out from behind that wall of guitars? Maybe you could sweet around and notch out a mid frequency on all the guitar parts that was covering up the snare. A few seconds of tweaking and you’ll easily carve out a “hole” for the crack of the snare to cut through. Nice!

You Can’t Add What’s Not There

I think people understand the benefit of carving with EQ, but we all still want to boost by instinct. I know I do. I want my guitar to have more bite to it, reach to turn up some high mid frequency. The problem is, even though you CAN boost with an EQ, you are simply turning up what is already there. Put another way, you can’t turn up something that doesn’t exist.

If that guitar just wasn’t very mid rangy and aggressive to begin with, then I can only boost what went into the microphone. Make sense? It might be better to remove competing “biting” frequencies in other tracks to make our guitar sound like it has more bite. Or we may just need to add some more distortion or saturation with a plugin. Either way, it’s really hard to turn up what was never there to begin with.

It’s All About Headroom

At the end of the day, your job as a mixer is to take the 20, 40, or 100+ tracks that were recorded and funnel them all down your stereo master bus (master fader). If you don’t carve out some of the junk (or worse yet, add more junk with a lot of EQ boosts) then you’ll run out of headroom quickly and create a mess of a “backlog” going to your mix bus. Rather, if you carve away what you don’t need and mix more from a cutting and not boosting perspective, you’re likely to free up volume, slim down your tracks and send less signal to your mix bus, allowing for a cleaner, more musical summing process.

So No Boosting Ever?

I can hear you guys freaking out already, “No boosting ever Graham?” Don’t worry, you can still boost if you like. In fact, sometimes it really is all you can do. Just try to boost in small increments (3db at a time) and be subtle about it. Remember, if you have to do some drastic EQ move just to make the track sound right, then it was just plainly recorded poorly. Consider muting that track or replacing it some how. Otherwise, force yourself to  cut as much as you can instead of reaching out and boosting out of habit.

Oh, and don’t forget: there are no rules in recording/mixing. Experiment with this and see if you like the results you’re getting. If not, go back to the way you were doing things. I’ll look the other way 

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Looking for some in depth training on how to use EQ effectively in your mixes? Get an edge with the simple JumpStart To EQ video. It’s fun, to the point and will get you schooled on all things EQ in less than an hour!