🎛️ Music Production Talk: The Magic of EQ'ing

Fellow Steemians! I hope this post finds you all well and good!

Today, I want to talk about the magic of EQ'ing. This magical, mysterious tip will get you EQ'ing your music like a pro. Boy do I tell you, when you hear this, it's going to flip your world of music production upside down. I get questions all the time about EQ'ing; how to EQ kicks, how to EQ vocals, is this EQ better than that EQ (sometimes it is)? And here is the mystical, wonderous, one-statement answer to it all...

There is no magic. It's just EQ'ing.

Now, okay, joke's over. EQ'ing is a crazy helpful tool for getting rid of unwanted frequencies, and giving little boosts to those that need it. However, I feel that sometimes novice producers get caught up in this imaginary 'magic' - this algorithmic perfection of sparkling, crispy high's and punchy, boomy lows - that makes their audio sound like that of the million dollar studio.

That's just it, you're not in a million dollar studio with a million dollar mind (yet), so you likely won't get that product. Back in my earlier days, when I compared my music to that of the big labels and such, I thought my compression/EQ'ing was the problem. Why isn't my track as punchy, and crisp, and beautifully dirty?

I spent hours compressing and EQ'ing away, until I had these muddy, harsh, uncontrolled sounds rendered useless by insane EQ curves and compression that was pushed way too hard. Nine times out of ten, it was never my EQ'ing that was the problem, it was just the source sound and the mix as a whole. Not only were their sound designers far more experienced and precise, but their audio sources (generators, synths, microphones, etc.) were just far better (and more expensive) to the point where they could do much less with greater results.

TLDR; EQ'ing doesn't help a poopy sound.

So where do we go from there? First of all, let's talk about what an EQ does.

An EQ is essentially a very dynamic 'volume' where you are able to control the levels of frequency bandwidths specifically. You can also filter out (which is why EQ's can sometimes be referred to as 'filters' as well) unwanted frequencies. Let's pick apart some of that jibberish I just sputtered.

Frequency is essentially a vibration, that we hear as sound. We measure frequency in hertz (hz). The higher the vibration, or the higher the frequency, the higher the pitch of the sound. The loudness of frequencies is what we control in an EQ.

A bandwidth is a range of frequencies. They can be narrow, or wide. You hear this in reference to how you may be treating a specific 'bandwidth' on an EQ.

When looking at an EQ, you have any number of parameters that can be used to 'EQ' (or filter) your sound. In the case of the Parametric EQ 2 (from FL Studio), we have 7 parameters for EQ'ing. The low-end (bass frequencies) is on the left, up through the mid-range to the high frequencies on the right.

Here are some tips regarding EQ'ing that might help!

• Not all sounds are present throughout the full harmonic spectrum (that's white noise), so first find out where the sound actually lives. Not all EQ actions are going to give you an 'equal' effect. A +6db low-shelf on a hi-hat isn't really going to do much of anything good for you, because a hihat is mostly high-end freqencies. A +6db high shelf on a hihat is a totally, totally different outcome. Just because were talking about the same gain, it doesn't make the end result equal. Know where your sound lives and act accordingly.

• Cut before you boost. I've actually mentioned this one before here on Steemit, so to quote myself: "When EQ'ing, it's easy to find yourself making big ol' frequency spikes because it might sound better in the moment and/or solo'd out. However, do this to 20-30 channels and now you have kind of a mess on your hands. If you've already established a decent mix, doing this is going to affect it, sometimes negatively. However, cutting unneeded frequencies can simultaneously retain a good mix and remove unwanted clutter/muddiness."

• A rule of thumb in the mixing world is you should never go beyond +/- 6db in either direction, or something like that. I say to hell with rules, but they're onto something from a philosophical standpoint. The idea is that if you have to adjust something that harshly, you might want to take a step back and re-analyze where and why the sound is where it is in your mix in the first place. Something with such a steep adjustment may come back to haunt you later on, so just have a game plan; have calculated reasons.

• EQ'ing is relative (as is music universally, in my opinion). Remember that when mastering, everything is normalized (ideally) to 0db. This means if you want heavy-ass bass, adding a s**t-ton of low end isn't going to help you. It's just going to make everything else super quiet in comparison when mastered. I'll give you a simple example. If we're talking on a scale of 1-10 regarding the lows, mids, and highs of a master, ideally you want everything 10/10/10, right? Well, kicking your low-end up to a 14 only means that when mastering, the whole thing has to be lowered by 4 to prevent clipping. So your end result winds up as a 10/6/6. Your bass doesn't become stronger, everything else just becomes weaker. Mark missed. Essentially, balance is everything.

• There are no universal truths in EQ'ing. Because an EQ sounds good on your voice, it may or may not sound good on someone else's. Every sound recording is different, so use your ears to determine what kind of EQ'ing is going to help you get a clean sound, and never just 'preset' your process.

Not to beat a dead horse, but practice is what gets you from A to B. But it's also really important not to be fooled by this illusion of 'magical' techniques (in other words, attributing fantastic sound to methods that don't make sense). EQ'ing, compression, or any other production methods can't save a sound that wasn't decent to begin with. Just doing things for the sake of doing them doesn't help (the old 'polished turd' proverb if you will, you know the one). A better course of action is understanding what an EQ actually does for you, using it to your advantage, and producing within your means.

I'll sound like a million dollar producer when you put me in a million dollar studio. But for now, I make due pretty darn well with just kinda knowing how some s**t works, and you will too.

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