Ultimately, more than any other audio engineering process, the well-judged application of EQ can make the difference between a polished, clear, professional sounding mix and an uneven, amateurish one. Also, most of the time, you’ll want to keep your cuts and boosts quite small – just a few dB either way – as extreme changes can, again, sound unnatural and eat up headroom. So, rather than boost the volume of a vocal at 2kHz by 3dB to make it heard over an accompanying guitar, for example, cut the guitar by 3dB at the same frequency. Generally speaking, it’s better to cut than to boost when EQing, especially if the goal is to move one part out of the way of another, as cutting sounds more natural and helps to maintain headroom in the mix. Set the centre, corner or cutoff frequency you want to adjust for a given band, then raise or lower the gain control to cut or boost the volume of that frequency and a range of frequencies adjacent to it, as determined by the bandwidth or ‘Q’ control. Loosely speaking, an EQ plugin can be thought of as sort of like a collection of volume controls, each one governing the level of a particular fixed or adjustable frequency range. EQ in music production serves essentially the same role – sculpting the frequency content to make stuff sound ‘better’ – but rather than the whole track, it’s applied independently to individual elements within it (drums, bass, guitar, keys, etc), so as to bring out the best in each one, cut away unwanted and unnecessary frequencies, and prevent clashes between sounds that occupy similar frequency ranges – the bass and kick drum, for example, or vocals and guitars. You’re probably already familiar with the basic principle of equalisation, as the music playback app on your phone will feature a simple graphic EQ, for tailoring the sound to your liking. In actuality, you can expect to deploy EQ plugins on the vast majority of your mixer channels, even if only for basic corrective purposes much of the time. Indeed, although EQ plugins will be categorised as ‘effects’ in your DAW, that term doesn’t really do them justice, implying occasional usage for the purpose of dramatising or glamourising a sound. Up there with compression in its essential music production status, EQ (short for ‘equalisation’) is one of the most powerful effects in your mixing toolbox, enabling shaping of the frequency content of instrument and vocal tracks, as well as groups, auxiliaries and even the master output of your mixer.
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