With that said, it’s not always bad to boost when EQing and sometimes the desired sound can’t be achieved by cutting. Secondly, extensive boosting on many tracks will quickly eat up your available headroom. Think about it this way - cutting involves taking away something already there and boosting involves adding something that isn’t there. This isn’t always the best practice when dealing with EQ. When something is too soft, our first instinct is to turn it up. My favorite plugin for surgical EQ is FabFilter’s Pro-Q, and I love the API 550 series for color. The idea here is to feed a “clean” signal to the compressor before coloring the compressed signal with another EQ. The second EQ, following the compressor, is an EQ for color.
The first EQ is a HPF or LPF if needed, and resonant frequency fixes. What I typically like to do is insert an EQ both before and after a compressor.
EQ Before and After CompressionĪs you gain more mixing experience, you might learn to prefer the sound of certain EQ plugins and it’s totally okay to use more than one. So here’s the rule of thumb to follow - solo when fixing specific frequencies and un-solo when shaping the sound to fit the context of the mix. Hearing a track on its own is important when fixing problem spots in the sound, particularly resonant frequencies. Okay, so that doesn’t mean you should never solo and EQ. If you EQed the piano to sound good by itself, you might end up completely missing the fact that the low frequencies will interfere with other instruments in the arrangement. In the context of a pop recording, it’s common for everything under 200 – 250Hz to be rolled off to make space for the bass and kick drum. In the context of a solo classical recording, all those frequencies should be preserved. A piano is an instrument that occupies a pretty wide frequency range. Sound works in strange ways, and a track that sounds amazing soloed might sound awful in the context of the full mix. Soloing tracks to EQ is another common mistake. When used correctly, high-pass and low-pass filters will result in a cleaner sounding mix. A common mistake is rolling off too many mid frequencies resulting in a low energy mix. Make sure you’re always attentive when using HPFs and LPFs. The important thing to keep in mind is to use your ears and not your eyes when EQing.
Many EQ plugins like FabFilter’s Pro-Q offer visual analysis modes which make it easier to determine where the best cutoff frequency is. Using a high-pass filter with the cutoff frequency set at 100 Hz will enable you to get rid of that rumble. For example, the important frequencies of a vocal track usually start around 100 Hz and everything under that is low frequency rumble.
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