M_Glenn_M mentioned in his last thread that he didn't have much info when it came to tweaking EQ settings. This info is from some othe forum and I find it to be good information. It gives the relative frequency range to tweak for a given instrument.
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3 golden rules of EQ:
Cut (attenuate) to make it sound "better"
Boost to make it sound "different"
You can't boost what isn't there to begin with
Boosting EQ causes phase delay, so use subtractive EQ whenever possible. Your mix will thank you ;-)
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GENERAL EQ SETTINGS REFERENCE
Octave 1 - 20Hz-40Hz - Center 32Hz - (31.5, 31.25, 31)
Description: Chest, Sub-bass, Rumble, Thump
Benefits: all extremely low-frequency instruments (kick,bass, organ) that need a feel of power added.
Caution: causes rumble (cool for FX - post production)
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Octave 2 - 40Hz-80Hz - Center 64Hz (63.5, 63)
Description: Bass, Full/Fat/Round Bass.
Benefits: all low-frequency instruments (kick, bass, etc.) that need more fulness.
Caution: only add to ONE instrument, otherwise you will lose the definition in the low end.
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Octave 3 - 80Hz-160Hz - Center 125Hz
Description: Full, Fat, Body, Boomy
Benefits: Piano, Low Strings, Floor tom, Snare drum Low male vox (around 100)
Caution: cut on kick drum, bass guitar (boomy)
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Octave 4 - 160Hz-320Hz - Center 250Hz
Description: muddy, muffled, ****
Benefits: all mid-range instruments (including vocals) that require some **** and natural feel to the sound
Caution: use on fewer instruments in the mix, in order to keep the definition.
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Octave 5 - 320Hz-640Hz - Center 500Hz
Description: horn-like, boxy, honky, tubey, raspy
Benefits: when cut, it will make things sound more transparent.
Attack (raspy) bass guitar.
Horns (lower brass)
- Megaphone/TV effect
- Honky-tonk piano
Caution: kick/snare drums sound BOXY when there is too much 500Hz
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Octave 6 - 640Hz-1.25kHz - Center 1kHz (actual center of the frequency spectrum. 1kHz is often used as the reference frequency when doing psycho-acoustic measurements)
Description: Aggressive, Attack, Distortion, Nasal
Benefits: Distorted guitar, snare, anything that
needs more aggressive feel to it. (Screaming low vocals)
- Telephone effect
Caution: higher pitch vocals - nasal sound
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Octave 7 - 1.25kHz - 2.5kHz - Center 2kHz
Description: Crunchy, Gritty, Noisy, Grainy
Benefits - Background instruments, including BG Vox. (synths, strings, etc.)
Caution: too much of 2kHz will reduce the smoothness of a sound.
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Octave 8 - 2.5kHz - 5kHz - Center 4kHz (Human Speech Recognition)
Description: Sharp, Edgy, Presence, Definition, "ouch"
Benefits: Lead VOCALS and soloing instruments.
Caution: too much can cause listener's fatigue
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Octave 9 - 5kHz - 10kHz - Center 8kHz
Description: Metallic, Brilliant, Sizzling, Sibilance
Benefits: all instruments with metallic parts (cymbals, hats), shakers, snare bottom, etc., sax and trumpet
Caution: causes sibilance in vocals (extremely sharp S and T sounds). String noise.
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Octave 10 - 10kHz - 20kHz - Center 16kHz
Description: Bright, Airy, Open, Hissy
Benefits: all acoustic instruments, creates a feeling of openness and air.
Caution: tape (analog) hiss. Careful with samples that were taken from vinyl/tape
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Wow! Thanks BB. This is a whole new world for me. I've fiddled with EQ but have only scratched the surface according to this! It might be time to swap my 'instinctive' mixing for something a bit more professional, lol
Yea Greeny, I haven't done much with tweaking EQ settings much either. With the BR-1200 I have EQ dedicated for each track so I have started exploring it a bit more, and it can really alter the sound quite a bit for the better. With the MicroBR you can also have EQ for each track, it is just one extra step. You have to master the track you want to tweak the EQ on (muting the other three tracks), shutting off compression and other unwanted effects. It makes the micro pretty darn flexible and tweakable also but just takes a few more steps.
Greatly appreciated. What a goldmine of information.
Peace.
Blooby
BB,
This is incredibly helpful. Gives so great starting points for fixing EQ issues like mud, excessive string noise and generally flavoring the mix better.
Just a logical reference point for those interested, Middle C falls about 262 Hz, near the centerpoint of octave four.
Unreserved thanks for this. I know nothing about this stuff and you have given out a tremendous resource and somewhere to start.
Agree - if I can ever get round to having some time with the MBR again, this will be extremely helpful.
Cheers,
Nigel
Quote from: Ferryman_1957 on May 22, 2009, 07:58:39 AMAgree - if I can ever get round to having some time with the MBR again, this will be extremely helpful.
Cheers,
Nigel
Hang on in there!!!!!
I thought middle C was 440hz.
Quote from: Flash Harry on May 22, 2009, 10:25:36 AMI thought middle C was 440hz.
440Hz (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A440) is the A above middle C (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle_c). It's the reference frequency that's often used for tuning a guitar and matches the tone produced by fretting the first string at the fifth fret. When I started learning to play guitar (long before electronic tuners were available), I used an A440 tuning fork (http://www.onlinetuningfork.com/) as a reference for tuning my guitar. A440 is also the standard frequency that the equally-tempered scale (http://entertainment.howstuffworks.com/guitar3.htm) is based on.
Well there you go, that's a lifetime of ignorance on my part. I'd have died believing that. Cheers 64g!
Hey 64G's Ive still got my old tuning fork in the draw, although it doesn't see the light of day now thanks to the MB-R. What a gadget they were.
Regards
Eddy
Wow Bluesberry - superb post...
I know that, so far, it sounds like I know what I'm doing ::) but this post contains loads of useful info I had no idea over - I'm almost tempted to go back and remix everything :D
I certainly print this one out and add it to my growing pile of ideas and crib sheets beside the monitor speakers...
Many thanks
Thanks BB, IT looks as if I'm not the only one who will benefit from this info.
I will be recording dry and bouncing each track for EQ from now on I suspect.
I notice there are several of the standard FX in bounce mode that have tweakable (and of course save-able) EQ's as part of their tool kit.
Is there one you use in particular? Or do you use one for vox, one for guitar and one for drums and one for bass etc?
This link is pretty good too:
http://www.recordingwebsite.com/articles/eqprimer.php
I am learning about "Q" settings as I see we have that option too.
A friggin' amazing machine for a couple of hundred $$
Great! Any recommendations for Bass guitar EQ settings, to help em cut through a mix?
Quote from: Davo on May 24, 2009, 10:15:57 PMGreat! Any recommendations for Bass guitar EQ settings, to help em cut through a mix?
I haven't got any actual settings, probably depends on the type of music I guess, but I do have various bits of wisdom people have given me. Use this in conjunction with what BB posted - a lot of these can be figured out I guess, with experience, from the info he put up, but I've found that for this particular subject, we can all use as many different angles as we can lay our hands on ;D
For the type of music I do (pop/rock, blues), after the vocal, the bass is probably the most important part on a recording (I'm a guitarist by the way :D). Think about the bass sound, and how it gels with the drum part, before EQing all the fancy parts - I tend to think about bass/drums/vocals early on (with a little of the other instruments to give me flavour).
You need to get the best bass sound you can coming into the recorder. New strings, whatever it takes. Bass seems to be very much a "you can't put in what isn't there" instrument when it comes to EQing and mixing.
Don't stick to one style (fingers or pick). I am a confirmed "fingers" bass player, it feels better, more righteous, etc, :D. But on my last recording I was having all sorts of trouble writing a part that cut through, pumped the band along... after several hours practising over two/three days, I finally realised I needed a plectrum bass part - the minute I started using the pick it worked. I'd even be prepared to record the bass on several tracks and mix them down to one, if necessary.
Use compression (I process after recording it dry) - compressing the bass part not only "lowers" those accidentally loud notes, it seems to make the whole track more "punchy" and allows it to come through the mix better (probably because you can turn it up more ??? :D). I'm not sure about settings - I'm still learning and making it up as I go along - I grab some preset and tweak until it sounds "right"/"better".
On EQ, I've found that it's often more to do with what you take out of the other parts rather than the EQ on the bass:
Guitars: I always take bottom end off of the guitars I've recorded, guitars eat up the lower frequencies, and you don't really hear what they're doing down there once they're in the mix. So take their bottoms off to give the other parts that need that area more room. I do this during mix and bouncing, or possibly if the guitar comes in through a mixing desk - but I prefer to record what's coming out of the amp and cut afterwards. Note: I
never use the bass control on the amp to achieve this.
Keyboards: These want/need bottom end, and they're capable of playing the same octaves (or lower) than the bass guitar. You have to figure out between the bass and keys who's playing what, and then later during mix/bouncing who gets the bass frequencies. Consider leaving out left hand from the keyboard parts (bit of a potential punch-up here if you're not the keyboard player :D). But at the very least check what's going on in the keyboard left-hand to make sure it complements rather than fights the bass guitar. If I'm using keys, I tend to use the bass for punch and bottom of the band, and then give the keys as much lower frequencies as I can (even to the extent of taking more from the guitars). Often on quieter passages, or when the bass guitar is playing higher up the neck, the keyboards can be supplying the bottom of the band.
Bass: I personally like as much bottom end as it can handle before it gets "boomy". Compression before EQ seems to increase the amount of bass you can put on. I do love the MBR's master toolkit with it's 3 band compressor, and the EQ is tied to those bands. Make sure you can still hear the bass drum though - a lot of what we perceive as "bass" is actually the bass drum. The nuances of the bass guitar performace is in the top end - add a bit more of that to accentuate it, watch out for string noises though! What I don't want on (most) bass parts is too much mids - nearly all instruments mess with the mids to some extent (guitars are big offenders), and for me nearly all of the mixing battle is usually about leaving enough mids open for the vocals to sit nicely.
Finally, I discovered I do have some settings that might be useful, they're from a crib sheet I got from Cakewalk's tech tips on their web site. I'll put the whole table:
| Instrument----- | Lower Harmonic---- | Upper Harmonic---- |
| Bass | 400 Hz | 1500 Hz |
| Guitar | 3 kHz | 5 kHz |
| Kick Drum | 400 Hz | 5 kHz |
| Snare Drum | 7 kHz | 100 kHz |
| Vocal | 5 kHz | 10 kHz |
Use an instrument's lower harmonic to add punch or presence, use the upper harmonic to accentuate clarity or brightness. Eg. to brighten a vocal, use a moderate boost of say +2 or possibly +4 at 10 kHz.
I believe these are "ballpark" frequencies - certainly seems so to me whenever I use this info.
Be gentle though - if you boost every track on their harmonics you just end up with an "everything louder than everything else" scenario. The best way of getting any track to "cut-through" is to a) get the best sound recorded that you can, then b) make space for it by adjusting the tracks around it.
Hope that helps...
One of the reasons I love doing this stuff is there are so many "answers" and it's a never ending learning curve. We're all looking for the "correct" way to do it - and sometimes various bits of wisdom seem to conflict with what we've learnt already. I finally figured out that it's cos it's art! All the tech advice we come across is "correct" in some way, just not necessarilly the "correct" way for our own application :D - you can get some really good sounds out of doing the exact opposite sometimes!
Andy Ive saved this post, thanks for the great tips.
And I didnt even know that the MBR had a 3 band comp.
Andy, you get the other half of the unreserved thanks. I can't believe how useful this thread has been so far. Well, I can. That's why I'm saving the info.
I'm still learning too - I followed the links earlier in the thread last night and found some superb information...
What I'm thinking is that, for someone like me, if you try and read all this stuff early on, you'll get so wound up on technicalities that you'll forget it's "art".
But when you've got yourself a bit of "bang-it-down-and-see-what-happens" experience, you've actually got some queries and issues you need to resolve - the answers and guidelines available are like gold-dust then :)
And the MBR is a fantastic tool for learning this stuff - it encourages, and is very forgiving of the bang-it-down attempts... and then when you want to delve into balancing instruments and creating punchier mixes, better vocal performances, etc, etc, it has enough quality processing tools to let you learn how to use the "established" techniques that professionals use :)