EQ and mixing

[elviskennedy]

Hello All.
I am mixing a recording at the moment, but am a bit lost when it comes to EQ. I can muck around for ages and get a range of decent sounds, but I would really like to slap a default "Snare EQ" setting on my snare track and fine tune from there. Lazy I know, but does anyone know of anything that can do this? Or even a list of suggested EQ settings that I can apply in Cubase?
Any help greatfully appreciated

[Blue Bear Sound]

"slapping on a preset" will virtually never work, since the context of every track is going to be different.

Mixing Article --> Mixing 101

[darnold]

use your ears and apply whats needed.

danny

[Rev E]

Many will tell you and it is true... there is no such thing as stock settings for any instrument unless you recorded that instrument before and repeated the same recording process and know personally where the faults are from a previous mixing attempt. That said, most snares that I've used have little useful info under 80ish Hz, so I'd slap a high pass filter on that with the filter's center at somewhere between 80 and 120 Hz. Also the snare often picks up some kick and you may want to take the kick out as best as you can so that the kick's sound is coming from just the kick mic. But after filtering to bring back some of the body of the snare you may want to do a slight boost in the lower mid area to recover some body/power. Lots of folks like 225 - 250 Hz as a fundamental/body are for snares. I'd look into the lower mids (above the filter point up to 400ish Hz) for too much mud or (depending on how you recorded it) to little power.

Generally, cuts should be hi Q values (narrow bandwith) anywhere in the 100 to 1kHz are, because a lot of the snare sound is in this area... which frequencies is better answered by listening to the instrument yourself. Then there's the all imporant upper mid area above 1kHz... sometimes you need a boost (I usually use Hi Q settings here). But the vocals have a lot of fundamentals in this area from 1kHz to 4kHz so you don't want to do too much boosting and you may end up boosting one upper mid area with a high Q (narrow bandwidth) and cutting nearby (frequencywise) to leave some space for the vocals.

If you didn't add this during recording, you may also consider using a (low Q-wide bandwidth) EQ centered anywhere in the 5kHz to 8 kHz or a shelving EQ in the same are to add some high end sparkle.

But the bottom line is there is no stock settings, because all of this depends on the sound of the snare itself AND most importantly, what the song calls for. So all this talking about what to do with the snare out of context with what it sounds like in the mix is... IMO... misguided. And just when you got the snare sound jumpin', you've got to consider what effects to apply, if any. Hope I helped.

[Farview]

My Lord! how many different times did you post this same question? The real answer to your question is: If you really want to be an engineer, you will have to learn to like fiddling with EQ. Thats what we do