Need help for setting param EQ for guitar rack

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DropD

New member
Last week I bought a parametric (I hate graphic) EQ (Behringer Ultra-Q Pro, 5-band fully parametric, plus lo-cut and hi-cut) for my guitar system (which is composed of a Pod Pro and a *cough*Peavey*cough*solid-state*cough* power amp through a Mesa 4X12). I hooked it up and tried to do something out of it and, although I understand perfectly how it works, I had no absolutely no clue. Mostly my guitar tone was simply incredible that day so there was nothing that needed to be changed, but I don't believe in perfection, there is surely something to be improved, I just don't know what and how to do it :)

So I was wondering if anyone could help me understand which frequency ranges affect guitar tone and in what way, like for example, how to make the guitar cuts better through the mix, how to make it sound bigger, how to give more attack to my crunchy rhytm work. I'm talking mostly high-gain situations here.

Thanks

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Yannick Blais
Fender Fat Strat Texas Special, Godin LGX, Yamaha RGX621D with Seymour Duncans
 
To get distorted Guitar to cut through a mix I would Boost a little mids, somewhere between 600hz and 2khz, just sweep through the frequencies till you hear the 'sweet spot', It'll be different for every setup. To make the rhythm tone 'fuller' and 'heavier' boost between 250 hz and 500 hz, the above still applies. Be careful, this range can also add muddiness if overdone.

Since Distortion adds compression if you want more attack you may need to back off the amount of gain that you are using a little, too much gain can turn a guitar tone into unintelligible mush that you might think sounds ok by itself , but in a mix just turns into noise.
From an eq point of view boosting between 2khz and 5 khz should add attack.

The trick to using Parametric eqs is to boost the gain about 4-8 db and then sweep through the frequencies, you will hear a kind of flanging effect, listen carefully till you hear the frequency that you are looking for 'pop out', then cut or boost that frequency to taste.
 
Thanks for the info

What Q setting do you recommend while sweeping through the frequency? The Ultra-Q can go from ultra-steep (0.03 octave) to pretty wide (2 octaves).
 
It's hard to say off the top of my head, but I would guess something between .5 and 1, you might find that if the frequency that you are looking for is high that a smaller Q might work better, once you try it you'll get the hang of it pretty quickly.

Good Luck.
 
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