Tyler, I don't think you're going to find a whole lot of useful advice as far as specific recipes for specific frequencies on specific instruments, because that's typically just not how things really work. The chart Rami refers to does provides some general guidelines as to what some frequency ranges can mean can mean to various instruments, but it in no means is intended to provide any advice as far as what to actually DO in any given situation.
There are, however a few general techniques and platitudes regarding the general use of EQ that can be helpful. As always with these kinds of "rules", there are always exceptions; they do not hold true or work 100% of the time. But they do tend to me more useful and helpful to remember than to ignore:
I'd start you out with checking out
this article on how to use a parametric EQ for sweeping the crud from your tracks. Hardly a instrument track passes my desk that doesn't wind up benefiting from a parametric sweep, IMHO. After that:
- Use EQ only when called for, not just for the sake of using it. While I understand and kind of agree in principle with the "high pass everything" idea, I personally like to supercede that with the idea of "keep your signal chain as short and clean as possible". In this case, if a buildup of bass mud is not a problem in your mix, then I see no need to add all that extra EQ to the signal processing, myself.
- Use EQ boost to make something sound different, use EQ cut to make something sound the same but better. There are many exceptions, but this is a good principle to use as a baseline.
- Boost wide and low, cut narrow and deep. Again, there are exceptions, but generally speaking, you'll probably most often find yourself successful with EQ if your boosts are mid-to-wider bandwidth of just a few dB to generally shape the sound, and you use more surgical cuts of narrow bandwidth but more dBs to surgically remove trouble frequencies (as in the parametric sweep.)
- Sometimes you can make a radical EQ boost sound better (more transparent and natural) but distributing your EQ across the close harmonics. For example, a fairly narrow but radical boost at, say just for example, 200Hz can *sometimes* sound better by lessening the boost by a few dB but then adding small boosts of a dB or three at 100 and 400Hz. Experiment to taste.
- Often, rather than trying to force one instrument into the mix by excessive EQ boost, you can get it to fit in better by boosting it just a couple of dB and then making room by cutting just a couple of dB from the competing tracks. This is often referred to as "differential EQ".
The tips almost never end, but that's a pretty good starter list, I think.
G.
