eq book or faq?

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cuda

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hello
the one thing that really seems to be lacking in my recordings is a good understanding of eq. like what frequencies do what for guitar or bass etc. anyone have any literature they can recommend here? i've had surprisingly little success in finding anything helpful, but perhaps i'm looking in the wrong place. also curious if anyone can recommend some good eq and compression plugins with good presets, at least as a starting point.
thanks
 
I think this may be the hardest thing to learn, and the weakest area of my own development. It's like working with color, without the calibration card.
The one thing I find helpful is to calibrate your ears with some gold standard reference mixes. What those are is really up to each recordist, but they should be both exemplary to your own ears, and critically acclaimed/commercially successful. Keeping a small collection of these covering various styles ready to listen to is the best way I've found to calibrate my ears before tweaking the EQs.

-RD
 
A great way to learn what the frequencies sound like is to set up a parametric with a really high/narrow Q, gain set to max and just sweep through the audio spectrum. It's also a great way to find problem frequecies, you boost to find it, then cut it.
 
Good links and advice on this thread. I do what reshp1 suggests in the previous post. Also, HERE are some good articles on eq.
 
All the articles posted have good information, but may I recommend using those as signposts or guidelines only. Numbers can be decieving; they seem to imply certainty or accuracy. In a case like this that could not be farther from the truth.

Use the numbers solely as a way to translate sound to the controls on the EQ. In other words, learn the "color" of sounds at different frequency ranges and learn that "this" sound translates to somewhere around "that" number on the EQ (e.g. "Hmmm...that sounds like it's somewhere around 250-400Hz.")

Reshp1 has a very good technique above to get started in understanding the relationship between perceived sound and actual frequency values. It's also good to just simply pay attention when using any EQ on music in general. By that I mean don't just listen for when an instrument sounds good or bad, but listen to what it actually sounds like - how it's character changes - as you move the EQ controls.

It really doesn't take golden ears; as long as one doesn't have a tin ear, it really shouldn't take long at all to learn to mentally break the entire spectrum down fairly accurately by ear. (And of course if one has a tin ear, then maybe they should move to photography instead ;) )

But the important thing is not to EQ by the numbers. Learning that, for example, mid-bass is somewhere in the 100-250Hz range and that such and such instruments have fundamentals there will be meaningless unless your ears know what that frequency range actually sounds like. It has a certain character that's easy to recognize by ear once you discover it. On the other hand, if you learn the sounds first, and then learn what numbers they translate to, you'll be EQ Man in no time.

G.
 
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