Graphic EQs work at live performances and in the studio. Brighter colors represent louder sounds, which you can cut with precision. You might also try editing using a spectrum analyzer, which offers a visual representation of an audio file’s frequencies. “You can choose your center frequency, narrow or widen the bandwidth of surrounding frequencies that are affected, and also adjust the slope of those frequencies,” Boutillette says of parametric EQs.
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Graphic equalizers work well for tuning a full mix of music, but audio engineers tend to use parametric equalizers to pinpoint particular frequencies. You may want to cut some of the high end.”įor precise frequency tuning, try a parametric equalizer. If you’re looking for a darker sound, you may not want to boost any low end. You might cut out some low muddiness, and that could brighten up your sound. “If you want a brighter sound,” Berry says, “you might not necessarily want to boost the high end. The most important thing is to use your ears, not your eyes. When deciding whether to boost or cut, Boutillette usually opts to cut, and she says she doesn’t adjust past three dB in either direction. You can change the sound significantly with slight adjustments.īerry says he rarely cuts more than one or two dB (decibels) because drastic changes can sound unnatural.
You’re boosting or cutting a range of frequencies above and below it. Remember that when you’re cutting or boosting a band, you’re not just altering the gain (volume) of the center frequency. Use a light touch when you tweak EQ controls. He also looks out for “the honkiness factor,” when voices sound too nasal, which can come into play between 600 and 800 Hz. When he’s recording vocals, Berry monitors between 20 Hz and cuts a little if it seems harsh. “If you pull down your highs,” she says, “there’s always the risk of losing the clarity of a person’s voice. The human voice exists mostly between 10 Hz, but sibilance and consonant sounds can reach higher frequencies. Boutillette, a frequent podcast producer, cautions against setting a low-pass filter too low. When mixing drum tracks, Berry uses low-pass filters to avoid snare or symbol bleed. “Even though you don’t hear it, it’s still making the speakers work harder than they have to.” When he’s mixing a vocal track, he tends to filter out everything below 100 Hz: “The microphone might pick up some subsonic frequencies, and that’s just going to muddy up your mix,” he says. “We can’t really hear them well anyway, and they can get out of hand and start rumbling your room,” she says. Producer and mixer Lo Boutillette uses high-pass filters to cut the low basses. A high-pass filter cuts the low frequencies and lets high frequencies pass through, while a low-pass filter does the opposite. These filters are important tools in any good EQ plug-in. Set limits with high-pass filters and low-pass filters. If you cut something and all the beefiness to the sound just goes away, you may want to keep that in or even boost it a little more.” If you boost something and don’t like how it sounds, you can cut it a little bit. “You can either go up or go down on one of the fixed frequency points. “The cool thing about graphic EQs is how simple they are,” says producer and engineer Gus Berry. This makes for easy cutting and boosting, but you risk altering frequencies that you aren’t trying to alter.
On a 10-band EQ, the center frequencies are an octave apart, so each adjustment covers a whole octave of tones.
With so many bands to work with, you can adjust narrow ranges of frequency. On a 31-band graphic equalizer, the center frequency of each band is one-third of an octave away from the center frequencies of adjacent bands. The most sensitive human ears can hear roughly between 20 and 20,000 Hz.) Low notes travel in slow waves, high in fast. (Frequency - the rate at which a sound wave passes a certain point - is measured in hertz (Hz), which is the number of waves that pass a point in one second. If the bass is shaking the windows, you can just lower the slider of one of the lower frequency bands. If, for example, the treble is too loud on a track, cutting the volume on one or two of the higher frequency bands can soften it.
Most graphic equalizers divide sound between 6 and 31 bands of frequency, with a physical or virtual slider controlling the volume of each band.