As one of the most powerful tools in your mixing locker, equalisation is a process that can do more harm than good if employed without due care and attention. Earlier this year, Julian illustrated 5 Mistakes People Make When Mixing With EQ – here are some more of the most ruinous pitfalls to steer clear of.
Using The Wrong EQ
With so many EQ types available, it behoves every producer to understand which should be called on for any given situation or task. Some EQs – such as the Pultec EQP-1A and Maag EQ4 – specialise in broad-curve ‘musical’ frequency shaping, ideal for smoothing out vocals and instruments without compromising their natural tonality. Then there are the ‘surgical’ likes of FabFilter Pro-Q 3, Sonnox Oxford EQ and Photosounder SplineEQ, which enable ultra-precise targeting and tweaking of very narrow frequency bands for highly detailed sculpting. On top of that, does the job at hand demand the warmth and character of an analogue emulation, or the pristine cleanliness of a digital EQ? Would the adaptability of a dynamic or automatic EQ deliver the goods better than a static model? And are you fully au fait with the differences between linear phase and minimum phase EQ?
It’s a complicated business, for sure, but reaching for the fanciest, most expensive EQ in your arsenal every time isn’t the answer. Bone up on the various options at your disposal, spend time practicing with each one to develop your understanding of them, and appreciate that the stock EQ plugins in your DAW are probably more than good enough for most occasions.
Boosting Rather Than Cutting
There are, of course, no hard and fast rules in mixing, but if any engineering concept comes close to being one, it’s that, with EQ, cuts are preferable to boosts. The reason for this is that boosting (especially narrow frequency ranges) can easily give rise to mix-upsetting resonances and harshness, so it’s generally better to instead attenuate those frequencies in the channels you’re looking to pull away from the focal part. And if you do find yourself needing to up the gain of a certain band, make the increase as small as possible and keep the bandwidth relatively broad to maintain a natural sound.
Not Concentrating On ‘Mud’
The low-mid frequency range, from around 200-500Hz, can be tricky to handle, as most signals in the average mix will encroach upon it to some extent, thereby leading to an excess in that area that can make a track sound muffled, muddy and unbalanced. This sonic congestion builds up insidiously throughout the mix process, exacerbated by the introduction of dynamics processing and effects, and is something you need to be constantly aware of from start to finish. The easiest way to clear out the mud is to cut those frequencies in the parts and busses that are contributing to it using parametric EQ (pay particular attention to the kick drum and bass), or boost the highs and/or lows; but dynamic EQ can be very effective, enabling those frequencies to be suppressed only when their levels become problematic. Also worth mentioning here are ‘intelligent’ auto-EQs such as oeksound Soothe 2 and Wavesfactory Equalizer, which are designed to smooth out precisely these kinds of undesirable resonances across the frequency spectrum with minimal user input.
EQing In Solo Mode
Spending a significant amount of time with any channel in solo mode at the mixing stage is questionable practise at best, and even more so when it comes to equalisation. Soloing a sound takes it out of the full mix, which is the only place in which it ever needs to work, and thus is largely pointless; and with EQ being so heavily context-dependent (think kick drum vs bass, vocal vs guitar, etc), you’re essentially guessing at the net effect of any gain changes made, potentially resulting in unexpected clashes with other elements or misplaced ‘holes’ when the part is un-soloed. If an obviously troublesome resonance crops up and you need to find and hone in on it, the solo button is a perfectly reasonable solution. Beyond that, though, leave it alone and get used to EQing in situ – your mixes will thank you for it.
High-Passing Everything
You will have heard it said before that pretty much every channel in a mix should have a high-pass filter inserted, set to the lowest frequency above which that channel is actually audible, in order to mitigate headroom-eating low-frequency build-up. However, such advice is really a gross over-simplification, and rolling off everything below the apparent ‘bottom’ of a signal can do all sorts of minor damage, including altering the room ambience captured in a recording, damping energy that is in fact beneficial to the overall sound, and generally leading to an overly light mix that lacks in weight and punch. So, while high-pass filters are indeed incredibly useful for taking control of the low end, only fire them up when they’re really required – shaving off extreme subs in a bassline or kick drum; doing away with rumble and plosives in vocals; lifting guitars out of the mud (see above), etc. And bear in mind that you can always switch a filter in for only certain parts of the song (the verse, perhaps) with automation, or even apply dynamic EQ to scale the low frequencies according to their volume levels.
Trying To Salvage The Unsalvageable
EQ isn’t a magic bullet for rescuing bad recordings. If no amount of cutting, boosting, filtering and/or shelving is getting an instrumental or vocal part sitting where you need it to in the mix, it’s time to admit defeat and record it again. We know this is something we frequently suggest in our tips articles, but it’s such an important point and so broadly applicable that it just can’t be understated: if you want your tracks to sound as good as they possibly can, you simply can’t afford to compromise on your source recordings, no matter how much effort that might involve. And, indeed, with even relatively severe spectral issues being so eminently concealable via equalisation, if your most surgical of EQ plugins isn’t proving effective in rescuing a particular recording, that suggests that the audio in question must be quite profoundly broken – so get that mic out and start again.
Do you have any EQ advisories to add to the list? Share them in the comments.