I could do with some help on EQing and general balancing of my tracks as often i get into the situation where things get quite muddy. It would be nice to see a vid starting with a bad mix and working through how to tidy things up.
Cheers
Q. What should I EQ to improve my muddy mixes?
Published in SOS November 2008
SOS contributor Mike Senior replies: The first thing to say is that there are no specific frequencies that will always work, irrespective of the instrument concerned, as this kind of EQ use is entirely about the unique context of your mix. The main issue, as you've realised, is how to identify what to cut in each case.
Low frequencies take up much of the headroom in many mixes, so if your bass part is already providing the low-end weight you need, you may find that the low frequencies of any guitar parts, in particular, will serve no useful purpose and can be high-pass filtered to keep the bass part clear.
The first thing I'd suggest is to build up the tracks in your mix in order of importance. So if your vocal is the most important sound in the mix, and sounds great on its own, you should be trying to preserve as much of that sound in the final mix as possible. Add in the next most important track, and if it hides anything important in the vocal, that second track needs to be cut with EQ so that it doesn't compromise the vocal. The trick is to mute and unmute the second track while actually concentrating on the vocal sound.
This same principle can then be applied as each subsequent track is added in, and hopefully this should help make a lot of your EQ decisions feel more logical. (Incidentally, while it is indeed often sensible to remove low end from guitar parts, this is usually because the bass part is considered more important in this frequency range, but if this isn't the situation in your specific mix, that particular EQ cut is by no means set in stone.)
If you've got a very busy arrangement, this general EQ'ing approach means that EQ will usually become more and more severe as tracks get less important. For very unimportant things, there's sometimes only a very limited frequency range that is relevant to the mix at all, so you might as well cut away everything else to keep the mix clear. The bottom line is that if you bypass the EQ cuts and the sound itself doesn't appear to lose anything important, the stuff you're cutting away is expendable, and getting rid of it will improve the clarity of other, more important instruments in the mix.
Because low frequencies tend to use the majority of the mix headroom, EQ cuts are most frequently concentrated there, and I certainly find the high-pass filter to be my most common EQ choice. However, high-pass filtering can be entirely unnecessary in some mixes, or low shelving might do a more musical job.
Your suggestion of using boosts to bring out the characteristic frequency ranges of different instruments will probably do you more harm than good, in my opinion. For a start, built-in sequencer EQ plug-ins tend to sound better cutting than boosting, but you're also more likely to mislead yourself into thinking an EQ setting is making a sound better simply because it's making it louder.
I don't think very narrow 'notch' EQ cuts are really what you're after here, either, as these tend to be for dealing with specific technical problems, such as reducing mains hum or unwanted drum resonances. If you're already happy with the sounds on their own, very narrow notches may not be really be that useful at all.
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