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I discussed EQ’ing strategies above, here I turn to EQ’ing tactics— meaning the applied techniques used to make EQ decisions. How do you decide which EQ plug-in to use (assuming you have more than one)? How many frequencies to adjust? Whether to boost or dip frequencies? Which frequencies to either boost or dip? How much to boost or dip them? Whether to use bell-shaped EQ curves or shelving? How steep of a bell or shelf to use? There are a lot of decisions to be made, but there isn’t a formula for how to make them.

When referencing the strategies mentioned above, how do you achieve the optimal frequency balance for each element or the best compromise between sounds best and fits best? There is one primary tactic in the service of this pro- cess, and that is using extreme settings to uncover the ways boosting or dipping certain frequencies affects the material that you’re working on.

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CREATIVE TIP

Use your ears!

Before jumping into the practical tactics of applying EQ, and while these strategies are still fresh, it is good to remember the overriding bottom line when EQ’ing any element: use your ear! You set EQ based on the way things sound and in service of your aesthetic vision. Developing your ear for EQ’ing takes time and experience; there is no substitute for the hours of trial and error using EQs on program material of all types, combined with critical listening of music that you love or admire that is clearly related to the music you’re working on.

Remember that there are no hard-and-fast rules (or presets!). And even where there are generally accepted practices, some of the most interesting (and effective) mixes come from breaking the rules in service of a creative vision. See the final section on EQ where radical EQ’ing is discussed—nothing should be considered out of bounds!

WHAT NOT TO DO

Don’t rely on a spectrum analyzer.

As indicated in the creative tip above, when it comes to EQ (when it comes to mixing in general!) your ears are your best guides. I mentioned in chapter 2 that a spectrum analyzer could be useful to uncover strange anomalies that might be out of the range of your speakers (or your hearing), such as infrasound (very low frequencies below the hearing threshold) or ultrasound (very high frequencies above the hearing thresh- old), which may have strayed into your mix. It’s also a good tool for beginners to catch very out-of-balance mix elements (caused by inexperi- ence or poor monitoring). It’s worth checking your mix on a spectrum analyzer, but other than as a way to catch the oddities, it’s dangerous to use for anything more than very rough guide to frequency balance. You need to learn to trust your ear, through experience.

CREATIVE TIP

Double your fun.

EQ’ing sometimes demands close work on many frequencies. This may especially be true on drum tracks and loops. It can be helpful to copy your track and use two tracks to EQ the same thing twice. You might use one track to work on the high frequencies and another on the low. Kick drums and snare drums might benefit from this approach, especially if you feel like they need a lot of EQ shaping. Loops that include full-frequency

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material, like drum loops or full band loops, might also be easier to manipulate to your liking by combining EQ efforts. You might also employ the parallel compression tactic (see the section on dynamics for details on this, page 94) by heavily EQ’ing the duplicated track and mixing that with its un-EQ’d counterpart.

Choosing Frequencies

The key to selecting frequencies that are going to achieve the best results for enhancing or fitting an element in your mix is to use exaggerated settings and listen to the way the material responds. One of my favorite EQ plug-ins (MDW, from the master EQ designer George Massenburg) supplies a shortcut to this technique called ISO Peak (see screenshot 4.6). For each EQ band there is a button that shifts that band to a setting with a very high boost (+12 dB) and narrows the bandwidth to very narrow setting (Q = 8 is the default, but the user can change this to 4, 12, or 16). You can then sweep through frequencies (by sliding the mouse over the frequency select control) and listen to an exagger- ated version of the effect on the various frequencies. This often immediately reveals the points at which the effects of the EQ are particular sweet or sympa- thetic and the points at which they are particularly unpleasant or problematic. Of course, you will still need to decide how much to boost or dip and what kind of bandwidth setting to use, but this technique to select the center frequency to work from gets you off to a good start.

Choosing Bandwidth

Broad or narrow bandwidth? Bell curve or shelving? Making these decisions can be confusing, but at least to start with, you can use the default settings on your EQ and this will often produce good results (some EQs only have default settings, without user access to bandwidth control and that isn’t necessarily a problem). EQs often default the highest and lowest bands to shelving curves with a moderate rise and mid-bands to bell curves with a moderate width. Gen- erally you will want some compelling reason to vary from these settings (e.g., you may not want the low-frequency boost to extend into the infrasonic or subharmonic (lower than 20 Hz) range, so you’d opt for a bell curve rather than the default shelving setting). As a rule of thumb, broader bandwidths and shelving

SCREENSHOT 4.6

The MDW EQ with one band set in the ISO peak mode.

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EQs are gentler and more musical than narrow bandwidth settings (see the later section on other forms of EQ for a discussion of EQ with very narrow band- width settings, commonly called notch filters).

Choosing EQs

Which EQ plug-in to select for the goal you may have with a particular element in the mix requires some amount of trial and error. There are EQs based on all different kinds of hardware construction, including vacuum tube, transformer, and/or integrated circuit (IC) technology. The sound of any software EQ is a combination of the goal of the designer and the execution of that goal through the construction and algorithms of the computer code. Some EQs supply limited control in the interface; often modeling hardware EQ interfaces from some vin- tage and/or famous EQ. In all likelihood those earlier EQs limited the parame- ter controls because they were designed before strategies had been developed to provide all the possible EQ parameters and/or for financial reasons. These may sound great and be very useful, but I generally prefer EQs that give full access to gain, frequency, and bandwidth control; these may still model earlier hardware designs and strategies sonically, without the parameter limitations.

Some main strategies for EQ design are tubes, transformers and/or ICs, and linear phase. I describe each here, along with some comments on their quali- ties in practice and a screenshot of one popular example. (Some developers have plug-ins that emulate tube, transformer, or IC designs simply by selecting different presets.)

Tube emulation designs. These EQ plug-ins attempt to emulate vacuum tube-based hardware EQs, either vintage (e.g., the various Pultec EQs) or con- temporary (e.g., the various Manley EQs); see screenshot 4.7. Tube EQs have a reputation for a “warm” sound produced by the introduction of even-order har- monic distortion. Even- and odd-order harmonics are related to the overtone series that gives instruments their particular timbre (discussed earlier). Even- order harmonics produce smooth, musical characteristics as opposed to odd- order harmonics, which tend to sound harsh. Both hardware and software tube

SCREENSHOT 4.7

Vacuum tube emulation EQ plug-in.

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or tube emulation EQs can vary considerably in their characteristics, but they tend to introduce some degree of even-order harmonic distortion that produces a “warming” effect by thickening the overtones of the original signal.

WHAT NOT TO DO

Don’t assume that even-order harmonic distortion is always good or that odd-order harmonic distortion is always bad.

There are many factors that define the effects of harmonic distortion, including the level of the signal being processed and the extent of process- ing gain being used. While the judgment that even-order harmonics equal “warm” and odd-order harmonics equal “harsh” may be the norm, it is also possible for overdriven even-order harmonics to sound “mushy” or indistinct and subtle odd-order harmonics to add “presence” or definition.

Transformer or IC-based designs. Solid state EQs replaced tube EQs pri- marily because of the reduction in cost, but as the designs were perfected they also generated their own versions of even- or even- and odd-order harmonics, and some became highly valued for the tonal characteristics (especially the transformer-based designs of the early Rupert Neve EQs); see screenshot 4.8. Integrated circuits replaced transformer-based designs because of cost savings. Early IC designs tended to introduce odd-order harmonic distortion that gave them their bad reputation for sounding harsh, but later designs have become highly valued (e.g., the Solid State Logic - SSL - EQs). See screenshot 4.9. The reality is that tubes, transformers, and ICs can be designed to create either even- or odd-order harmonics, and they may be either more aggressive with the addi- tion of tonal qualities or more transparent (tonally neutral), so the current state

SCREENSHOT 4.9

Integrated circuit (IC) emulation EQ plug-in (use SSL).

SCREENSHOT 4.8

Transformer emulation EQ plug-in (use neve).

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of both hardware and software EQs should be judged on their tonal qualities rather than the origin of their design.

Linear-phase designs. Linear-phase EQs represent a new breed of processors that have emerged in the context of software EQ development. These processors use techniques to deal with the issues of phase that emerge in the application of EQ. Anytime we process a selective part of the frequency range of a sound (EQ’ing the highs, or lows, or whatever), the delay required to process those frequencies changes the phase relationship of the sound (phase being the rela- tive arrival time of sounds or frequencies at their destination—generally your ears!). These changes in phase relationship may produce unwanted artifacts (such as harshness) in your sound.

Linear-phase EQs work to solve this problem by delaying the unprocessed frequencies (and/or the frequencies processed separately but incurring different delay times) and then delivering the full sound in the same phase relationship as it came into the processor, but with the inclusion of the various frequency processing that has been added. See screenshot 4.10. As a result, these EQs tend to exhibit pretty long latency times (delays), though these can be solved using the delay compensation that is built into most DAWs now. Linear-phase EQs also tend to be CPU hogs, which can be an issue depending on the size of your file and your computer configuration.

It may seem that linear-phase EQs would always be the most desirable kind of EQ to use, and they do tend to have a particularly smooth and pleasing sound, but they have their own set of compromises to consider. They handle phase issues especially well, but they are still subject to distortion and other artifacts typical of all EQs to varying degrees. They may be particularly useful

SCREENSHOT 4.10

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on individual tracks in multi-miked situations (such as drums or acoustic piano), though other elements of the sound of any particular EQ may prove equally or more important to you and cause you to choose something other than a linear- phase style EQ—as always, the ear needs to be the final judge.

On the website, an EQ “shootout” provides clips of the same settings on each type of EQ applied to the same program material:

Artist: Cascada de Florees CD: Radio Flor Track: “Collar de Perlas” Audio Clip 4.9 A brief clip with the following EQ setting using a

tube emulation EQ software plug-in: bell curve set to 3 kHz, +5 gain, and .8 bandwidth.

Audio Clip 4.10 The same piece of music with the same EQ settings but with transformer emulation EQ.

Audio Clip 4.11 The same piece of music with the same EQ settings but with an IC emulation EQ.

Audio Clip 4.12 The same piece of music with the same EQ settings but with a linear phase EQ.