How To Become a Master at EQ (in Only 15 Minutes)

I used to hate eqing every time I used an EQ I couldn't really tell if it made my mixes sound better or worse I'd sit there tweaking knobs second guessing every move and wondering is this even helping for a little while I didn't really get it and no matter what I did my mixes sounded flat if this sounds like you I understand but after a lot of practice and consistency it kind of just clicked and the difference it made was Unreal I mean just listen to this this is my phone microphone with no eqing whatsoever

and this is my phone microphone with EQ insane difference I'm going to break it down in such a simple way so that you have complete Clarity on when where and how to use it and I'll even show you a few secret techniques so before we go into anything else we need to understand what an EQ actually does an EQ or equalizer is a tool that lets you boost or cut specific frequency ranges in a sound and you might be like well why would we want to boost or cut specific frequencies in a sound well that's

to create balance in your mix we'll go over all of that in just a little bit but first let's go over some of the controls here this is the default parametric EQ and FL Studio I'll do Ableton in just a little bit there are many types of eqs there's graphic eqs parametric eqs for the sake of Simplicity we'll just be focusing on parametric cuz they're very common and you can see it has these bands here now we can left click and drag these up to raise a certain frequency range or lower it so let's check

that [Music] out so that's the main control right there it's just the volume the next parameter is just the frequency so this is from the left to the right with the right being the more higher frequencies and the left being the lower [Music] ones and then there's the Q or the resonance or the bandwidth whatever you want to call it it has many names and this just controls how wide or thin the band is so we can make it really sharp or really wide like [Music] this oh and then finally there's the shape so up

here in the FL Studio EQ you can choose the shape of each band so for example we could left click and drag to make this a high pass I know this is a lot of information but the high pass just lets the highs pass through and cuts the low [Music] [Applause] frequencies and then there's a low pass as well which is the opposite and like I said you can choose the shape for each of these bands all right now just a quick example for the Ableton users say as well it's the same thing this is

a track I just started working on I'll play it real quick [Music] anyway hope you liked that let's check out this main synth here so for Ableton users it's just a matter of loading up an eq8 all the same controls still apply this is also a parametric EQ and you know you can change the gain of the band The Frequency Q resonance bandwidth whatever you want to call it so that's how to use an EQ right you know the fundamentals you know the controls but why would we want to use an EQ that's the most

important question so let's head to the Whiteboard real quick and I want to show you just a quick drawing okay so why would we want to use an EQ at least this is how I kind of visualize it so let's say you have some sounds in your track like a bass for example so this right here would be your base sound let's also say you have some synth chords or something like that so this is a synth chords but here's the thing if we look at these sounds both on like a spectrum this Basse sound

is of course going to have a lot of lower frequencies or base frequencies over here and possibly a little bit of mids and stuff and these synth chords are most likely going to have a lot of mids but maybe a little lows as well and the thing is if we look at these two the synth chords have a little bit of low end and this is going to clash with the frequencies of this base and sometimes the mid- frequencies of your base depending on what type of instrument it is might clash with the mids of

the synth chords and so how do we solve that how do we fit these two together well of course we're going to use an EQ so we'll cover this in a little bit more detail later but for example we might take one of the EQ bands and make it a low pass so that it completely cuts out all of the lower frequencies here and once we do this now we have all this room for the base frequencies to breathe in the actual bass instrument and in the Basse just for an example there might be a

lot of presence in the higher mid frequencies up here and so we might take one of the EQ bands and lower it so that way the synth chords have a little bit more room to breathe over here I know this is a visual example but do you see how we're just kind of fitting these two together like a puzzle so eqing your full song with like 50 instruments for example is just like taking a bunch of jumbled up puzzle pieces and fitting them together so now let's look at some practical examples this has been my

life for the past 9 years so you know how to use an EQ you know why to use an EQ and now it's just a matter of where and when to use an EQ so let's look at some practical examples I have this bass in [Music] piano and the first step of using an EQ is to just find sounds that compliment each other focus on your sound selection first don't just go applying an EQ on every sound to solve it solve the problem before it even happens you need to make sure you have the right

pieces of the puzzle right if you take some random jigsaw puzzle set right and then you take another completely different set with a completely different picture and you try and put those two puzzles together with completely different pictures it's not going to fit it's going to look very weird the same thing applies here so make sure you have the right puzzle pieces first that's sound selection I would say these fit pretty well together let's uh check them on the EQ so this is the EQ on the piano and this is on the base let's [Music]

see so as you can tell the base has a lot of low frequencies that's why it's called bass and then there's some mid frequencies as well the piano mostly consists of the mids around here now like I said we want to make sure these two fit together like a puzzle so the bass has a lot of low frequencies and the piano has some these can Clash and sound muddy and like very boomy right so pretty much every instrument that is in a base we want to cut the bass frequencies out of that way they don't

Clash so I'm going to make this a low pass and make this more [Music] steep now if you're newer to music production and mixing and stuff like that you probably won't hear much of a difference at all and so really quickly I'll just turn up the bass notes on this piano and maybe even duplicate it an octave down just to really show you what it sounds like so now the piano and the bass are really going to be clashing in these lower [Music] frequencies so let's try and cut this [Music] out do a little before

and after [Music] it's more of a subtle difference but just for one extra example let's just increase the base on this piano so you can really hear it Clash at the [Music] Basse let's cut it out [Music] and bring it back [Music] in so you hear how those frequencies build up and it gets really muddy so we're fitting them together like a puzzle let's try and add something else all right so I added a quick [Music] guitar and here are all of the eqs this one's for the piano this is the bass and this is

the guitar so I'm going to cut the blows from the guitar so that way we're making room for the Basse of [Music] course and now that we're getting more sounds in the mid frequencies specifically the guitar and the piano we can start working on those so the most common technique with an EQ is just to boost one of these bands here and sweep through the sound and then cut the frequencies you don't like so we can do these ones right here and then those and there's a problem with this I'll show you in a second

and then these ones these are really muddy and just for good measure let's sweep through one more time like that now here's the thing if your EQ looks like this probably 95% of the time you're doing something wrong this is just completely destroying the character of the sound with no real intention we're kind of just sweeping through finding stuff that we don't like and then just cutting it out and the thing is no matter what you do if you boost a certain frequency it will probably sound bad in the mix no matter what we also

want to be careful with how much we cut or boost usually no more than 5 DB that could be safe but it really depends on the situation every scenario is different and sweeping through and finding harsh frequencies can still be a good technique but there's another technique that I actually got from In the Mix full credit to him where instead you cut and then sweep through find out when the mix sounds better and then find which frequencies to [Music] cut so I did want this piano to be more of a background type of thing just

to add some texture I might do a slight dip in the mids [Music] here yeah I really want that guitar Melody just to be a little bit more present and we're making a little bit of space for that if I wanted it to be the opposite where the piano is more present I might do this just kind of Dipping some of the body of the guitar and some of the presents [Music] and adjusting the [Music] levels and by the way I want to clear something up sound design is completely different from mixing so if you

wanted to have a bunch of notches like this in your EQ because you're doing some crazy sound design dub step base or something then that's fine it's okay to break the rules but during mixing if your EQ is looking something like this it's probably not good cuz I can just tell that this is going to destroy the character of the sound all right so another practical example this is a project I made in 2021 it has vocals but for the sake of this video I'm going to disable the vocals and we can see there's a

bunch of these bell sounds I'll play the [Music] intro here's what they sound [Music] like now supp specifically on this ping here you can see that I lowered the fundamental peak of the sound usually I wouldn't do this but I found that it just helps it sit better into the mix a little bit more so if I really boost it here you can hear it's really sharp if we dip it a little [Music] bit it just helps it sit into the mix so much better another example would be all these cord layers over here in

the drop I'll play the drop for you real [Music] quick now there's three layers here we have this one this one and then this one and of course I had to fit these all together like a puzzle with the EQ so if we look at the three quarter layers here they each have their own EQ so this one has a little dip around 8,000 Herz because it had a lot of noise this one has been dipped around 3,600 [Music] Hertz there just very harsh frequencies right here and each of these layers were building up there

so I wanted to remove that and in layer three it's the same thing so all together they're built to work together all right so back to Ableton of course I played this track [Music] earlier and so for example this lead syn here was a little bit too sharp without the EQ I'm going to take it off [Music] you can hear these very high frequencies around here I'll boost it a little bit just to kind of train your [Music] ear those very sizzly frequencies and so I decided to just low pass this lead like this this

just rounds it out and I found that it fits so much better in the track because it's not so sharp anymore [Music] very subtle difference but we're just fitting it into the track same with this other [Music] layer and of course I had to make sure that these sounds complemented each other we might even be able to lower some of the frequencies of the second layer that way this second layer here it's just adding that high-end texture to the first layer once again we're just fitting these two together like a [Music] puzzle you can see

that even in these atmosphere layers here I've lowered some of these mids here like that and that's because with all of these atmosphere layers like this this one same thing and even this one there's going to be a lot of buildup in that mid-range and we want to make sure to take care of that fit it into the mix so that it sounds more clean all these subtle differences just really clean everything up thank you so much for watching I really appreciate it this is just kind of a crash course on EQ and I might

make some more detailed videos later if you think I'm cool Please Subscribe it would help me a ton and if you want to work one-on-one with me you can check the link in the description is there anything else I want to say uh yeah just go apply this right now just completely click off the video or subscribe before you do then completely click off the video and go apply these principles we just spoke about into one of your projects so that it just sticks in your brain forever it'll help a ton trust me anyway make

music now and you'll thank yourself later peace