Some good tips, thanks ! A few comments:

- I boost and cut in equal proportions – YMMV.

- “Sweeping” is something I do all the time. I’m more cautious about “feathering”, but it can work if instruments are fighting in the arrangement. Better to change what’s being played, though, and then just EQ everything to sound it’s best, in an ideal world.

- Nice idea about the parallel EQ/distortion processing – I have a post planned on this.

- I only hi and low-pass if necessary, but they can be useful strategies.

- Absolutely about listening in context – but solo-ing is also useful ! Balance is everything, as someone once said

Thanks for reading and contributing !

Ian

“Sweeping” to find the frequency you are looking for is also great — I like to turn up the gain all the way and just sweep the frequency back and forth until I find the frequency I am looking for. This is especially useful when you can tell two instruments are fighting but can’t really tell where the problem areas are.

“Feathering” your EQs is also very valuable, bringing up a frequency band on one instrument while reducing the same frequency band on other similar sounds to give them more space — I have found that I have a much easier time getting the bass guitar and kick drum to play nicely if I give the kick a boost around 60 Hz and a cut around 100 Hz, then bring up my bass guitar and cut it at 60 Hz and boost it at 100 Hz, for example. (Note: frequencies are estimated, this will be different for every session)

This one only applies to tube EQs (or very well modeled tube EQ plugins). If you want a bit more “punch” out of the low end on a kick drum but don’t want to boost the level too much, just patch two EQs in a row on the channel, the first being a tube EQ. Boost the low end a lot, maybe 12 or 15 dB. This will give you some of that nice, pleasing tube saturation on the low end. Unfortunately, the low end will be WAY too loud, so you simply crank the low end back down on the second EQ, and voila! You retain the nice warm tube compression on your lows, it will really punch through the mix, without artificially raising the volume of the bass frequencies and creating mud.

You touched on it with the hi-hat example, but I cannot overstate the value of hi and lo pass filtering! If you don’t need it, get rid of it! You can’t have every instrument in your mix blasting out from 20-20k, you will just have a huge mess. You probably don’t need anything higher than 10k on a kick drum, or lower than 150 Hz on a guitar. This leads me to my last tip:

ALWAYS listen to the track in the mix. A lot of times a properly EQ’ed track will sound weak soloed. Conversely, you will often find that as soon as you get your kick drum sounding beautiful and full by itself, it sounds awful and oppressive with everything else. You need to take the whole mix into account when you are EQ’ing or you will drive yourself insane. This will keep you from overdoing it. As a side note, I would also like to add that sometimes fairly aggressive EQ’ing is the best option, particularly if you are mixing an improperly recorded track. Just use your ears, and if it sounds good then it is the right thing for that track.

Rumour had it you could buy the same thing working in the opposite direction to make your audio sound like it was coming from any British Rail tannoy speaker in London.

:-p

How many badly EQ’d PAs in public places have you heard – you know the train company employee is male, bored and 45, but you don’t know anything about the trains.

All the different frequency corridors seem to carry with them different emotional or cerebral interpretive tendencies. Big basslines get people dancing, a crooning melody and a lyric with pathos leaves no dry eye in the house, and the angelic voices hitting the long high notes go all the way to God. Right?

Interesting analog to this is in written script. Cover the top half of a random sentence you’ve never seen, and try to read it, just interpreting the bottom of the letters. It’s quite difficult. Then do the reverse, try it with another random line but this time cover the lower half of the text. Most people find ttex easier to interpret.