Music How to: An Explanation behind EQ

Hey everyone! So today, I’m going to explain what is EQ.

Let’s get into it.

Music 101 an explanation in Music Frequencies

First, Let’s talk about music frequencies and how they relate to the EQ.

When you record something, anything. 

That audio noise actually uses the entire audible Frequency Spectrum to make the noise. 

And the entire Audible Frequency Spectrum is between 0 hz to 21 khz.

And it doesn’t matter if you are using a microphone to record a snare drum or to record the guitar parts, to record the voice, or a bass guitar, whatever noise you’re going to record is going to occupy the entire frequency spectrum, if not most of it. 

However, that presents a problem for us musicians. 

Because even though it sounds nice when you play things all at the same time, when you hear it in person, you might notice that the guitar and the voices clash with one another. 

You might notice that the instruments and the voices clash and that it seems like everything is just a big mess. 

And when you put that music into a DAW, you hear it all the more audible. 

Therefore, when you record a song, you need something that will highlight the frequencies that you want and diminish the frequencies that you don’t want for each instrument and voice. 

Introducing the EQ

EQ, the tool that carves out music

When you use EQ, it does exactly that job. 

What happens is that back in the early recording days, producers would find trouble trying to balance out the frequencies by just the volume faders alone.

And in retrospect, it was impossible.

So they created a tool that could boost or cut the frequencies that you wanted or not wanted. 

And that tool is the EQ.

So it works like this. 

Let’s say you have a guitar part that is playing heavily at 1.6 khz, but your vocalist is singing in the exact same range. 

That means that you want to create a guitar that is loud but is not cutting into the vocal parts. 

What you could do is at 1.6 Khz you could CUT the frequencies in the guitar just enough so that the voice can be heard and the guitars stay present. 

Or what you could do is you could boost the vocal frequencies at 1.6 khz. And that’s how you could do that. 

But remember that you are dealing with multiple instruments all at the same time that all need their “Space” that’s the term for the frequency that an instrument needs in order to be heard. 

So say for example, you have a 4 part ensemble. A guitarist, a Vocalist, a Bassist, and a drummer. 

The bass is really heavy at 80 hz, the guitar is really heavy at 1.5 khz the Vocalist is at 5khz, and the snare and crash and hi hat are all at 20 khz. 

Then what you would do is you would carve out a space for each instrument. 

For the purpose of this exercise, we’re only going to talk about the vocals. 

You would cut at 80hz, 1.5 khz, and 20 khz while boosting the 5 khz ever so slightly, because you still want your instruments to be heard all of this in the vocals. 

But of course, you might have a whole bunch of more instruments than just 4 different instruments. 

You might have a lead guitarist and a rhythm guitarist. 

You might have synthesizers and pianos, You might have orchestras

So obviously there might be some overlap in the frequencies that you are cutting and boosting, so just use your best judgment as to what you should cut or boost and just leave it like that. 

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Thank you all for listening in on this blog post. 

German Gonzalez, signing out!