Practical Equalisation 2 (video tutorial)

Equalising in context

In some ways, mixing sound is like baking a cake, you take a lot of different ingredients (musical inputs) blend them together and they become something quite different from the individual ingredients you started with. The overall sound and tone of a large string section is much warmer and silky compared to say just two violins playing together. Simply adding bass guitar into a mix of a drumkit makes it sound stronger and more solid, it glues everything together.

Now once you bake a cake, you can never go back and separate the sugar or flour from the cake again, once mixed it’s permanent, however, with an audio mix, we can continuously separate and recombine our musical ingredients and keep ‘sweetening to taste’ until we are happy.

Consider though, for example, the tone of a solo acoustic guitar versus the tone of an acoustic guitar within a band mix. In a solo situation, we need the acoustic to provide everything tonally from the warmth of the bass and lower mids through to the sparkle in the highs, however when that same guitar is part of a band mix we don’t necessarily need the same tone from the acoustic.

The bass guitar is providing plenty of warmth, along with keyboards and electric guitars, and there is plenty of sparkle from other instruments too, so you may well find yourself eq’ing out some of the lower mids, and even softening the tone up the top a little to avoid tonally ‘cluttering’ the mix.

If all the instruments and drums were eq’d to have warmth for example, chances are you’ll get too much overall and find the mix is a bit muddy or lo mid heavy, too much sparkle in everything gets too harsh. So the key is to give every instrument its ‘space tonally’ so that it belongs and fits well within the overall mix. An overly bright acoustic can fight with the hi-hats tone, a bass guitar and kick drum both eq’d to be full in the same lo frequencies can overlap each other and make both indistinct.

I often find it very helpful to eq instruments ‘in the mix’, in other words not to solo them thru the PA get it perfect on its own and then recombine, but to eq in place, so that you can hear the effect of what you are doing with the rest of the mix around it. For sure to get some focus while you eq, push the instrument you are working on 6dB or so on the fader to hear it more clearly, and if it is proving tricky, then solo as you need to, but remember, the audience never hears things in solo, they only hear the whole mix, so work within the mix as much as you can.