This is an area that’s really guilty for adding mud to a mix. Now, this area is crucial for home recording, because this is where you get a lot of buildup with guitars, vocals, even the top end of the bass guitar especially. Next up, if you go from 200 up to 600 hertz, this is what I would call low mids, and this is a really important area for mixing. Lots of the low-end vocals as well, because male vocals are going to have the fundamental below 200Hz in most cases. In this area, we’ve got lots of bass guitar. For me, this is everything between 60 and 200 hertz. But if you’re listening on a laptop or a phone, there’s no way you will hear that.Īfter that, we get into what I would call bass. You should be able to hear it a little bit if you’re on monitors or headphones. The first area we’re going to focus on is sub-bass.Įverything below 60Hz is sub-bass, so generally you need a subwoofer or a good pair of headphones (open-back headphones, for example) to hear that. In between these two extremes, we’ve got the human range of hearing.įor me, this breaks down into five very distinct sections. You can feel 20 hertz if you’re on a really large sound system – but not necessarily hear it. When you’re first born you can, but as you get older, your hearing lowly degrades.īut you will still hear the impact of 20 kilohertz – so don’t ignore it.īass is on the low end (left).

Now, none of us will actually be able to hear 20 kilohertz. Then on the right we’ve got 20,000 hertz, or 20 kilohertz. We go from left to right, and we start with 20 hertz. So now let’s look at the frequency spectrum in a bit more depth… In the recording phase, you decide what tone you want, and then you use EQ to scope that and make small changes to take it further towards your end goal. All you can do is work with what’s already there. Now, it’s important to bear in mind that you can’t completely change the sound of an instrument with EQ alone. That’s what gives an instrument its tone or its character, its timbre, and that’s why a bass guitar, for example, sounds different to an organ.īy adjusting these frequencies, by cutting certain frequencies or boosting others, we can adjust that tone and change the timbre of the instrument. As well as that fundamental note, it has overtones. Rather than a volume fader, which would allow us to adjust the overall volume, an equalizer allows us to just turn up or turn down individual frequencies and individual elements of that sound.Įvery instrument has a fundamental note. An equalizer is simply a tool that lets you adjust the volume of the individual frequencies within an audio source.

Shelving equalizer definition