If you've ever felt that your vocals sounded glued on top of the mix instead of sitting with the rest of the song, this email will help.

Below are the six frequency ranges you can start with when you are in trouble and need to figure out how to equalize your vocal so that it sits better with your song.

1. THE TOO LOW-RANGE

Feel free to filter out the low end of the vocal when mixing. 100 Hz is a good starting point.

Listening is critical here because you don’t want to cut out the singer’s character, especially if he has a good presence there in the lower register.

For female singers, you can go even higher. But be careful of Barry White and Leonard Cohen type singers, they may need that extra rumble in their voice.

2. THE THICK 150 HZ

For rounding out a vocal and making it more thick and full, search around the 150 Hz area.

Some singers sound thin and nasally and can do with a little meat on their vocal cords.

Boosting here can give the vocal more punch.

3. HONKY-BOXY 4-500 HZ

If your vocal track lacks definition and sounds boxy you can sweep around this area, even going so far as up to 800 Hz.

Remember that when cutting you should have your Q pretty narrow because you are trying to repair your recording, and cutting too broadly from the frequency spectrum will severely compromise the natural sound of the vocal.

4. NASALNESS AT 1 KHZ

If your vocalist sounds like they have a bit of a cold then cut around the 1 kHz area to get rid of it.

Too much of a cut will sound worse than just having a cold so make sure you’re subtle about it.

5. IN YOUR FACE PRESENCE OF THE 5 KHZ

If your singer doesn’t seem to be cutting through the mix, he might need to be presented to 5Khz.

It will push the track a little more to the front and give the singer a much-needed presence.

6. SIBILANCE AROUND THE 7 KHZ

Some people have more sibilance than others. The s’ sounds have much more energy than other consonants. If your singer has an excess of S’s you can try cutting around 7 kHz.

It will make the S’s less pronounced and won’t make them jump out too much. Better yet, inserting a de-esser or a compressor that only compresses the ‘s’ area can work even better.

Male sibilance is typically 3-7k Hz and female sibilance is typically 5-9k Hz so there needs to be some experimentation to find that annoying ‘s’ sound.

Fix Your Muddy Mixes

However, if your mix sounds muddy, it doesn’t matter how great the vocal EQ is.

Creating professional mixes from their home studio demos without making everything sound like a muddy mess is a common problem.

Home studio engineers and musicians like yourself want to create professional sounding recordings but still hit their head against a wall of muddy boom in their mixes.

If you want to make clean mixes where you can hear every instrument clearly, you’ll need to learn as much as you can about EQ.

Learning to use equalization (or EQ) is the first step towards great mixing skills. Knowing how frequencies interact and how to fit them all together is a crucial skill all engineers like yourself should have.

Today, you might be having trouble getting cleaner mixes.

Maybe your vocal sounds like it’s muffled under the other instruments that already sound like they’re under a blanket.

But after learning to EQ, you’ll be making all those instruments jump out of the speakers.

• You’ll learn to clean up the muddiness in your mixes.
• You’ll discover where to get rid of the boxy cardboard sound in your drums.
• You’ll know exactly which frequencies to boost to make your guitars, bass, and other instruments sound powerful.

And best of all, you’ll finally get your vocals to explode out of your speakers instead of drowning behind your instruments.

Now, instead of wandering around your mix trying to EQ without knowing where to look you can learn everything that you need to know about EQ inside EQ Strategies - Your Ultimate Guide to EQ

EQ doesn’t have to be a mystery so let me show you how to master it with my Ultimate Guide to EQ.

Here’s what Jeff Smith had to say about the Ultimate Guide to EQ:

“The EQ tips that have helped the most have to do with the bass guitar and kick drum. I’m able to get a clean and tight low end on this song I’m working on. I cut some of the mud out of the kick and bass, then I let the kick have a little extra 50 Hz and added a little bit around 800 Hz on the bass guitar. That made the low-end clear and punchy. This song has an acoustic guitar as one of the main instruments and I decided to put a HPF up to 200 Hz and added a little bit around 3 kHz and it sounds good so far. This is a great guide to get things moving in the right direction!!! Thank You!!!!” – Jeff Smith, Mixing Engineer

Here’s what a couple more engineers had to say about it recently:

“Everything was helpful. I used to fiddle with knobs until it sounded right. Now I can just go directly to the frequencies I need to boost or cut. I also learned more about how to use compression. I am enjoying learning and understanding more about mixing. I play out frequently and have a very good live drum sound. Your EQ Strategies has already helped me improve the sound by helping me understand compression better and how to use it on drums.” -Jean F Peters

“The book is full of tips that are immediately useful. Like anything you are learning, it takes ‘doing’ and more ‘doing’ before you can start to polish your work. But the initial results are immediate and impressive….thanks. The format helped me solidify the basics very quickly.  I sampled a few sessions with the concepts and found an immediate and pronounced improvement.” -Dave Michaels

Read more testimonials here.

Here’s just a sample of what you’ll learn when you go through EQ Strategies – Your Ultimate Guide to EQ:

• A frequency-by-frequency rundown of the complete EQ spectrum, with characteristics of each frequency range to teach you how to recognize frequencies on your own.
• Practical and easy EQ tips that you can use to improve your mixes immediately
• Graphical representations of where your instruments lie in the EQ spectrum
• EQ insights from Grammy award-winning engineers 
• When to use EQ and when to use compression
• How to EQ drums to get rid of muddy resonances while keeping them thick and punchy
• Using filters to reduce bleed on drums to create a tighter drum sound
• EQ’ing overheads and room mics to compliment the overall drum sound
• EQ’ing groups of both acoustic and electric guitars to give each one their own space in the frequency spectrum
• How to use EQ presets on instrument groups to your advantage with some minor tweaking
• Using a bass amp simulator in addition to EQ to make the bass cut through the mix
• Using mid/side EQ on backing vocals to make room for the lead vocals in a dense vocal mix
• The importance of using EQ on reverbs to avoid cluttering up your mix

This course has helped more than two thousand engineers create better-sounding mixes with better EQ skills so make sure you grab your copy of the course right here:

www.EQStrategies.net