This is an excerpt from chapter 8 of EQ Strategies - Your Ultimate Guide to EQ. It talks about how to EQ all the instruments together in your mix.

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Chapter 8 – EQ’ing the Mix Together

Knowing where the problematic areas are for each instrument is an invaluable EQ skill to have. However, being able to make one instrument sound great when the track is solo’ed is only half the battle. You also need to know how to make all the instruments fit together with each other in a busy mix. That’s where the true struggle lies.

This chapter focuses on strategies to use when you want to create separation between all the instruments in a mix and how you go about giving each element and track a place to shine.

EQ is all about creating space in the frequency spectrum for all the instruments in the mix.

You give one instrument a bit of this frequency, take a little bit of the same frequency out in another one that’s clashing and that creates separation.

Everybody needs to fit in the playground so you need to find the right frequencies for each instrument so that they all play nicely together.

So here’s what you do to get started.

Filter First

First things first, take out all the stuff you don’t need.

If you simplify your mix into groups of instruments, like I show you in the Step By Step Mixing book, it’s easy to filter out all of the unnecessary information using only a few EQ plug-ins on the groups.

Here are the general guidelines to get started:

Filter Up to 100 Hz on most instruments except bass and kick drum. Also, if you have a piano or another low-end instrument such as a synth that you consider important in the lows then don’t filter that one as much.

Add a low-pass filter on instruments as well. This is an underutilized trick. Anything that’s just hissy and loud like a rock guitar or even on kick drum to reduce bleed from the rest of the drums can focus your instruments.

Clean and Repair

It’s more fun to mix after you clean up your tracks. The same goes for EQ’ing, but in this case I mean cutting out the problematic frequencies that cause annoying resonances or add something negative (like boxiness) to the instruments.

Sweep around to find frequencies that pop out and make the instrument sound worse. This can be a weird resonance because you recorded it in a bad room that caused weird comb filtering or reflections to be introduced into the sound. Or it can just be the typical problems inherent in the recording, like boxiness in the kick drum for instance.

Sweep and Cut

When I hunt for problematic frequencies inherent in the sound, as opposed to cutting out frequencies to make room for other instruments, I tend to solo the track. People say you shouldn’t solo and if you’re trying to make things fit together in the context of the mix you need to hear the whole thing playing at once to do so.

If you’re repairing or cutting out stuff that’s making the instrument itself sound bad then it’s easier to do in solo. It’s as simple as sweeping around the frequency spectrum with a bell curve EQ with a high Q and then cutting the annoying frequencies you find along the way.

Then it’s a matter of going back to the mix as a whole and hearing how each instrument relates to the others. For instance, if you do the same sweeping exercise in the bass and all of a sudden the guitars feel really cluttered then you’ve probably found a frequency to cut in the bass to make room for the guitars. Then you just repeat the exercise with other instruments that need more room in the mix.

Deciding Where Sounds Should Go

You usually have some choices as to where you want to accent each instrument. Take the kick drum and the bass guitar in the lows for instance. You might want to do the typical trick of boosting one frequency in the kick and then subtracting the same frequency in the bass. But which frequency should you choose?

That’s really up to your taste as a mixing engineer and also the feel of the song. Is it the type of song where the kick is felt rather than heard? Then maybe a boost at 60 Hz is where the kick sounds the best.

The style of music can really dictate whether you want the bass guitar sitting on top of the kick or underneath the kick in the low frequency spectrum. And two mixing engineers might do two completely different things but still achieve a great mix. So at that point it’s up to you, just as long as you still separate them in some way.

Sweeten the Mix With Some Character

Subtractive EQ is pretty boring. Effective, but boring.

Sometimes you still need to add boosts to your instruments to really bring out the character. If a kick drum needs more weight, then boosting the lows is the way to go. If the snare needs more attack, then a boost in the higher mids is where you find it. If the guitars need more thickness you can bring it out in the low-mids (as long as you don’t mask the bass guitar).

Don’t Boost the Same Frequencies in 5 Different Instruments

This is a surefire way to make all the elements of a mix clash together, resulting in a cluttered and unclear mix. Think of it like a division problem. You have a set amount of apples, and you need to divide them among a set amount of people. Similarly, you have a set amount of instruments that you need to divide among the frequency spectrum. The kick drum, bass guitar, acoustic, and vocal can’t all have a 12 dB boost at 4 kHz.

Find different frequencies that complement each instrument individually and spread them around.

If you’re boosting a frequency in a certain instrument, then it’s usually a good idea to cut at the same frequency in an instrument that occupies the same range. Divide the frequencies evenly among instruments and achieve better separation and clarity in your mixes.

Rebalance to Bring Your Static Mix Back

After EQ’ing your whole mix it might be a little bit out of balance from the static mix you had before. At that point it’s time to rebalance to get the mix back to where it was before, except this time, you can hear all the instruments better.

You can do this by rebalancing the faders or adjusting the output gain on your EQ. Depending on whether you used a lot of cuts or boosts you might need to either increase or decrease the output gain. When I use the Fabfilter Pro-Q 2 I tend to turn the automatic make-up gain on the EQ to make it easier on me, but not all plug-ins have that option so you simply need to use your ears and adjust the mix accordingly.

Once your instruments are properly balanced (and rebalanced) in the frequency spectrum you should be able to hear everything much better. However, you might have some dynamics issues with an instrument being too loud in some parts and too quiet in others. You could always tackle that with automation on the fader, but it’s more fun to give the mix extra character with compression.

A Note on Rebalancing

As you move through the mixing process and keep adding processors such as EQ, you will inevitably change the initial balance you made with only volume and panning.

That’s why it’s always a good idea to keep rebalancing the faders as you move through the mix.

Even if you keep your gain structure of the plug-ins relatively perfect, you will still need to keep adjusting the volume. Mixing isn’t a complete step-by-step process and sometimes it isn’t enough to just EQ your mix once and call it a day. Oftentimes you’ll have to revisit certain tracks and adjust the frequencies you’ve boosted or cut depending on what you’ve done to the rest of the mix.

Instead of a step-by-step process that’s unchanging, it’s more like a set of steps and guidelines you follow while constantly adjusting and reacting to your mix decisions. Think of it like following a style guide while designing or scales and chord charts while performing. You can design many different things within a style guide, and you can play chords and solos several different ways each time.

How to Use the Analyzer to Find Where Your Instruments are Clashing

A good way to know how to make peace in the high-mids is to use an analyzer on multiple instruments to see where they’re clashing the most. If you can see where each instrument is fighting in the frequency spectrum you’ll have an easier time separating them.

This sounds backwards but you can find where any instrument is clashing with another by simply finding the frequency range where it starts masking the other instrument. We talked about this briefly in the vocal EQ chapter as the Reverse-EQ Method.

For example, I can easily make the acoustic guitar mask the vocals by boosting around the frequency spectrum and listening to when the vocal starts feeling cluttered.

That’s when you know that’s the frequency range you need to cut in order to bring the vocal out in the mix without necessarily adding a bunch of boosts to the vocal track.

Using EQ to Get Your Mix to Translate to Different Speakers

It doesn’t matter how good your mix sounds in your studio. If it sounds bad on normal speakers where most listeners will be hearing it, it’s still a bad mix. That’s why you need to reference your mix on as many speakers as possible throughout the mixing process.

Throughout the process of listening to your mix on different speakers, you should make notes on how you need to fix the mix in the frequency spectrum. EQ is immensely powerful for making your mix translate because it will make you find the best middle ground among all the speakers you’re listening through. That helps you find the best frequency balance for your mix.

Let me elaborate by sharing the step-by-step translation process I take when mixing.

The italicized parts below are excerpts from the final chapter of my best-selling Amazon ebook, Step By Step Mixing: How to Create Great Mixes Using Only 5 Plug-ins.

Personally, my mix process is as follows:

• I mix in mono on my Behringer Behritone mixcube, mostly following the steps I’ve given you in the previous chapters. The Mixcube is a terrible speaker that has no low-end or highs. It has only one driver and sounds pretty terrible. However, if I can make my mix sound halfway decent on this speaker I know I’m getting somewhere.

EQ’ing through this speaker at low volumes is one of the best ways I’ve found to create separation between high-mid instruments such as guitars and vocals. It’s kind of like running with weights. If you run with weights for a while you’ll find it incredibly easy to run once the weights are off. Likewise, mixing quietly on a bad speaker really trains your ears to EQ with balance and separation.

• I flip my mix over to my Yamaha HS-5s and do another round of tweaking. This is usually a rebalancing effort on EQ but I also flip my mix out of mono at this point. Now I can hear the stereo spectrum pretty well. If I get a “Whoa! That mix really opens up even though it wasn’t sounding bad before,” I know I’m on the right track. I’ll spend some time on reverb, delays and other effects.
• Then I listen to my mix on my Focal CMS50s that are coupled with a subwoofer. Now I can really hear all the little things in the mix, as well as all the low-end that’s present. Usually this requires me to tweak the drums, kick, bass, and other low-end instruments.

At this point I will have EQ’d my mix on three different studio monitors that all give me slightly different information. Going back and forth like this and checking the frequency balance of the entire mix will create a good overall balance to start with.

• Once I feel my mix is done I bounce it and upload it to Dropbox. I take the dog for a walk and listen to my mix multiple times on earbuds, making mental notes of what needs to be changed.
• I either tackle the mix right away, or I sleep on it and come back to it with fresh ears. Throughout this process, I tend to check the mix with a high-end pair of headphones every so often to make sure nothing is screwy with the reverb and effects.

I highly recommend sleeping on the mix if you’ve been mixing for a while. When you mix for too long you’ll risk ruining the mix you started out with – not just because you like tweaking things here and there, but because after a while your ears are shot.

That happened to me one day while I was finishing up a long day of mixing.

As I usually do, I took the dog for a walk and tested my mix through my earbuds to hear how the regular Apple lovin’ amateur would experience it.

I felt the mix lacked some high-end and was sounding a bit too muddy, but it was late, so I thought I would revisit it in the morning.

Well, I just took a listen to the mix again the next morning, and it sounded great! It wasn’t too muddy with low-mids. It was just that I couldn’t hear the high-end at the end of the day.

My ears were simply too tired.

When your ears are tired, the high-end and high-mids will sound duller. And when you can’t hear the entire frequency spectrum accurately you’ll make poor mix decisions.

Make sure you take adequate breaks, don’t listen to everything at an ear-piercing volume, and listen to your ears when they’re telling you they’re tired. Otherwise you won’t make good decisions when revising your mix.

• Once I’ve done my revisions I usually get feedback from my studio partner before sending it to the client.
• If the client has any feedback I change the mix accordingly and send him the final mix.”

Notice how many different pairs of speakers and individual ears the mix goes through before it’s done?

You don’t want to rely on one single monitor setup - or just one volume level - in one room to make your final mix decisions. You want to make sure your mix translates well everywhere the mix will be listened to.

Conclusion – EQ Should Be Your Best Friend

We’ve covered quite a lot of techniques on using EQ to improve your mixes inside EQ Strategies - Your Ultimate Guide to EQ.

• You’ve learned what an equalizer is and how the most common EQ processors work.
  
• We’ve covered the entire frequency spectrum and you’ve learned the necessary vocabulary and jargon to understand where certain frequency characteristics live. You’ll encounter many different frequency problems along your career, but it’s my hope that I’ve shown you how to tackle the most common problems that will arise again and again.
• Then you learned a step by step process of how to approach EQ’ing in your mixes, we’ve discussed the relationship between EQ and compression as well as talked about how much you should EQ depending on the amount of tracks in your mix.
• We dove deeper into the theory behind filtering, boosting and cutting and how you can use EQ to wipe the amateur sound out of your home recordings.
• You gained in-depth knowledge on how to EQ each instrument in the mix. So whether you’re working with drums, bass, guitar, vocals, keys, synths, orchestral instruments or any other instrument, you’ll have an idea of how to EQ them to make them fit better in the mix.
• Finally, we tied it all together and you learned to EQ your instruments together in the mix, with low-end EQ tricks to tighten up your bass, a reverse EQ trick to find what instruments are clashing and using analyzer tools to help you when you’re lost.

If you want to learn all those things and take your productions to the next level, go grab my EQ Strategies guide here. I'm offering a special Basic and Lite version TODAY ONLY. It's the best deal you'll get if you can't afford the full EQ Strategies course.

I sincerely hope my EQ course will help you in your productions. I just know from personal experience how much better your mixes sound once you learn to understand how the frequency spectrum works and what you can do with it.

In short, think of EQ as your best friend who’s there for you every step of the way, helping you fix any problem you encounter. If you need somebody to introduce you to your EQ friend, let my Ultimate EQ Guide do it for you.

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