Advice on Learning EQ

deakle

deakle

Experienced
I am a 50’s something guitarist who grew up using tube amps and pedals and have only begun using the Fractal Audio equipment the last couple of years. I am discovering how important proper equalization is to a good sound. Does anyone have any advice on how I could best learn the basics of EQ? I am using the “adjust till it sounds good” principle but I know there is more to it than that. There is pre-eq, post-eq, hi pass, low pass,etc. Also, what frequencies should I concentrate on? I am willing to learn, so if there are any books, web sites, tips that anyone could offer? C’mon guys, help an “old fart” out? Thanks in advance for any assistance.
 
Rule 1 - trust your ears
Rule 2 - twist a knob, listen, better or worse?
Rule 3 - less is more, sometimes you don’t need to tweak things just becasue there is a knob


There is no right or wrong way to do things, lots of styles of music and production came about because people were doing things the “wrong” way but it sounded good, and then became the “right” way that people try to emulate.

Let your ears guide you, best way to learn, turn a knob, hear what it does, make a note if it’s better or worse. You’ll learn to eq for your tastes and needs.

Nice thing with the Axe is so easy to experiment and hear differences. Also lots of good resources online you can read, but I find 5 minutes of hands on beats 5 hours of reading about how stuff is supposed to work
 
deakle said:
I am a 50’s something guitarist who grew up using tube amps and pedals and have only begun using the Fractal Audio equipment the last couple of years. I am discovering how important proper equalization is to a good sound. Does anyone have any advice on how I could best learn the basics of EQ? I am using the “adjust till it sounds good” principle but I know there is more to it than that. There is pre-eq, post-eq, hi pass, low pass,etc. Also, what frequencies should I concentrate on? I am willing to learn, so if there are any books, web sites, tips that anyone could offer? C’mon guys, help an “old fart” out? Thanks in advance for any assistance.
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Here's some good links as it pertains to the Axe-Fx and guitar tone EQ-ing:
https://wiki.fractalaudio.com/axefx2/index.php?title=EQ-ing
https://forum.fractalaudio.com/threads/the-power-of-pre-eq.80951/
 
Here's what you'll learn and test on if you were to attend a good audio school. The link below is to a tone generator - and several other very good audio tools.

Using the tone generator, you can select and play different tones, familiarize yourself with them and then ask someone to randomly play tones for you while you guess their frequency - kind of like flash cards. If you're like most people, you'll be surprised by how low / high some of our most commonly referenced tones are. It's quite the eye (ear) opener. This is also one of the harder modules for most budding audio engineers. I think your 50 year old ears are in for some fun! Once you have a better handle on this, you'll have a greater understanding of graphic and parametric eq which will lead to mastery of low / hi cut and so on.

http://onlinetonegenerator.com
 
The best way to get familiar with EQ is pull up a parametric EQ and play with one band, boost up 12db, sweep the frequency and see what it does. Cut 12db and sweep it around.

EQ before distortion will let you shape the distortion, if you boost highs they'll distort more, if you boost lows they'll distort more. Guitar is a midrange fundamental, so you see a lot of talk about mid boost...take a parametric EQ and boost 12 db at 500hz, and then you can sweep it up and down to hear the effect it has on the distortion at different frequency centers.

A filter is an EQ equivalent of a butcher knife, it's meant to log off big chunks at the head or tail (highs or lows). High pass = lets the highs past... low pass = lets the lows past. If you filter a signal, the stuff that's left gets all the attention of whatever processing it goes through, sometimes it's a better result than trying to boost a whole lot of one frequency, better to lob off what you don't need and then just boost the level of that.
 
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