In the last video, I banged on for ages about how important compression was. Remember? Well buckle up, because I'm about to do exactly the same with EQ.

This little tiny, super simple plug-in is about to change the way you think about songs. I'll go as far as to say that it's going to change the way you think about making music.

First, I need to tell you what EQ is. It stands for Equalisation, you can see why we shorten it. To keep the explanation short is easy too, EQ cuts or boosts frequencies. That's it. Easy right? In theory, absolutely. We use EQ to carve out frequencies that we don't want, and boost frequencies we do like.

The whole concept of EQ in my head is summed up in two words: Space & Taste.

SPACE

What on earth do I mean by space?! Well, I'm talking about creating seperation between elements in your song. Often you might find you can't really hear your kick drum, but the bass comes through really well. What's going on there?! The way a speaker works, it can only reproduce a certain amount of detail in a sound, and that is measured in Frequency response. That is measured it Hertz, and describes the speed at which air vibrates. The human ear can detect around 20Hz (Low Bass) -20,000Hz (Super High) and most modern speakers do a good job of reproducing most of this range.

The trouble is , if the speaker has a kick drum and a bass coming in at the same time, in the same frequency range and the bass is louder, it can only prioritise one! (This isn't exactly how speakers work, but it's a good way of visualising it) We have a job as producers to make decisions as to which instruments get which section of the spectrum in our songs. We divide the frequency spectrum up with EQ.

In the above example, if the kick drum is hitting at 80hz every time, we could make a little cut in the bass guitar at 80hz to enable to kick to push through a bit more.

We could also make sure none of our other instruments are in the way of the bass and kick by cutting all the low end out of our other elements in the song.

And...

TASTE

This one is a lot harder to define and teach because it's going to be different for everyone. When I say taste, I'm referring to EQ decisions we make to craft sounds. This could be boosting parts of a sound that we want to hear more of in a mix, or cutting out frequencies we dislike. It's not a hard fast rule on what you should cut or boost. There are some rules of thumb (such as boost wide, cut narrow) but even these are flexible if you think it'll improve the sound of your track.

Another thing that falls under taste is crafting of instruments, exactly as we've done to the acoustic guitar in this song! The part I played would've taken up far too much space without the brutal Low Cut filter we applied, so we changed the entire purpose of an instrument using one really quick easy EQ move.

When I'm adding instruments, composing parts, writing melodies, deciding on chords etc etc etc, EQ is right at the front of my mind. You have to constantly think about space and where this new part is going to fit in your song. If you have two guitars playing big power chord parts and you want to add a piano playing middle position 5th chords, it's going to get muddy, fast. Instead, why not move the piano up an octave or two and play something that will fill another section of the EQ spectrum.

The same is true of drums. I often associate high frequency sounds with energy in my head (Shakers, hi hats, maracas etc) and so I know that I can reach for those tools when I need to add urgency to a section.

So yeah, there it is, a super super super brief look at EQ. Similar to Compression, this is a huge topic and there are hundreds of really specific use cases, but this is a run down that should serve you well for now.

FOR NEXT TIME...

In this video, I point out that the guitars and synths have preset EQ curves on them. I want you save a version of the project or bounce out a copy of the song (CMD+B in logic!) and then I want you to delete all the EQ plug ins, except the ones we talked through in this lesson.

Go back through each element of the track and give it it's own space with EQ. See if you can sweep through each part and find any nasty frequencies poking out. If you do, cut them.

Once you've worked through the whole track, bounce a new version and compare it with the first version we did together. If you've EQ'd everything right you should have a lot more clarity and be able to pick out every instrument clearly. There should be more space between tracks and all together the difference should be subtle but noticable.

Good Luck..!