This article was written by Ben Priceat Sweetwater. We’ve publishing an entire series of articles in the Lounge from Sweetwater. Keep your eyes peeled and check back often! And now for some motivation.
Equalization – or EQ, if you prefer – was created in the early days of telephony to counteract the frequency loss in the signal when it was sent over long transmission lines. Broadcast and studio engineers adopted the technology as a creative tool for adjusting the timbre or sound quality in reproduced sounds.
There are tons of resources out there for understanding the technical side of EQ, so I won’t get into that side of it here. In this article, I want to get into a more esoteric topic: microphone placement as EQ. Yes, before you reach for the EQ in your desk, rack, or DAW, try moving that microphone around. The relationship of mic placement to sound source offers unlimited variances in tonality and frequency response.
Take, for example, miking a guitar amp. Grab your trusty mic (Shure SM57, Royer R-121, Sennheiser MD 441, Beyerdynamic M160, et al.) and put it right up on the center of the dust cap. Pretty bright sound. Move it out toward the edge of the cone, half inch by half inch; you’ll find the sound gets progressively less bright, or warmer, or duller – choose whatever term works for you. Now take that mic and place it at a 45-degree angle and do the same thing – a parallel universe of different tones. With both techniques, pull the mic farther away from the amp in small steps and soon you’ll have a whole 3-dimensional matrix of tones at your disposal. Don’t forget that in addition to mic placement as EQ, different microphones act as their own EQ as well. Each mic, and sometimes even different versions of the same mic, will have its own inherent sound. If the midrange response of the beloved SM57 is a little too uneven for you, try a mic with a smoother midrange.
There are so many options here, you might feel like you’re lost as to what sound to use. Don’t fret – choose the sound that works for the song. It doesn’t matter how amazing the tone is when it’s soloed, it matters how the part sounds in context with the rest of the mix. One thing that confounded me in my early days of engineering was how all the huge sounds I worked so hard on sounded awful in the mix. The problem is, when all the sounds are big and grandiose there is no room for everything to fit in. Remember, when we’re mixing a song, we’re working within an artifice. No group of musicians (acoustic or electronic) naturally come out of a pair of speakers, so we use dynamics processing and time-based effects to shape the music and create a cohesive presentation. It’s basically suspension of belief on the part of the listener. Small and big, close and far, bright and dull, left and right, stereo and mono, and on and on.
What I’ve learned is that not every sound in a mix can, or should, be huge. Each sound should integrate into the song as the artist and producer intend. Often small sounds work better in conjunction with big sounds. It’s really about that contrast – we need context to understand what we’re hearing. And this is another point; to my ears, balancing the instruments of a mix is almost an extension of EQ. It’s about relationships within the song. If the bass is playing the appropriate part with the right sound, you probably don’t need a ton of low end in the guitars, which will sound bigger in the mix because the bass will act as an extension at the bottom end. The more you understand which sounds work well in a mix, the better you’ll get at choosing the appropriate mic placement at the beginning.
In my early days as an engineer I found myself EQing sounds with some pretty heavy-handed boosts and cuts. As I’ve gained experience over the years, I find myself EQing less and less. Lately, generally speaking, when I grab an EQ I’m doing only a few dBs of boost or cut and often with a fairly broad bandwidth. Sure, sometimes you need that notch EQ to eliminate particular nastiness in a sound. When I made the jump from a primarily analog-based setup to a digital one I found myself using a lot of narrow-bandwidth EQs and the resulting sound was much more uneven and pinched. At the time I felt like the precision was exactly what I was looking for but I soon realized I was quite unhappy with the results. When you look at EQ curves from the classic EQs out there (Pultec, Neve, Trident, etc.) you’ll see fairly broad bandwidth curves and often you’ll see fixed frequency points. These classic EQs were designed so well that a combination of mic placement and those fixed frequencies really was enough to get you where you needed to be in terms of tone. With all the options and programmability we have with digital EQs, try some broad strokes to color the sound as opposed to very narrow EQ curves. You may find the results to be more musical – and musicality is what we’re after, right?
Of course, sometimes a sound “happens” through EQing and you should not be afraid to crank up (or down!) the EQ when necessary. One thing I try to keep in mind is the need to find the right sound for the project or song at hand. Doing this leads to unique sounds as opposed to making sounds that are just like some other record. Boring.
There are rules, but there are no rules. If it sounds good, it is good, at least until you’ve trained and developed your ear further and you hear better, meaning more critically. Not quite the masterful summation I had in mind, but I don’t really have any trite, cute ways to wrap this up. So disengage your EQ and go move that mic around. Let me know what you think.
Ben Price has over ten years experience as a professional engineer, producer, studio manager, and musician. He’s currently signed to a small record label and working in sales at Sweetwater in addition to working as a freelance recording engineer. He can be reached at 1-800-222-4700 ext. 1329 or ben_price@sweetwater.com.