This content outlines a logical, step-by-step workflow for EQing guitar tones, emphasizing that EQ should enhance an already good tone by removing problematic frequencies rather than fixing a poor one.
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People ask me in comments all the time,
"Scott, how do you EQ guitars?" And
honestly, the first answer that comes to
EQ. All right. No, seriously. Today in
this video, I am going to give you the
keys to the Lamborghini, the secret to
the sauce, a workflow based in logic and
lots of experience. In this video, I'm
going to give you the exact steps I
pretty much always follow when I'm EQing
guitars. Be they black metal, death
metal, grind core, doom metal, grammar
core, crab core, whatever core metal,
whatever. Just guitars. Now, as I show
you these steps here, I'm going to use
the Aurora DSP Laboga Diamond Sound
demonstration track that I created. And
that's because Dan again has graciously
sponsored this video. I got to give Dan
big, big thumbs up. He's been supporting
the channel a lot lately. He's a really
awesome guy. Aurora DSP have very good,
high quality plugins that are very
affordable. I've left a link down to
Aurora DSP in the description. Go check
it out. And obviously, we're going to
have a big long look at how Diamond
Sound here sounds in this demo track as
I EQ the guitar tones. Remember, the
goal of EQ is not to make the guitar uh
sound good. You already should have
pretty much a great guitar tone. The
goal of the EQ is to kind of remove the
things that are making it a bit cloudy,
bit honky, some of the really nasty
whistles. And we're we're going to try
and bring out the guitar tone that
you've already created as much as
possible with EQ. So remember, EQing
guitar is not about taking a shitty
guitar tone and making it sound good.
We're taking an already good guitar tone
and making it sound better. So that's
step zero. Make sure you have a good
guitar tone. If you have no idea how to
do that, you can use my presets if you
want to use them or on my website or you
can take the metal guitar tone workshop
which is also on my website. So now you
have step zero out of the way. We need
to move to step one. Let's just remind
Okay, that tone has no EQ on it
whatsoever. It's just the preset that I
created for Diamond Sound. Already
sounds really good. You like it? Yeah,
that's the importance of step zero. So,
step one, we are going to do some
filtering. All right, I'm actually going
to use the stock EQ plugin here in Qbase
just to prove that you can do this with
any plugin. All right. So, step one is
filtering. You might know it as
highpass, low pass, or high cut, low
cut. It's kind of interchangeable,
although the lexicon would mean
different thing. It really doesn't
matter. But anyway, you want to start
with filtering. And the reason why you
want to start with filtering is you want
to get the guitar out of places that it
just should not be to begin with. You
want to start containing it because if
you have a guitar tone that is too
broadband, meaning that it's in every
freaking frequency spot, it's going to
fight with everything else in every
frequency spot and it's probably going
to win and that would be a bad thing.
So, the very first easiest thing to do
is we start bringing the guitar in. We
start containing it and getting it out
of the way, getting it out of the way of
areas that it just literally does not
need to be. So that's going to be a high
pass and a low pass or a low cut and a
high cut. All right. And again, I'm just
using frequency 2, which is a stock
plugin that comes with Qbase. I like to
do a 48 uh dB per octave slope, which is
just the how much slope you have on the
frequency. You know, this is a very
gradual slope of 12. This is a much more
steep slope. And the reason why I do
that is because I will just I go to 100
hertz. I pretty much very rarely do I
really change this, but at 100 Hz I
pretty much do my filter because the
guitar tone has nothing of value in my
opinion below like 92 Hz. It literally
doesn't matter. You have a bass guitar
for a reason. Let the bass guitar do
bass things. That's like I don't even
think about this. I don't even care.
Now, when it comes to the high cut or
low pass, um I do typically will I will
start very commonly at 7K. All right?
And this is where 7K is right here. It's
not automatic that I'm going to leave it
at 7K. All right? Maybe I can go 8K or
8.5K, but you don't need a lot of this
upper high-end literally white noise or
hiss that's coming from the IR or the
speaker that you're using. It's just
contributing noise and it's it's not
doing anything musical up there. You
don't need it up there. Plus, your
vocals are up here. Your symbols are up
here, okay? And it's just going to be
getting in the way of these other
instruments. So, these are the very
first two steps or the one singular step
that you're going to do, which is
filtering. So, if we solo what we have
right now and just have a listen,
there's not going to be a huge
not not shattering here, but we're just
getting it out of the way so the other
instruments can come through. Now, the
second step, we are going to look at the
upper mid-range first. The reason that
we look at the upper mids first and
mid-range in general is that mid-range
and upper mid-range, we're very
sensitive to that as humans. And
everything that we do in this range is
going to have a major impact on how we
interpret the sound. The second reason
for doing this is that when you clean up
the gunk and you make things more clear
and you get like the guitar tone from
being under a pillow, you're going to be
able to much more accurately understand
how what the high end and the low end of
your guitar tone is doing. You might
think right off the gate like a guitar
tone is not bright enough and you'll
start cranking all the brightness and
then you'll scoop the mids and then
you're going to be like, "What
happened?" And more often than not,
you'll go back down up to the brightness
and kind of like bring it back down a
little bit. Why do that way? You can
just go to mid-range first, clean up the
gunk that's making it cloudy, muddy,
maybe a bit honky, and then you'll be
able to really hear what's happening in
the upper range and the lower range.
Now, I consider upper mid-range to be
like 700 hertz all the way up to like
3K. And there's a number of different
things that we're going to find here.
We're going to find honkiness,
cloudiness, and we can even start
finding some resonance issues. All
right. So, let's have a look. Let's just
see. I'm going to engage number five
here. And let's have a [Music]
[Music]
listen. Great example of a just like a
honky muddy frequency that doesn't need
[Music]
And you'll notice the dynamic of the
tone has actually changed as well where
it's sounding a bit more mid-range honky
forward. We just do this one little dip
here and all of a sudden, oh, it cleans
up and oh, we have a lot more highing
information perceptively. All right, so
it's very important to start with the
upper mids. Let's see if we can find
anything else up here. [Music]
[Music]
So, we are finding a resonance and
that's fine. We can take care of it.
like. Cool. So, like a metallic honk
clank that we're getting rid of. Now,
let's double check what this sounds like
in the context of everything. I'm
actually going to turn the leads off cuz
now. Definite improvement. One thing
I'll tell you right away, also
definitely a good idea to do this with
music playing. I'm obviously soloing
this for demonstration purposes, but if
I was doing this in real life, I would
be doing it with the music playing. And
that's why you'll notice that when I'm
doing this in solo, you can still hear
the attenuations that I'm doing. You can
still hear the honkiness and stuff, but
I just know through experience that when
the mix is playing, you're not going to
hear this. So, [Music]
listen. It's still faintly there. You
can still hear it, but when the music is [Music]
[Music]
playing, it's not there. You're also
going to notice when you start attacking
the mid-range that where you had placed
the guitars in volume, more than likely
you're going to have to turn them up
because we are reducing a lot of
mid-range energy that is eating
headroom. All right. So, we can actually
here. Excellent. All right. So, I can
already see this and I can already hear
it. So, I'm going tohead going to go
ahead and attack it anyway. There is
another Oops. Let's put that back. There
is another little bit of a honky spike
happening and I'll just go ahead and
take care of that right now while we're
looking at it. So number seven, bring
So, just to give you an example of what
moves. Sounds pretty cool. Step three
now is going to be the low mids as you
were expecting. So, we're going upper
mids to low mids. Now, pretty much
arbitrarily, I typically like to start
with my secret EQ move, and that is
generally going to be 400 htz minus
2dB. And we'll and we'll see what
happens. So, I'll have it disengage, and
[Music]
You'll notice that not only did the
guitar tone become a bit more clear, but
it's almost like the bass guitar went up
in 2dB of loudness. All right, it's this
is why it's vitally important to really
attack the mid-range first in this in
this instance so we can really start to
understand what balance changes we may
need to do as well. So, after the 400 uh
hertz cut here typically, now this is
now this is where things get a little
genre dependent and tuning dependent.
I'm basically doing black metal and
standard E here. There's not going to be
a lot of low end. After this, I probably
would just opt to use the Andy4 any
Sneep C4 trick. But let's see what we
here. Okay, around 230, 250. Not
unexpected. You might be able to bring a
a little a little bump down. Or
alternatively, you could turn this into
a dynamic EQ, which you can do here with
[Music]
well. Cool. So, now we've tightened up
the guitar tone a little bit. Definitely
not muddy anymore. It's coming through
loud and clear, which leads us to our
last step. And the last step, of course,
is killing nasty resonances. All right,
so we need to load another EQ because we
don't have enough here. So, let's go
ahead and do that. I'll just load
literally another instance of frequency.
No big deal. And now we're going to
focus primarily on trying to find nasty,
ugly whistles. Now, word of warning
here. Do not waste your time trying to
find and hunt every single na nasty
whistle. Guitar tones are full of
whistles. You're never going to get rid
of them all. All you're going to do is
you're going to have nine points of, you
know, surgical EQ and then you're going
to be like, why does my guitar tone
sound weak and like That's why the
object here is just to find one or two
or three at the most that are just
egregious, really annoying, that are
really stabbing you in the ear and are
really making the guitar tone sound
shitty. And that's what we're going to
do here. Let's just take all these off
so I don't get confused. We'll start
with number six. All right, number six.
Now is what we do. We press
play. Make a generally narrow bell here
Okay. And that's pretty much your guitar
tone. Again, don't go crazy. You don't
have to pull them down as much as you
think. You notice I'm doing it with the
music playing cuz it's a habit at this
point. But this is a really important
reason to have the music playing is you
just want to pull it down just to where
the point where it's not a problem
anymore. And that's it. The ironic thing
is that these things need to exist in
the guitar tone to some degree in order
for it to sound like a guitar tone.
Otherwise, it sounds like a washy just
sterile mess. So, let's do a quick AB of
where we started, which was no EQ. I'm
There you go. And that's how you EQ a
guitar tone. From here on, you could do
the Andy Sneep C4 trick or go ahead and
and do your league guitars. In fact,
let's just let's just do the
league guitars right now because elite
guitars are a little bit different.
Elite guitars, it's even more important
that they don't need to be full
broadband because there's a lot you
already have the rhythm guitars in
there, right? And the league guitars and
melody guitars have a different purpose
which is for the melody. So, in this
particular instance, you can do two
things. You can do the filtering here at
the low end, right? We could do our
filter at 100. Same thing. Now, you can
do one of two things. You can do a peak
or bell or you can do a low shelf. For
me, a low shelf makes more sense. And
basically, you just want to pull the
shelf down 3 4 dB like
this. And bringing it to about 500
hertz. And we're just basically thinning
out the low end that doesn't need to be
there with the lead guitar. So, here are
the leads with EQ off. [Music]
[Music]
We're thinning them out a little bit
because all we care about is getting the
upper mids and the upper frequencies in
there. At this point now, it's the same
process. Upper mids, low mids, kill any
harshness. Let's go number five here.
See what we got. [Music]
[Music] [Applause]
[Applause] [Music]
[Music] [Applause]
[Applause] [Music]
[Music] [Applause]
[Applause] [Music]
[Music] [Applause]
[Applause]
Let's go ahead and do our filter while
we're up here. Filtering, same deal
around the 7K or eight, whatever. It
7K. And there is a whistle here that I'm
hearing and it's very annoying. Let's go
ahead and grab [Music]
[Music] [Applause]
[Applause] [Music]
[Music]
this. All right. Now, let's put this in
[Music]
Okay. And see, it's the same exact
process. I did the exact same thing.
Basically, I just thinned out the low
more with the low with the uh oh my god.
Low shelf. Now, there's one extra thing
I'm going to show you today. I just
can't stop being awesome. It's Saturday.
Let's just do it. So, sometimes what I
do is I will start doing a coloring EQ
on my rhythm guitars. I've been doing
this for a long time. This is nothing
new, nothing out of the ordinary. And
I'm actually just going to use Aurora
DSPs 510 EQ. It's it's an API style EQ,
which is what I like to do. All right.
This is coloring. At this point, I'm
maybe having adding some vibe or some
spice to it to get more of a present
sound that I like. All right. I'm not
really necessarily look necessarily
looking to fix anything. So, let's have
here. Number four. [Music]
So, it's very slight just color to the
high end. Maybe boosting the presence a
little bit. I'm not fixing any problems
here. Obviously, this is why I do this
after I do my my regular EQ regime
because if I didn't, I would just be
accentuating problems that exist in the
guitar tone instead of making things
sound more interesting and more
colorful. So, that's it. Four steps, no
black magic. Step one, filtering. Step
two, upper mid. Step three, low mids,
middle mids. Step four, kill the
resonances. That's literally all there
is to it. That is the workflow that I
have been using for years that works.
Again, no secrets, just a good workflow
with logic. And now it's up to you to
put it to practice. So, practice a lot,
practice every day, practice every
weekend, practice EQing, and uh yeah,
that's going to do it for me. Hope you
enjoyed the video, and I'll see you in
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