There’s No Prize For These Purist Audio Engineers

Let’s imagine you hired a contractor to work on your house.

Maybe you’re building an add-on for your house so that you can have a dedicated home studio space.

You want this studio to be perfect, and since your carpentry skills end at hitting your thumb with a hammer when you’re hanging pictures of your kids, you need some help.

But when your contractor shows up without any tools, you get confused.

You ask,

“Where are your tools?”

He bristles like you just insulted his firstborn child.

He bangs on his chest and exclaims,

“I don’t need any tools. I can do this job with my bare hands!”

This worries you.

You’ve been excited about your new home studio for a long time, and you’re pretty sure you need nails for the job.

You instantly regret calling that referral from your cheap-skate cousin Chip. Maybe Chip’s ex-wife was right about him. Maybe he wasn’t as smart as he guffawed about all the time.

While you’re wondering about your dysfunctional extended family, the carpenter keeps yelling about how “the original houses were made without any tools, and they were the best!”

Now his loincloth jersey with the team name “Pangean Prowlers” makes more sense.

This guy doesn’t just sound like a neanderthal. You suspect he might be Brendan Fraser’s brother from Encino Man, who took up carpentry after being thawed from the ice.

You quickly show him around and politely ask him to give you a quote before you shoo him away.

Once he’s gone, you shake your head and laugh,

“A carpenter without a hammer. That’s like refusing to use EQ in your sessions.”

I mean, come on! Let’s be real here.

If you’ve got tools at your disposal, why not use ’em?

But you would be surprised at all the “EQ Purists” out there on the internet who say stupid stuff like,

“The best recording has very little or no EQ.”

I suppose that if we’re talking about the recording process, sure, mic placement is key. You don’t want to add a bunch of EQ on the way in because you can’t take that off later.

But does that mean those records were mixed without any EQ?

Hardly.

Even if, by some miraculous chance, those mixes were EQ-free, do you honestly think the mastering engineer just shrugged their shoulder and said,

“Nah, I don’t use EQ. We’ll just have to leave that boomy bump there, and who cares if the record sounds a bit harsh when you turn it up”?

It’s absurd to think that they’d be so bad at their jobs.

I’ve never met a professional audio engineer who doesn’t use EQ in some shape or form.

EQ is as common in the audio world as bathroom breaks in the middle of the night when you get older. It’s not that you want to do them. It’s that they’re necessary for a successful sleep.

I’ll tell you right now that no producer worth their salt will have anything against EQ.

They don’t view it as the enemy, lurking in the shadows, waiting to ruin their perfect sound.

It’s just a tool, a trusty sidekick to help you make powerful records you can be proud to release.

So, why be a “no EQ purist”? What’s the prize for that? A Holier-Than-Thou Diploma for Being Annoying?

Trust me, there’s no shame in cranking up those knobs.

Just like a carpenter needs a trusty hammer, you need EQ to shape that sound.

So whenever some commercial studio curmudgeon chastises you for using so much EQ, just remember that it’s better to use the tools at your disposal than to be a brute force buffoon who wants their lives to be harder.

Let me make EQ’ing easy for you with the Audio Issues EQ plug-in.