6 Vocal EQ Areas You Need To Know About

Vocal EQ’ing can be frustrating. Sometimes it seems to sound like it was stuck on later and doesn’t flow with the rest of the track.

Below are the six frequency ranges you can start with when you are in trouble and need to figure out how to equalize your vocal so that it sits better with your song.

It goes without saying that no amount of EQ’ing is going to fix a badly recorded vocal. So be sure to have a clean and well-recorded vocal before you start mixing it.

1. The Too Low-Range

Usually, vocals can be filtered quite severely in the lowest range. Flip on the low-cut filter on the microphone when you’re recording to cut out the low-end rumble. Usually, this cuts at 75 or so but during mixing, you can filter it out even more.

Obviously, this depends on the singer’s voice but I usually go for a little over 100 Hz. Listening is critical here because you don’t want to cut out the singer’s character, especially if he has a good presence there in the lower register. For female singers, you can go even higher. But be careful of Barry White and Leonard Cohen type singers, they may need that extra rumble in their voice.

2. The Thick Vocal Power of 150 Hz

For rounding out a vocal and making it more thick and full I would search around the 150 Hz area. Some singers sound thin and nasally and can do with a little meat on their vocal cords. Boosting here can give the vocal more punch.

3. Honky-Boxy Vocal EQ Area of 4-500 Hz

If your vocal track lacks definition and sounds boxy you can sweep around this area, even going so far as up to 800 Hz. Remember that when cutting you should have your Q pretty narrow because you are trying to repair your recording, and cutting too broadly from the frequency spectrum will severely compromise the natural sound of the vocal.

4. Nasally vocalsat 1 kHz

If your vocalist sounds like they have a bit of a cold then cut around the 1 kHz area to get rid of it. Too much of a cut will sound worse than just having a cold so make sure you’re subtle about it.

5. In Your Face Presence of the 5 kHz

If your singer doesn’t seem to be cutting through the mix, he might need to be presented to 5Khz. It will push the track a little more to the front and give the singer a much-needed presence.

6. Sibilance Around the 7 kHz

Some people have more sibilance than others. The s’ sounds have much more energy than other consonants. If your singer has an excess of S’s you can try cutting around 7 kHz.

It will make the S’s less pronounced and won’t make them jump out too much. Better yet, inserting a de-esser or a compressor that only compresses the ‘s’ area can work even better.

Male sibilance is typically 3-7k Hz and female sibilance is typically 5-9k Hz so there needs to be some experimentation to find that annoying ‘s’ sound.

Get My Exclusive Vocal EQ Presets

Want to get rid of nasally and harsh vocals but don’t know where to EQ?

Is your voice sounding honky but you can’t figure out why? Or maybe your vocals sound buried under the rest of the mix, and you can’t get that present, clean, and clear vocal sound you hear in your head?

If that’s the case, this video about EQ’ing Vocals is made for you.

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Your Vocal EQ Won’t Matter If Your Mix is Muddy!

If your mix sounds muddy and full of boominess, it doesn’t matter how great the vocal EQ is.

Creating professional mixes from their home studio demos without making everything sound like a muddy mess is a common problem. Home studio engineers and musicians like yourself want to create professional sounding recordings but still hit their head against a wall of muddy boom in their mixes.

If you want to make clean mixes where you can hear every instrument clearly, you’ll need to learn as much as you can about EQ.

Learning to use equalization (or EQ) is the first step towards great mixing skills. Knowing how frequencies interact and how to fit them all together is a crucial skill all engineers like yourself should have.

Here’s how I learned how important EQ is:

Way back in my teens, I randomly found myself hired as the live sound engineer at this small venue called The Old Library. It was a cool place, but it had a reputation for having bad sound. It was the venue bands were forced to play if there was absolutely nowhere else to go.

Little did they know that they weren’t exactly hiring someone who knew what he was doing. I was extremely intimidated by everything surrounding live sound. All these cables everywhere.

All these speakers are everywhere, both the monitors and the P.A. The blinking lights of 24 channels on a mixing board?

In a word, overwhelming.

However, all of those things paled in comparison to figuring out how to use the simple, four-band EQ on the mixer. Learning to EQ by desperately twiddling knobs back and forth in a dimly lit venue isn’t the most glorious way to learn to EQ. I could hardly see what I was doing!

So, because I didn’t really know what I was doing, it was a lot of trial and error and literally fumbling around in the dark. Sure, any time I tweaked the EQ the sound of the mix changed.

Sometimes for the better, most of the time for the worse.

But it wasn’t until I spent hours behind that mixing board and studied what each frequency sounded like and what it does to the mix that I finally got it:

EQ is the most important mixing processor to create separation between the instruments in your mixes.

EQ helped me take that shitty music venue from its reputation for having terrible sound to becoming an in-demand spot where all the coolest bands wanted to play.

But I wouldn’t have been to able to make those shows sound so great if it wasn’t for the EQ. Honestly, I didn’t even have any compressors until a year after I started so limiting myself to mastering EQ wasn’t a choice, it was a necessity.

You can learn everything I’ve learned about EQ since then, in a much more comfortable setting.

You’ll learn that EQ can help you in any audio situation, whether you’re doing live sound or recording your own music in your home studio.

Today, you might be having trouble getting cleaner mixes, or making all the rock guitar tracks to stand out in a dense mix. Maybe your vocal sounds like it’s muffled under the other instruments that already sound like they’re under a blanket.

But after learning to EQ with me, you’ll be making all those instruments jump out of the speakers, with the vocal leading them like it’s the leader of the Avengers.

You’ll learn to clean up the muddiness in your mixes.
You’ll discover where to get rid of the boxy cardboard sound in your drums.
You’ll know exactly which frequencies to boost to make your guitars, bass, and other instruments sound powerful.

Best of all, you’ll finally get your vocals to explode out of your speakers instead of drowning behind your instruments.

Now, instead of wandering around your mix trying to EQ without knowing where to look you can actually learn where your problematic frequencies are when you need to fix them.