(This is my personal method and work process when it comes to EQing my drums, its more technical and these are certinly not rules but more guidelines to get you in the right direction when it comes to drum eqing)
I have been asked by a member here on how I EQ my drums so he thought it would be a good idea to share it with everyone so here it is!
EQing drums is something that I spend a lot of time doing on all my songs. I usually end up with 2 kicks, 2 claps and a snare, and a plethora of hihats, cymbals, and random percussion samples like shakers in the final drum kit. I use Ableton live and it has what’s called a ‘drum rack’ that contains all the sounds in one simple drum bus. On the drum bus I always have these three plugins in this order: the Modern Series compressor, Dominion, and an EQ to bring more warmth to the high frequencies. I use an equalizer on EVERY sound in my drum kit (and mix) because cutting away all the unneeded frequencies will make your song sound better, ask any artist.
Here are the rough guidelines I use when EQing my drums.
- I use two kicks; one really deep and ‘bassy’ the other more dynamic and interesting in the higher frequencies (~400Hz). First kick (the bass kick) gets brickwall low passed at ~250Hz, I only want its low end, and I usually roll it off around 30-40Hz because most speakers don’t play that low so why have it. Second kick gets brickwall high passed at ~120 and a long low pass curve at ~3kHz.
- I use 2 claps and a snare for my ‘clap’ sample; they all get high passed at ~500Hz and depending on the sample I may cut some of the high frequencies off the top. Using a bell curve I will cut out frequencies in the middle of each sample to give room for synths to come through the mix.
- All my hihats get high passed at ~1.5kHz and then cut out frequencies like I do with claps.
- Shaker sounds are more random, I find the fundamental frequency and usually cut most of everything else out.
- Cymbals I cut out anything below ~700Hz and cut away the frequencies that get in the way of synths and claps.
- On the bus EQ I use a bandaxall curve to increase the frequencies above 2kHz by around 1.5dB.
In the end it depends on the genre and sample on how you EQ the hits. Why should you eq every single drum sound? First, there a lot of frequencies that you won't hear over the other instruments playing, so why keep them when all hey will do is make those instruments less defined and quite possibly muddy or distorted. Second, EQing will help define the sound for your track; simply cutting out the highs on a kick drum can make it sound more dark and deep. If you do not give every sound its own space in the frequency spectrum then your song will not sound good at all. It will sound muddy, distorted, and unclear, it will produce terrible harmonics that will making listening more a chore then enjoyable.
I you have any questions please ask away, if you have anything to add to this or you have a diffrent method feel free to share here. I may post them up here for everyone to see so they dont have to scroll through a bunch of posts.
Lavender_Harmony wrote:A few key things I feel are missing from your post. You briefly touch on leaving room for other instruments, but didn't give much explanation, so here is a little addendum of info that I think is also kinda important, especially when it comes to the overall final mix. Remember when you are mixing that it is important to leave room in the audio spectrum to allow your other instruments to resonate. If you have two things competing for the same frequency, both will get lost and will become indistinguishable and muddy. A good analogy I heard was like trying to hear your friend speaking to you while he's surrounded by a crowd. If you duck out frequencies elsewhere and allow the other instruments to sound, it's like bringing him out of the crowd, so he can be heard.
Kicks: Remember to leave room for sub frequencies in electronic music. If you leave your kick low down there, whenever it hits it's effectively going to add on it's dB level to those frequencies, and will give you mix issues later on. You also mentioned layering a second kick to compensate for high end loss from a low pass. While this is fine, it's not mandatory that you layer two kicks. If you need more punch to your kick, a more metallic front-end, you can add a very short hi-hat sample, cut it and fade the tail off smoothly and layer that over your kick. However if you can find a kick that works, why change it? Remember, you do not want to layer two kicks together, and leave both of them with low end. This is going to cause some real mix problems, and all the power in either kick sample will be lost entirely.
Snares: it's important to know what frequencies these hit. For that pristine, mix-cutting snare, you need a peak and plenty high end. The latter can be made up from layering, claps and other, white noise snares are good for this. If you're looking for that common tone within snares that's popular right now, it's at 200Hz. Find a snare that has a peak there (Use a spectral analyzer. Your DAW will have one, if it doesn't, you're missing the most important mixing tool) and boost it.
Everything else I'd say are, as you said, definitely not rules. Hi Hat's I would be wary of cutting at those numbers every time. It's more something your ear hears, and you can fit them in your mix. Shakers too, but thats more EQing them to make them sound good.
