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EQ Settings for Mastering: General Tips

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EQ Settings for Mastering: General Tips

by: EMERSON MANINGO on April 5, 2010
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Mastering is the last music production process. It is the next process after audio mixing. In the mastering stage, the engineer does not concern with the mixing elements or different tracks used in the song. The primary reason is that the engineer would only be working on a single waveform (which is called the mix down such as the screenshot below:

Bear in mind that as a mastering engineer, you should be requiring your clients a proper mixdown of the song. This should ensure that you are working with the best quality audio as possible for mastering. One aspect of quality mixdown is observing correct audio mixing levels and headroom in preparation for mastering. EQ issues in mastering are often caused by problems in the mix. If you are self-mastering your work, you would be surprised that most EQ problems in the mastering can be fixed by remixing. During this remixing process, you would be re-adjusting the EQ of different tracks in the mix until the desired clarity and balance are attained. To minimize issues, you would want to try implementing the complete EQ settings to start when doing audio mixing.

EQ Issues that can be solved in Mastering

Mastering is necessary to further enhance the mix down particularly to address these following audio quality issues: 1.) Lack of presence presence is an element that makes the music as well as the vocals clearly audible in sound reproduction equipment (like hi-fi audio equipment, your CD player, etc). If this is not addressed, other strong/dominating elements like the bass and the drums will drown the important musical element like the vocals. Luckily, the mastering engineer can sort this issue using EQ. 2.) Lack of punchy bass elements if you are producing songs in rock and pop genre, the bass elements is very important to push the song. Unluckily during the mixing process, the job is to simply avoid mud in such as way all instruments can be heard at their specified frequencies. However, heavy boosting of bass elements is not recommended in the mixing stage and should be comfortably in the mastering stage. The important musical instruments that are affected are the bass and kick drums. 3.) Lack of bright hi frequency elements one of the common errors in independent music production is the lack of brightness with respect to high frequency elements. This makes the music so bassy and not been able to capture hi frequency elements properly. So if your music includes drum hi hats and cymbals, then you need to tweak these elements during the mastering stage using an EQ. OK, once you understood the objectives in your mastering stage which is to address the above said problems. It is now the time to formulate the EQ settings for mastering.

EQ Recommendations for Mastering (Quick Guide)

The following are the settings I used (that is a good setting to start but it may depend on your mix down so you need to do minor tweaks): Low shelf cut : 30Hz (Not recommended for rock, pop and country music as you would need to have a strong sub-bass for additional punch) Important: Also, if the raw audio mix contains too much sub-bass, you might want to cut this a little bit using the above setting. 70 Hz Q=0.8, +0.5dB to +1.5dB boost (This will boost the bass guitar frequencies or kick fundamental bass drum sound) 100Hz Q=2.0, +0.5dB to +1.5dB boost (This will strengthen the upper bass, for improving the clarity of bass guitar notes and kick drum spikes) 200Hz Q=1.4, -0.5dB to -1.5dB cut (This will remove the muddiness of the bass and guitar frequencies as well as the vocals) 1500Hz Q=0.7, +0.5dB to -1.5 dB boost (This will add overall presence of important mid-range instruments like the vocals and the guitars) 13500Hz Q=1.0, +0.5dB to +1.5 dB boost (This will boost the high frequencies to support hi hats, cymbals and vocals) You might notice that the mastering EQ does not cut or boost more than +1.5dB or -1.5dB. This is recommended because a slight EQ adjustment in mastering can have a big impact
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EQ Settings for Mastering: General Tips

on the resulting audio. You need to use your ears very carefully when making an adjustment. Highly trained ears of professional mastering engineers can distinguish differences of very small EQ boost/cut adjustments even as little as 0.2dB difference. You can assess it here: Ear training development exercises for mastering engineer. In some cases, you might want to adjust more than 1.5dB which is seems fine as long as you not be overdoing it. For example, the bass region of the mix really deserved a -3dB cut, by all means do that. But if you are doing a -3dB cut in different sections of the frequency spectrum, this is now considered a heavy EQ alteration. You might want to talk to your client first by raising this issue and whether re-mixing can be a better alternative than pushing through drastic EQ adjustments. There are some advanced EQ parametric such as Waves LinEQ and L2 Ultramaximizer that you can use to make your masters sound loud and big by making big EQ adjustments without compromising the audio quality. Always remember to use your ear and compare your mastering to the standard produced records of the same genre (if you are mastering rock music, you can listen to rock records and compare whether it is comparable sonic quality or not). For more information about implementing EQ in mastering, I suggest you will check out the following tutorials: 1.) 54 New Year Resolutions to Improve Recording Quality of your Projects- go directly to the mastering section for the tips. 2.) Using Parametric EQ to Find the Sweet Spot of any Musical Instruments in mastering, using parametric EQ is indispensable. Make sure you know how to detect EQ issues by knowing the sweet spot of the problem. 3.) Finding Instrument frequencies using Notch filtering in Audio Mastering this is another detect of finding out serious EQ issues in mastering using notch filtering.

Related tutorials for further reading

Tips when doing home audio mastering: Make Screenshots and Save Presets How to use Reference Tracks when Mastering Using MultiBand Compressor DIY (Do It Yourself) Quick Audio Mastering Tutorial for Beginners Content last updated on June 14, 2012
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EQ Settings for Mastering: General Tips

5 Responses to EQ Settings for Mastering: General Tips

1. Ivan Says:
April 12th, 2010 at 10:55 pm

How can you make a mastering sounds LARGE ? Usually, my mastering sound very good until I compare them to a professional record. The first thing I notice is how large a professional record sounds. Even though I use EQ, REVERB, PANNING, Compression, etc, I just cannot get close to a professional record. How can they achieve that? 2. Emerson Maningo Says:
April 19th, 2010 at 10:21 pm

Hi Ivan, I have that problem before, below is what fix this problem: 1.) Record at much higher resolution as possible. Normally, cheap sound cards can only allow you record at 16 bits 44Khz which is low resolution. If you can record at 24bits 96Khz like using Audiophile 2496 sound card much better. This increase in audio resolution makes the sound fuller. 2.) The way commercial mastering that sounds so large is a TRICK. They add more presence (boost 2Khz Q=0.8 1 to 2dB)which amplifies the vocals and musical instruments making sound loud. 3.) They boost the bass high at 50 to 80Hz and compare the level with commercial rock recordings. 4.) Of course, once you have seriously done Step 1 to 3, the last is wise compression techniques and comparison of levels. If you can compress the audio wave (after all EQ is done), and target the average SPL to around -12dB or -11dB , then it is considered commercial loud if you are talking about rock and pop. My advice is to EQ first, and then measure the volume in average SPL, if it is -20dB or -18dB , you need to compress in such a way you hit -12dB or 11dB which is not considered loud. Try that and you will amazed your recordings sound as loud as those commercial done recordings. My other advice is not to overcompress, it will loss the dynamics and makes your recording sounds bad. Use your ear and avoid distortion in the compression process. Anyway SPL is called sound pressure level and measured in decibels. 3. Frank Gardner Says:
September 15th, 2010 at 1:27 am

First of all Great Blog! I thank you deeply for providing such great and useful content. I was wondering if there is any Final EQing that is done by you (or other professionals) after you compress your track? Thanks again! Frank 4. Emerson Maningo Says:
September 15th, 2010 at 11:50 am

Hi Frank, I am not a great fan of doing final EQing after compression; because I find it risky. And I will only be doing this if the track calls for it. Supposing you compress the tracks in the mastering stage so that you will have the loudest volume as possible without resulting to distortion. If you EQ it again (after compression) like boosting some frequencies, it will make some portion of the wave to clip to 0dB thus resulting to distortion. I think it would be nice to EQ finally after compression just to do some minor cutting but not boosting. In this way, you are not adding extra gain to your wave and will not likely to clip. Some engineers will have routine for EQing again after compression; the purpose is to restore the off-balance EQ that they have before compression. But personally I do not know their approach and its up to the engineer personal taste. I bet the engineer will just to do some smoothing EQ like very minor cutting and boosting, in such a way it will not clip or distort the final produced music. 5. jungleland2 Says:
March 6th, 2011 at 9:52 am

Thanks for the info on this blog. I have been doing my own recording for a few years (three CDs for Rocksploitation) and am starting to do my own mastering as well (rather than send it out to a mastering studio) Your TRICKS were very helpful. I use Voxengo Elephant Mastering Suite, which has great presets (basically six to choose from and unlimited custom options) but the EQ part has always been a mystery, since every recording sounds different on different stereos. the 2k boost helped. I still find it hard to match commercial recordings DB wise without clipping though.
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