Best book for EQ 'cheat sheets'?

[adash123]

I am learning about mixing and mastering and recently saw the SPL EQ ranger plus on Plugin Alliance and it got me thinking.
Are there any books out there that provide key frequencies per instrument for mixing and maybe common boost/cut frequencies for mixing and mastering?
I dont just want to learn the basic freq ranges, but also the common frequencies.

[Benedict]

Attractive but not a good plan at all.

Sure, read a bit about the perception of sound across the frequency spectrum, but the moment you are using a cheat sheet, you are - as the name says - cheating. To borrow from a Country song: "I cheated me right out of you".

Sound is complex and surprisingly situational - as in every song is a bit different so applying formulas without any sense of understanding Why will deliver poor results more often than not. You cannot mix by numbers. Ok, you can fool yourself, but a real audience knows. They may not know you mixed by numbers, but they feel the broken Scene & Story in the Song.

Advice:
1. Read one of these things. The pic with the balloons is decent. Deffo avoid anything AI as the bots scrape popular answers, not correct answers so esp in music matters they are mostly very wrong.
2. Close the book and put it under a rock at the end of the garden so you can't be tempted.
3. Open your DAW with a well-mixed, good-quality song. Despite your ego preferences, maybe something like "FM" from Best Of Steely Dan (the planted cars) as that is solid.
4. Instance an EQ, preferably one without too much fru-fru, a) Bypass and take one freq knob and move it from one position to another, b) set Active, c) feel the difference. Tempting to scan but that fills your brain with other things like comb filtering/phasing when you need to build a "muscle memory" spreadsheet of how different freq areas feel.
5. Set 6kHz with 3dB boost and feel the extra sparkle.
6. Set 120Hz (narrow Q) and adjust til you feel Punch (not bass) but Punch.
7. Set 240Hz and drop 3dB, noting how the piece clears a bit.
8. Keep at it. 5 mins and done isnot the way. You need to do over and over. A snare hit is also a good one to really hear how you can dramatically change the sound perception with even one boost.
9. Again you may need to adjust for this song, but that is the learning here, not rigid formulas which is what happens when you sit there with a sheep-sheet open - making your decisions for you blindly.

[adash123]

I appreciate the learn-by-using-your-ears approach but I'd rather have a starting point based on the decades of audio engineering experience that's out there rather than starting from scratch.

[ksandvik]

There are starting points and there's experimentation based on the track content. Nothing black and white .

[ThoughtExperiment]

There's no substitute for 'using your ears' but that only comes with experience. You have to start somewhere, so I'd recommend 'Mixing Secrets For The Small Studio' by Mike Senior. It's very well-written and is a mine of information.

There's also 'The Art of Mixing - A Visual Guide' by David Gibson. This one is pretty dated, but there's still a lot of useful information, particularly about instrument frequency ranges.

'The Mixing Engineer's Handbook' by Bobby Owsinski is pretty good too for EQ tips, and mixing generally
Good luck!

[El°HYM]

[BertKoor]

There's no way to cheat.

Here's how I learned to properly EQ any channel:

• Better cut than boost. It's nearly always better to cut than to boost a band.
• Finding where to cut is easy if you do it as follows:
  Set the EQ to boost a few dB. Sweep the frequency around and LISTEN until you find the spot where it sounds the worst.
  THAT is the frequency to cut.

Practice this a lot. With training you will develop an ear and you'll get better results faster.

Old analog consoles had simple EQ sections with (apart from treble & bass shelves) just one or two sweepable mids and no Q knob. They got the job done. So you can get the job done without needing to use half a dozen bands.

Oh, and then there's EQ you'd do on a master bus with a full mix. You can cheat a bit by looking at a spectrum analyser. What you want to see in a well-balanced mix is similar to the spectrum of pink noise: straight line going from top left to bottom right, ie lots of bass, not so much treble.

[ksandvik]

Also there's a diff between eq with the rest of the tracks and isolated track. Both are needed.

As for final mix, the tracks should balance with little need to do bus or master eq, but it's sometimes unavoidable. I really like Izotope Tonal Balance as it shows ranges for master EQs per genre (they are different, let's say a ballad versus UK bass house, or you could make your own ones for reference.