When getting amazing guitar tone already feels like an endless battle, how can we hope to win the war? Easy… By knowing what to listen for, and how to fix it. Once you’ve dialled in your amp or digital modeler using our guide , there’s still the matter of polishing and refining it into that final, “professional guitar sound.” Give your tone clarity and punch as we show you how to EQ distorted guitars. We’re going to take you through a real-world example, step-by-step, and teach you what to listen for, what tools are available to you (including our Guitar EQ Checklist), and how to use them. Check out what we’re going to be working towards:
Disclaimer! If you want to get the most out of this guide, use the best listening environment you can. We’re going to be making some rather precise and subtle changes to these guitars that may not be noticeable on smaller or cheaper systems. If you’re listening on a phone or laptop, try switching to over-ear headphones or larger speakers in order to best hear what’s happening. In the real world, the problems you encounter with EQ can be much more subtle than the ones in this article, and it all comes down to training your ears through practice. That being said, with each step of the process I’ve included an “exaggerated” audio clip, where I boost the frequencies I hear that I want to deal with, to help you train your ears to hear them yourself. What’s The Point? My Tone Rocks! While your raw amp tone might sound awesome to you, a trained ear could find many problem areas in a raw tone that can be detrimental to your music. Cleaning up unwanted or unmusical frequencies allows your guitar to have improved clarity, punch, and aggression. It’s about removing what’s unnecessary, trimming the fat, leaving only the good stuff! Why bother? If it sounds good, it is good, right? Well… no, not quite. Just because our ears say things are fine, doesn’t mean they are. Remember when you were just a kid and you thought that solid state amp sounded AWESOME with your Boss Metal Zone in front, with the knobs cranked all the way up? Let’s be honest, that sounded awful… but at the time, you thought it sounded great. Your ears are not finite, they can learn and adapt. We train them to hear all kinds of things as musicians, and they get better and better the more we train them. They learn what to listen for, they learn how to identify what they hear, and they get better and better at what they do. Yes, your ears might tell you your tone is perfect, but a professional mixing engineer could still find a myriad of issues with it, and that’s just because their ears have been properly trained! The morale of the story? You can’t always trust your ears. Oh, and one last thing… An awesome guitar sound is not just about how the guitar sounds . It’s about how the guitar fits in with the other instruments in a mix! Remember what we learned in our last article : context is key! Cleaning up your guitar tone makes the other instruments sound better too! If you only take one thing away from this article, let it bet this: When there’s too much of a certain frequency, it gets messy . It’s hard to hear what’s going on in that area, you can’t hear any definition and clarity, it ruins the mix! Cleaning up frequencies the guitars don’t need allows other instruments to fit into those pockets. If you want that massive band sound, then every instrument needs its own space. How Do We Do It? Let’s take a listen to the raw amp tone:
For many of you, this tone might sound perfectly fine, it might even sound killer to your ears! That’s okay, there’s nothing wrong with that. It’s a great starting point, and a solid raw tone, but we’re here to teach you how you can make this even better. For those who don’t know, when you play a note on the guitar, you’re actually generating many more quieter notes above it at the same time, we call these “harmonics” or “overtones”. The more you distort a signal, the more overtones are created and the louder they can get, thus the sound of distorted guitars. How are we supposed to find just a few bad frequencies in that mess?! A few ways… 1) Start by listening for frequencies that immediately stand out to you, these will be notes or frequencies that seem to be louder than others. 2) A good rule of thumb is to look for frequencies that seem to stick around, lingering in your tone no matter what note is being played. 3) If nothing sticks out at first, listen to a longer or different style of riff. Sometimes you’ll find frequencies that only stick out on certain notes or techniques (I’m looking at you , palm mutes), but not others. 4) If you’re having trouble getting started, load up an EQ plugin and jog a little boost around the frequency spectrum to refresh your ears and get a feel for what’s happening in each part of the spectrum. These nasty little devils we’re looking for are called “resonant frequencies, ” and they are the first type of issue we’ll be dealing with. These resonances are usually very narrow areas of the frequency spectrum that like to stick out above the rest, and can reduce clarity and depth in your signal. In the low end they can create mud, and in the high end they can cause fizz. The best way to treat resonant frequencies are by cutting them with a narrow band (referred to as a “Q”), like the one below:
The Best Daws For Recording And Mixing Metal
This ensures that you’re only affecting the frequency you want to deal with, and not removing anything in the tone that you might want to keep! Only use as wide of a Q as absolutely necessary.
High End Resonances – Fizz and Clarity High end resonances tend to occur between 2kHz and 8kHz. Here’s the first frequency that stood out to my ears, I’ve boosted it to help you hear it better:
Before we cut out this fizz and move on with our lives, take a minute to compare that audio clip with the previous clip of the unaltered amp tone. Can you still hear that frequency when it’s not boosted? There’s similar clips throughout this article for each frequency area we will be treating, be sure to reference the original as you proceed to help train your ears to pick these things out! You can hear how high end resonances like this one tend to stick out, especially on the bigger open chords. Here it is after we swept through, found the frequency, and cut it using a very narrow Q:
Tips For Recording Metal Guitars That Sound Monstrous
Don’t forget… you should only ever cut as much as you need to. Resonant frequencies ARE NOT “bad” frequencies that need to be completely annihilated from this earth. Sometimes these resonances are in very important areas for that instrument, and cutting them entirely would ruin the sound. We only EQ as much as necessary to ensure that we don’t do more harm than good to the signal, and hollow it out – creating more problems along the way. In this specific case, I actually found it beneficial to just cut it entirely. It wasn’t adding anything musical to this guitar tone, and it was loud enough that it needed to be dropped a significant amount before it even sounded balanced. Sometimes you need to be conservative, other times you need to be heavy handed. Whatever EQ move fixes the issue, that’s the right move . Here’s another one I found, boosted and then removed:
This one also needed a bigger cut for the same reasons as the last one. It wasn’t adding anything musical, and it was sticking out if I didn’t make a significant cut. Again, I used a tight Q so I’m not impacting any frequencies other than this one. One last nasty one in the high register:
This time I used a very conservative dip, as it didn’t need much to remove. It also had a nice bite associated with it that I wanted to keep in the tone, so I found a good middle ground. The last thing I’m going to do is just a general cut in that area same area we’ve been working in, using a broad Q. This is only going to be a couple db at most, just to round out the overall tone. I’m using a wider Q because I want a more musical, softer tone shaping tool rather than a precise surgical removal. Here’s what that sounds like:
Eq Cheat Sheet
That’s already a huge improvement in high end clarity! Far less harsh sounding, while still maintaining definition, articulation, aggression, and bite. The area we’ve opened up is where a vocal’s clarity, the
That’s already a huge improvement in high end clarity! Far less harsh sounding, while still maintaining definition, articulation, aggression, and bite. The area we’ve opened up is where a vocal’s clarity, the
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