How To Mix Live Music Chapter 11 - EQ for Electric Bass, Guitars & Keyboards

thanks for joining me in this series about how to mix live music we've already got the drums sounding good now we're going to move on to the electric bass guitars and keyboards the key instruments for most rock and pop bands will start with the bass guitar because getting that to sound right will help

the other instruments to sit nicely on top even though the bass is fundamental frequencies cover a range between about 40 Hertz and 400 Hertz his harmonics reach up to 4 kilohertz so it has potential to mask the sound of the other instruments we're just going to focus on the direct sound of the bass using a DI

box though it could also be possible to put a microphone to its speaker cabinet firstly just because it's a bass instrument doesn't mean you should automatically boost the low EQ band the room might have so much low frequency resonance that you need to actually reduce the low band reducing the low band will eliminate some boo meanness

from the sound increasing it can add depth and body to the sound but don't be afraid to leave it flat if you think that sounds best the high shelf won't have much influence on the sound so let's reduce it a bit to make space for other instruments in their zone now the mid band my tip is to cut this rather

than boost to make space for the guitar and piano if you cut about 6 DB with the frequency somewhere between 500 Hertz and 1.5 kilohertz it will keep the bases loaded and high definition while removing its growly nasal mid tones if you have to mid bands available like on TF mixers then you may be surprised

to hear that boosting around 2 to 3 kilohertz can add a certain amount of pop to the sound take a listen to these examples the first example has a flat high mid band while the second is boosted at 2.5 killers