Looking for EQing Advice & Tips

It depends a bit on the eq settings of your mixer (hardware or software) wether cutting the bass will influence the sound of your vocals. With some mixers the bandwith of the bass eq is very wide and will cut the low from your vocals as well as cutting the bass.

The eq parameters of hardware mixers are often available in the manual. VDJ introduced parametric eq’s in the last release, so you can emulate any set of eq parameters. Not sure about other software packages.

If you want some more tips about using eq’s in your mixes, perhaps it’s easiest to post a link to one of your mixes and tell us where you think you went wrong. Perhaps you could get some pointers from some more experienced DJ’s on these forums.

Have you tried a practice session without touching the eqs at all? Might tell you where you’re going wrong. What kind of music are you mixing?

That seems kinda weird that you never eq or filter when you are planning your set.

Question do you use quantize when you play? How long does it take for you to get your songs in phrase? How do you do track preperation?

A few things that i find that will totally increase your speed and let you be more creative by using EQ and Filter and effects are:

Set your cue points. Myself i am not a big sampler or remixer so i use 4 track decks…this is to not say that i dont use samples…but i will just use bits and pieces of other songs as samples.

Have 8 cue points set up you can go within the Kontrol S4 manager and have your sample slots changed to cue points.

Now with your 8 cue points…what i have done is set it pretty much every 32 beats…intro, 2nd intro, first build, first drop, 2nd build, 2nd drop. The last 2 cue points i will either have set to an outtro, or i will find a place within the track that i really like.

When it comes to mixing my general rule is to get my beats matched up usually takes only a couple of seconds…then i turn all my EQ to about 9 oclock…this way i can pretty much bring in my next track at anypoint and you cannot really hear the track at all.

Then on proper count usually the end of a 32 i will start bringing in my mids or my highs depending…then at the right moment i will swap basslines and slowly start eqing out the highs and mids of the first track.

all different genres you have to eq differently as there is more pronounced parts of songs depending on the genre..ie drum and bass is the high hat, progressive and trance is usually the mids where the synth line is…Electro is all over the place…and most forms of real house (jacking/Soulful/Deep/Tech) there is a lot of emphasis on the basslines.

+1 to D-Jam

This is why i continually tell Djs to buy the proper headphones for the proper job. Headphones like the Beats, and a lot of other headphones extend the bass end and can really screw with your mixes

@ Shuga,

A lot of the time when i have songs that are not the same level it is normal for my 2nd track to have all the EQs at like 2 or even 3 oclock to match levels, as long as you are not hitting the red on your track you should be fine.

A few things to remember with Traktor is to NOT use the Autogain…the autogain feature i find isnt very good…and if you are buying all your tracks most of them should be within the same level.

Have you updated to the new Traktor 2.6? Try using the Z eq settings that have full cutoff of frequencys.

XD-40s are good! Anyway, all I could say is that through trial and error you learn the tricks of EQ:ing. Just experiment and you will grok it.