I know each show and pull sounds different, but I was wondering if there are some good basic guidelines to properly EQing an audience recording for listening. I generally listen to auds through my headphones on my computer, and for some shows I can dial in a good sound, but others I'll toy with the whole show and still not get a decent sound.

Any tips from the aud experts out there to enhance my aud listening experience?

@mgh2001 said:

I am by no means a professional and this is just my preference. I tend to focus on the three main areas, highs, mids, and lows. Bringing them all up, bass for mike and fishs kick, and some other low end crazy effects. Mids for the vocals, fish, and keys. Highs for vocals and Trey plus it clears up some of the high end anyways. Trey is always in front of the mix so you never really need to worry about him.

My ear is decent enough to make those distinctions, but sometimes the recording is too high or low in several different areas. I use Media Monkey which has a 10-band EQ so there's a lot of flexibility. I guess what I really need is to learn how to better train my ear to be able to adjust the levels properly depending on what show/pull I'm listening to. Some of them are pretty level to begin with and only require small adjustments. Others sound weird as hell and I can't level them out.

One general EQing tip is to adjust downward rather than upward relative to a flat curve, whenever possible. For example, if you want to emphasize the highs and lows (creating a roughly U-shaped curve), do it by lowering the mids below 0 db, not creating the same shape by raising the highs and lows above 0 db, if that makes sense. This achieves essentially the same end result while eliminating any possibility of introducing distortion from boosting the gain too much. It's not a big deal or anything, but it's a good habit to have.

In my experience, EQ works best for subtle shading, not making radical alterations to "fix" a recording that I never liked in the first place. Ultimately, just experiment and trust your ears, which is all that matters after all. Not very helpful, I know, but so much depends on your own personal preferences and equipment.

Every AUD is different, with the greatest changes having to do with how much the sound echoes off the walls of an arena or other indoor venue, or the position of the mic relative to the stage in an outdoor setting.

I think it's worth taking the time to put on an AUD of choice and spend some quality time with the 10-band EQ of your playback program, starting out totally flat and moving one single slider at a time, to give yourself a general idea of how changing any one of the 10 bands effects the overall sound.

As a general rule, muddy AUDs can easily be cleaned up by boosting the higher frequencies (4 and 8 khz especially) and by cutting low-mids (125 and 250 hz) - all relative to the direct source sound, meaning you can generate the same EQ effect by LOWERING sliders relative to baseline rather than BOOSTING them, as mentioned above, in order to prevent clipping through excessive gain.