Hey guys, in this video we’re going to talk about how to separate guitar tracks with equalization.
This will allow them to be easily distinguishable and will leave you with a much cleaner sounding
mix.
This technique is especially important for projects that have multiple guitar tracks,
since these are typically where we run into problems.
We’ll start off recording two electric guitar tracks.
To do this, I’m using an Avid Eleven Rack and a Gibson Les Paul Studio.
We’ll use a more saturated distortion sound and keep it the same between both tracks.
I’m also recording both these tracks mono.
We’ll have one as a rhythm track, and the other has a bit of a lead riff going on.
No panning has been applied to these tracks, since we want the separation to be made by
equalization and not by stereo separation.
We’ve also added an additional bass track and drums to make this more of a real world
situation.
First we’ll play it back with just the two guitar tracks.
As you can hear, there isn’t much separation between these tracks.
Now we’ll play it back with the drums and bass added as well.
In a full band situation like you would usually be working with, everything here is clashing
and very difficult to hear apart.
Normally you would want to try and avoid this as you’re actually recording by recording
your lead and rhythm guitar differently so they occupy different frequencies, but let’s
take a look at how we can address this issue with a bit of equalization.
The first thing we’re going to do is boost and cut a track by about 4 dB at two different
frequencies.
We’ll boost the first track at 4 kHz, and cut it at 2 kHz, and do the opposite on the
second track.
You might not necessarily want to boost and cut this much in your final mix.
We’ve taken it a little farther than normal since this video will be uploaded online and
subtle changes are more difficult to distinguish after the video is compressed.
Now we’ll play it back and hear the difference.
So there is quite a bit more separation going on now, but we still have some issues at the
bottom end.
Let’s add a high pass filter to cut off a lot of those low frequencies.
These don’t normally add much to the guitar track, especially in a full band situation.
If we don’t do this, it will be difficult to get separating between the guitars and
bass, and it will be difficult to hear the kick drum.
We’ll set our high pass filter to cut off below 120 Hz.
Now let’s play them back.
We’ve got much better separation between the two tracks now.
We’ll try adding in the bass and drums now.
So this is a lot better than where we started.
The one thing I would like to do, is cut out the bass frequencies where we emphasized the
guitar.
So make two cuts to the bass EQ, one a 2 kHz and the other at 4 kHz.
I’ll also boost the bass by 5 dB at 110 Hz.
Now we’ll play everything back together.
When working on a full mix, you’ll also do some stereo separation.
This will really make a big difference to the separation, but it’s not good enough
on its own without the EQ changes we made.
Let’s pan the rhythm guitar 50% left, and the lead guitar 50% right and play back
the tracks.
So for a quick edit like this, we did a pretty decent job getting separation between our
two guitar tracks and our bass.
The last thing we’ll do is a side by side comparison starting with all our mono bass
and guitar tracks with no EQ and switching to our final track with the effects applied.
Thanks for watching this video on separating two similar sounding tracks with equalization.
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