Finding Your Own Voice
From the famous examples highlighted above, we’d encourage you to try and experiment with an EQ pedal to conceive some new sounds. You may be thinking “it’s all be done before, what’s the point?”, but both Dimebag Darrell and Josh Homme may have thought the same thing!
Try and partner an equalizer with unconventional pieces of gear. You may get more interesting results than simply maxing out certain frequencies randomly into your usual rig. Maybe pair an EQ with other pedals, in a similar method to David Gilmour. He controls the sounds of his overdrive and fuzz units by placing each of them before a dedicated EQ stompbox, so that he can tailor their tones.
2. To Save Your Performance
In the previous section, we looked at the benefits of an EQ when it comes to shaping new sounds. However, in that part we had more of a focus on recording, when in fact an EQ can also be incredibly practical for live performance too.
For example, have you ever spent hours perfecting your ideal guitar tone at home, but when you turned up at band practice you found yourself completely inaudible? That’s because when you’re in a live situation, you’re competing with other mid-range and top-end frequencies, especially those emitted by your singer’s voice, your other guitarist’s amplifier and your drummer’s cymbals.
With so many strong frequencies flying around in a space, your tone can easily get buried amongst them. In this scenario, it can be easy to think that you just need to turn your amp up, but an EQ pedal is actually a far more effective (and potentially ear-saving!) solution.
As a Boost
With an equaliser, you can pump up your upper mids and top-end to ensure that you cut through far better in a mix. On its own, your guitar sound could sound terribly brittle like this, but in a band context you’ll be heard much clearer. However, if your base tone is already present enough, or you’re the only guitar player in your band, this may not be necessary. Instead, you could use an EQ as an alternative to a boost pedal.
One top player that uses an equaliser for this purpose is Tom Morello of Rage Against the Machine. With his DOD FX40B 7-band EQ a mainstay on his pedalboard for over 25 years, Morello practically maxes out the lows and mids to give his lead sound more girth. This is particularly potent if you don’t have a rhythm guitarist backing you up.
You’ll also find that many EQ pedals feature gain controls too, letting you raise the overall output of your signal for a volume increase. This includes popular MXR’s 6-band and 10-band EQ units, and while we suggest sticking to boosting frequencies for a lead kick, volume can still be king in certain situations.
To Imitate Other Guitar Sounds
If you play in a function band, you’ll already know that a highly-versatile rig is necessary. To ensure that your covers sound convincing, closely capturing the guitar sounds from original recordings is essential for engaging your audience.
This usually means taking several guitars to a gig, as well as a couple of amplifiers for producing various tonalities. However, as modern players seek ways to make their rigs more portable and manageable, an EQ pedal can be a great solution for minimising your setup.
For example, the Les Paul and Stratocaster pairing is capable of attaining most common guitar sounds. However, sometimes taking even two guitars to a gig can be cumbersome, especially if you’re using public transport.
This is where an EQ pedal can come in handy. A Les Paul is notorious for projecting a strong low-end with a lively mid-range character, mostly due to its thick-sounding humbuckers. Also boasting smooth and balanced highs thanks in part to its Mahogany construction, the Les Paul is a ballsy-sounding rock machine.
A Stratocaster is a completely different animal, however. With a trio of spanky-sounding single-coils that sound fantastic when used in conjunction with clean settings, these particular pickups deliver sparkly highs and shelved lows. With a bolt-on construction and Maple neck, Strats tend to also have a snappy response, giving a more immediate bite to notes.
So for example, if a Les Paul is the only guitar you want to use live, you can utilise an EQ pedal to imitate the tonal qualities of a Stratocaster. In this instance, raising the upper mid-range frequencies (around 800Hz-1kHz) and highs (2kHz – 5kHz) will get you close to achieving the cut that a Strat is famous for. Decreasing the lows will also help in securing that well-known snap, and it’s fair to say that the majority of your audience will be easy to fool!
3. To Create Unique Effects
We’ve already mentioned how an EQ can be used to discover new timbres. However, in that particular section we tried to highlight how you can use EQ to establish your own “sound” and “voice”. In this segment though, we’ll give you some tips for attaining unique, idiosyncratic effects.
Lo-Fi Sounds
Used often in rap and hip-hop styles, ‘lo-fi’ describes sounds that have been deliberately manipulated to convey a low quality, which in most cases is achieved by using drastic EQ settings. The opposite of ‘hi-fi’, lo-fi sounds have poor audio fidelity and will lack a broad range of frequencies.
EQ pedals can therefore be used to produce these lo-fi tones, and a common sound that some try to imitate is that of a vintage radio. An old-school radio would typically lack a lot of low-end frequencies, due to the poor signal quality of decades past and the tiny speakers installed in portable devices.
To recreate this peculiar sound, taking the frequencies sub-600Hz down to zero on your pedal will get you in the ballpark. With these settings, your EQ pedal works like a high-pass filter, only letting the top-end frequencies through. You’d be surprised, but this type of sound is actually used in music production quite often, usually in the introduction of a song.
An example of this can be heard in the song “I Believe in a Thing Called Love” (2003) by The Darkness, where the opening guitar riff has a lo-fi, radio-style sound. This is used to create tension, giving more impact to the main hook/riff when the rest of the band joins. As a dynamic tool, lo-fi sounds can be used to great effect when arranging songs: