Training your ears to hear different frequency bands in sounds is an essential skill for music producers and sound engineers. There are multiple training tools available, but let’s first understand how each frequency band affects the sound. Let’s use vocals here as an example.
How-to
There are seven frequency ranges commonly used to define a voice’s qualities. Try to apply a selective EQ filter to hear how every band sounds in isolation.
Bottom end/fullness
60-140Hz
Engineers often cut off everything below 80Hz to remove rumble and handling noise, but if recorded in a studio, this frequency range can add more power to the voice.
Mud/boxy/boom
150-300 Hz
This range is also called fundamental or core voice frequencies. It either makes your sound too thin or too boomy.
Body/timbre
500-700Hz
As the name suggests, this band holds “the timbre” of the voice.
Articulation/phone/nasal
1200-2000Hz
Many affordable microphones have this band exhausted, but be careful reducing it too much because this range carries the articulation.
Presence
2000-5000Hz
This range carries the presence of the voice but also harshness and all sibilances. Be extremely careful working in this range and consider applying dynamic EQs and de-essers in combination with broad curves of a static EQ. Harshness is usually present around 3800Hz, presence is around 3600Hz.
Heights
Around 8000Hz
Some microphones are lacking this range, but it’s always there and can be pulled back with a simple static EQ.
Air
10000Hz and higher
Depending on your genre you can boost or reduce this range.
Now you can take a look at any vintage wide-band EQ and realise that most of them have exactly these ranges. Many of them were created to process voice and this is why they are so popular even nowadays, as VSTs.
This technique is used:
Genres: all
Stages of production: recording sound design mixing