Experimentation during the mixing of the ‘Banquet Scene’ led me towards a contextually-universal EQ curve–or near enough a good starting point of which can be applied to future scenes and… here it is.

A common phrase blasted around the audio-for-visual fraternity is “Dialogue is King” of which Hollywood’s Post Production and Dialogue Mixer, Stephen Tibbo asserts “everything else wraps around it (iZotope, 2014)”. Therefore when EQ’ing foley, the motivation is to avoid masking the human voice by creating a frequency hole in the foley for the voice to sit.

The concept of the curve is:

• To remove harshness around the 3k range and carve out space for the human voice to sit.
• To boost the lower mids to add perceived warmth, bottom and midrange. This is also an area of less importance for the voice (see article below).
• To sweeten and massage out the individual characteristics of the intricate foley sounds by shelve-boosting the upper-mids to highs–adding presence to stand out from the mix.

Jay Rose, author of Audio Postproduction for Film and Video offers an insightful breakdown of the general rules of which the human voice adheres to and is something I find myself referencing a lot when considering mix decisions concerning the human voice. The following excerpt informed the rationale behind the EQ curve.

Jay Rose

Under 150 Hz
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In this range you can pull down the dialog. It will help reduce plosives, handling noise and echo in large rooms. If the voices get too thin, lower the cutoff frequency.

For music, you can cut things like bass drums a bit at the lowest frequencies (say under 60Hz) to ensure that you have no sub-sonics, and to give you more headroom.

Low cuts are nice for safety, but if you’re too aggressive, things get thin. Find the right balance.

150Hz – 300Hz
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This is where the fundamentals of voice and many important instruments exist. I like to give the voices a slight boost and the music/effects/foley a slight cut here. If your voices are boomy, back it off. If thin, boost away.

One trick is to send your music to two sub-busses. When you’re underscoring dialog, use the cut version. When standing alone, use the flat version.

300Hz – 600Hz
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This region is less critical for voice. You can boost your music/etc here and get away with it. Cut the voices here to make room.

600Hz – 1200Hz
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This region is critical for consonants. Boost the voices and cut the music. You lose some fast attacks on your music, but it’s more important to understand the talent.

1200Hz – 2400Hz
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This area isn’t critical for voice. Cut the dialog, boost the music a bit.

2400Hz – 4800Hz
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This region is important for distiguishing voices and instruments. Boost the voices and cut the music – especially if there are multiple voices. The downside is that your oboe will start to sound like a clarinet. You can push this range back up for the music when it stands alone.

4800Hz – 9600Hz
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This is the *sizzle* region. I boost both the music and voice heavily here.

9600Hz and up
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Don’t worry about higher frequencies too much. It’s mostly noise. If your tracks have HF noise, feel free to cut with a heavy hand.

It came to me as an afterthought following the mixing process of the Banquet scene that one has to sometimes compromise between artistic and technical decisions. In an interview with Producer and Engineer, Erik Zobler (George Duke, Stanley Clarke, Dianne Reeves, Al Jarreau, Natalie Cole, Anita Baker) talks about sound mixing and anecdotally mentions his experience working with engineer, Bruce Houdini of which offered Zobler a piece of solid mixing advice of which to always “Fill the Meter, Fill the Speaker”. In regards to the latter of which Houdini attributes to bringing balance not only to channel levels, but also to the entire frequency spectrum to deliver that lush sounding piece of audio. Zobler asserts:

“Make sure you’re putting all the frequencies in there, whatever you do, no matter what you do. Maybe not each instrument, but when you’re done with your mix, make sure your mix has all the frequencies, way down, way high.”

Full Interview can be viewed here.

(Zobler, 2004, Waves)

This piece of advice particularly resonated with me and following implementation into common practice, I started reaping the benefits. However by side-effect, this imposed rule led towards an artistic vs technical battle when considering tracking and mixing scenes for film. For example, the Banquet scene of 5150 takes place inside a living room in the countryside, there is a lit fireplace, it’s a fairytale setting and appears to be a clear day outside. Therefore chosen components making up the soundscape and fulfilling the picture consisted of the following:

• Fire-1
• Fire-2
• Clock
• Blackbird
• Rural birds (assorted)
• Wind
• Horror Drone

Here lies the balancing act of making your scene not only aesthetically pleasing with full use of the frequency spectrum, but to colour it with strokes of realism that compliment the imagery plus further sweeps of non-diegetic elements such as music and SFX. The choosing of the above sounds were as a result of this balancing act. For example, the wind was not something we felt would be aesthetically pleasing to the ear, but was indeed low-passed, pulled down and used to fill out the sub > low end of the spectrum. The fire tracks were initially going to be used to fill the entire void. However, allowing the subs to filter through perceptually gave the impression of proximity to the listener and caused a dissonance or clashing to the perceived realism. This was also the same with the high end of the fire cracks, so frequencies above 8-10k were shelved off via equalisation. I managed to retrieve the airiness and presence by boosting the high end of the intricate foley sounds, the upper harmonics of the dialogue and the composition of music by way of a careful balancing act.

This notion of balancing art and technical very much parallels to that of musical composition. Sounds take on the heir of the instruments of which in order to create a full-sounding orchestration, they need to be collated and organised throughout the entire frequency range. An orchestra of silken-sound, filling the spectrum, filling the meter and therefore, filling the speaker.