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.