How can you know for sure that your EQ moves are helping a track? What if you’re simply making the track louder and that’s why you like it?
These are questions every mixer must face when attempting the proper EQ tweaks – and yet most of us don’t.
Today I want to show you how I approach level matching with EQ and how it can give you confidence in your EQ decisions.
Want to have all of the EQ techniques in this series on hand next time you’re mixing with EQ? – Download my FREE EQ Checklist here!
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My name is Graham Cochrane and I'm the founder of The Recording Revolution, one of the world's most loved audio recording and mixing blogs with over 200,000 readers each month. 
Great tutorial. I’ve never done that level match thing at the end of my mixes. I will from this point on. It makes a lot of sense to do.
Great tip, something that can easily be missed it forgotten. I think it’s important to point out that this should be done with any plugin with an output dial. Thanks Graham for all you do!
Yeah i’ve been fooled so many times. Thankfully, there’s a few plugins that can help to make the output stays on the same loudness level in realtime, very handy when you’re using and tweaking multiple plugins on the fly . AB_LM, Perception, to name a few.
Level matching is really an important thing that always be forgotten. Most of us just care the ratio of compressor, thresold, frequency, etc, but miss this step surely.
Thanks for reminding us, Graham!
I’m still struggling, but I can tell I have fallen into this trap many many times in my mix as the overall volume of the 2-bus just rises as I progress. I have this problem especially with compression.
I didn’t but I will now. It’s like going to school for mixing! Thanks man!
Thanks Graham. I was not level matching but I will now. I was unaware of the concept until you showed me the light!
Craig
Hi Graham,
Ok about your tip but I have a question:
On the first example, you cut 2.7 dB on the output knob.
Isn’t it the same than lowering your boost at 2,5k and lowering your cut in the lows?
Thanks for all your great videos and recording project saving tips!
really very useful concept! However i can understand how to achieve this inside logic 9 that i am using, since the logic’s eq doesn’t have these meters of signal in and out. Any thoughts?
Great video for doing eq in the box. Please do some videos regarding using outboard eq’s during tracking. I find that I use both plugin eq’s very differently (more subtly,) than I do my outboard equalizers.