The EQ Cheat Sheet
A church sound EQ frequency map you can actually use during a service. Nine bands, four rules, high-pass settings for every channel, and a plain-language lookup that turns a complaint into a frequency. It is all free to read right here. Drop your email and we will send the print-ready PDF to tape to the console.
What Each Band Actually Does
Learn these nine zones and you can fix most problems without a sweep. Everything below is a starting neighborhood, not an address.
Four Rules That Beat Any Preset
Cut Before You Boost
Removing what is wrong beats adding what is missing. Cuts do not eat headroom, do not cost you gain before feedback, and rarely sound artificial. Boosts do all three.
Sweep To Find, Then Narrow
Boost 6 to 10 dB with a narrow Q, sweep until the ugly thing jumps out, then flip it to a cut. Finding the frequency takes ten seconds. Guessing takes all night.
Narrow To Cut, Wide To Boost
Problems are narrow. Character is wide. Use a Q of 6 to 10 to kill a resonance, a Q of 0.7 to 1.5 to add a tonal quality.
Fix It In The Room First
If a channel needs more than 8 dB of correction, the mic is in the wrong place or it is the wrong mic. Go move it. A thirty second walk saves an hour of knob turning.
High-Pass Filter, Every Channel
The single highest-value move on a live console. Everything that is not a kick, bass, or floor tom gets filtered. You remove energy nothing needs and buy back headroom and gain before feedback.
| Source | High-Pass |
|---|---|
| Kick | 30-40 Hz |
| Bass guitar | 30-40 Hz |
| Floor tom | 50-60 Hz |
| Rack tom | 70-80 Hz |
| Overheads | 200-300 Hz |
| Electric guitar | 80-100 Hz |
| Acoustic guitar | 80-120 Hz |
| Piano | 40-60 Hz |
| Snare | 100-150 Hz |
| Hi-hat | 300-400 Hz |
| Male vocal | 80-100 Hz |
| Female vocal | 100-120 Hz |
| Speech / lectern | 100-120 Hz |
| Choir | 100-120 Hz |
| Horns / strings | 80-120 Hz |
On a wedge or an in-ear send, push the high-pass another 20 to 30 Hz higher than the mains. Nobody needs sub in a monitor.
Source By Source
Red is what to cut. Cyan is what to boost, sparingly. Start at 3 dB and only go further if it is clearly still wrong.
| Source | Cut | Boost | Note |
|---|---|---|---|
| Kick | 300-500 box | 60-80 thump · 3-5k beater | The scoop at 400 is what makes it read in a full mix. |
| Snare top | 500-800 honk | 200 body · 5k crack | Boost 8-10k for air only if the hi-hat bleed allows. |
| Snare bottom | below 200 | 8-10k wires | Flip the polarity. Always check it against the top mic. |
| Rack tom | 400-600 mud | 200-250 body · 5k attack | Gate them or the whole kit leaks through. |
| Floor tom | 300-500 mud | 80-120 body · 4-5k stick | Same gate treatment as the racks. |
| Hi-hat | 1k clank | 10k shimmer | High-pass hard at 300-400. Nothing useful below. |
| Overheads | 400-800 wash | 10-12k air | Treat these as the drum kit, not as cymbal mics. |
| Bass guitar | 250-400 mud | 60-100 weight · 700-1k growl | The 800 Hz region is how bass gets heard on small speakers. |
| Electric guitar | 200-400 mud · 6k fizz | 2-4k presence | Carve 2-4k if it is fighting the lead vocal. |
| Acoustic guitar | 200-300 boom | 5k detail · 10k air | Piezo pickups quack at 1-2k. Notch it narrow. |
| Piano | 300 box | 80-120 low · 5k hammer | In a dense mix, cut 200-400 hard and let it sit under. |
| Male vocal | 200-400 mud | 3-5k presence · 10k air | De-ess around 5-8k. Sibilance sits lower than most expect. |
| Female vocal | 250-450 mud | 4-6k presence · 12k air | De-ess around 6-9k. |
| Speech / lectern | 250-400 chest | 2-4k intelligibility | Intelligibility beats warmth. Every time. |
| Choir | 300-500 | 3-5k diction · 10k air | Fewer mics, higher up, is almost always better. |
Complaint To Frequency
When someone says a word, this is where to go first. Cut, do not boost the opposite.
| They Say | Go To |
|---|---|
| Muddy | 200-400 Hz |
| Boomy | 120-250 Hz |
| Boxy | 300-600 Hz |
| Honky, nasal | 500 Hz - 1 kHz |
| Harsh, brittle | 2-4 kHz |
| Piercing | 3-6 kHz |
| Sibilant, spitty | 5-9 kHz |
| Thin, small | boost 100-250 Hz |
| Dull, muffled | boost 3-6 kHz |
| No air | boost 10-14 kHz |
| Can't understand words | cut 300, boost 2-4k |
| Too loud, hurts | 1-4 kHz, then turn down |
"I can't understand the words" is almost never a volume problem. It is too much 200 to 400 Hz from every instrument at once, piling up and masking the consonants. Fix it on the guitars and keys, not on the vocal.
Print It. Tape It To The Console.
This is one sheet from Volume One. The full set adds gain staging, killing feedback, mic placement, and troubleshooting. Same format. Same two-pages-per-subject rule.
Gain staging, the EQ map, killing feedback, mic placement, and troubleshooting. The five things that fix most of what goes wrong.
Every sheet, all three volumes, one price. Fifteen reference sheets covering the whole booth, from gain staging to running the team.
Still Fighting Feedback Every Service?
If a cheat sheet is not enough, the room is the problem, not the settings. Foresight designs, installs, and tunes sound systems for churches and venues across Washington and nationwide. One call, one crew, one flat quote.