How to EQ Electric Guitar (Logic Pro)

How to EQ Electric Guitar in Logic Pro

Electric guitar can be one of the trickiest instruments to fit into a busy mix. Left untouched, it often competes with bass, kick drum, and vocals for the same frequency space, leaving everything sounding muddy and unclear. EQ is how you carve out room for each instrument to have its own place in the mix, and in this post I'll walk through a real approach to EQing electric guitar using a session from the band Moon Drifter and their song Nowhere.

Starting With a Blended Guitar Tone

This particular guitar was recorded using two microphones on the same amp at the same time: an SM57 placed right up against the speaker, and a Rode NT2A in a figure-eight pattern positioned a foot or two back. On its own, the SM57 captures most of the body and character of the amp tone. The Rode, by contrast, doesn't sound particularly flattering in isolation, but it adds a noticeable top-end airiness when blended in with the SM57. Together, the two mics create a fuller, more three-dimensional guitar sound than either one alone.

Since both microphones are routed to a single track stack, the EQ can be applied once to the blended signal rather than separately on each individual microphone track. This keeps the workflow simple: click into the EQ slot on the track stack, and you're shaping the combined tone of both mics together.

Step One — High Pass Filter

The first move with almost any electric guitar, or any instrument other than bass and kick drum, is applying a high pass filter to remove unnecessary low end. Turn on the filter and slowly raise the frequency while listening. Push it too far and the guitar starts to thin out noticeably, which isn't what you want. The goal is a smaller, more surgical cut, removing frequencies around 130 Hz and below in this case. This doesn't meaningfully change the character of the guitar tone, but it clears space in a frequency range that bass and kick drum need to occupy. Without this step, guitar tracks can easily muddy up the low end and make it harder for the rhythm section to come through clearly.

Logic Pro's EQ includes a built-in frequency analyzer, visible as a small button on the plugin, which displays a real-time curve of the instrument's frequency content as it plays. This is a genuinely useful visual reference while you're sweeping and adjusting, though it's worth remembering that your ears should always be the final judge, not just what you see on the display.

It's also worth remembering that EQ decisions in the mix depend heavily on how the guitar was recorded in the first place. Wherever possible, aim to get the tone you want as close to right as possible at the amp during recording, using EQ afterward for subtle tweaks and mix cleanup rather than major tonal changes. Big changes are best made at the source.

Step Two — Cutting Muddiness

With a lot of guitar tracks layered in a busy arrangement, low-mid muddiness builds up quickly if left unchecked. A useful technique here is boosting a wide range and sweeping through it while listening for anything that sounds unpleasant or honky, then pulling that specific area back down once you've identified it. In this case, a slightly honky quality was found around 324 Hz, and pulling out roughly 3 decibels there cleaned things up noticeably.

Step Three — Adding Brightness With a High Shelf

Once the low end is under control, the next step is often brightening the tone using a high shelf filter. A high shelf boosts everything from a chosen frequency upward, rather than targeting one specific point. In this case, setting the shelf at 5000 Hz and boosting around 3 decibels added a sense of air to the guitar tone, helping it cut through the rest of the mix more effectively. Not every guitar tone needs this step, particularly if the amp tone was already bright to begin with, but it's a useful technique to have available.

Step Four — Finding the Sweet Spot

After the broader shaping is done, it's worth doing one more sweep to find the specific frequency that makes this particular guitar tone sound its best. Apply a noticeable boost, sweep it slowly through the frequency range while playing the track, and listen for the point where the tone feels most pleasing and present. In this case, that sweet spot landed around 1000 Hz.

A useful rule of thumb worth keeping in mind: when boosting, try not to go much beyond 3 decibels. Past that point, boosts tend to start sounding unnatural or forced. Cuts are a different story. If a frequency is genuinely causing a problem, you can cut it far more aggressively than you'd ever want to boost, sometimes 10 decibels or more, without it sounding unnatural, since you're removing something rather than exaggerating it.

Step Five — Taming Harsh Frequencies

One area worth being cautious with on electric guitar is the range around 2.5 to 4 kHz, which can get harsh and piercing quickly when boosted. While sweeping through frequencies earlier, a specific frequency in this range stood out as unpleasant. To address it, a much narrower EQ band was used this time, rather than the wide boosts and cuts used earlier. Adjusting the Q, or bandwidth, from wide to narrow lets you target a single problematic frequency without affecting the surrounding tone. In this case, a narrow cut of around 10.5 decibels at that specific frequency cleaned up the harshness without noticeably thinning out the rest of the guitar's character.

Hearing the Difference

Comparing the guitar with the EQ bypassed versus engaged makes the impact clear. Without the EQ, the tone becomes noticeably woofy and muddy, which in turn muddies up the bass guitar sitting in a similar frequency range. With the EQ engaged, the guitar sits more clearly in its own space and doesn't compete with the bass and drums the way it did before.

Listening to the guitar within the context of the full mix confirms the same result. With the EQ on, the guitars cut through more clearly and no longer cloud up the low end where the bass and kick drum need room to breathe.

A Quick Recap of the Process

The full approach used here follows a repeatable order: start with a high pass filter to remove unneeded low end, carve out any muddiness with a moderate cut somewhere in the low-mids, add brightness with a high shelf if the tone needs it, sweep through the frequency range to find and boost the area that makes the guitar sound its best, and finally listen for any harsh or piercing frequencies and apply a narrow cut if needed.

Not every guitar recording will need every step here. Some tones are already close to right coming out of the amp and only need the high pass filter and a small tweak. Others, especially in a dense mix with several guitar tracks layered together, will benefit from the full process. The key is listening carefully at each stage and making decisions based on what the track actually needs rather than applying the same settings to every guitar automatically.

Music by MoonDrifter
https://www.instagram.com/moon.drifter/
https://soundcloud.com/brendan-krieg 

TIMECODES:
00:00 Intro
00:41 SM57 Guitar Track
01:08 NT2A Guitar Track
02:22 Loading the EQ
02:30 High Pass Filter
04:34 Low Mid
05:58 High Shelf
07:04 Mid/High-Mid
08:37 Problem Frequencies
10:28 Before/After
11:51 Final Thoughts