Frequency ranges: what lives in each band of the spectrum
From 20 Hz to 20 kHz, band by band: which instrument sits where, what problem shows up in each zone and what to do when there's too much or too little.
The map before the tools
Nearly everyone learns to move an EQ before knowing what sits on the other side of the knob. It's a reasonable order — you learn by doing — but it explains why plenty of people spend years repeating the same gesture without knowing why it sometimes works: without a map of the spectrum, EQing is guessing. With one, it's deciding.
Human hearing covers roughly 20 Hz to 20 kHz, and that top figure drops with age: by forty, many people no longer get past 15 or 16 kHz. It isn't a tragedy for mixing, because almost no important decision lives up there, but it's worth knowing before you add an air boost you can't hear and everyone else can.
Band by band
| Zone | What lives there | Too much | Too little |
|---|---|---|---|
| 20–60 Hz · Sub | Kick body, low B fundamental, sub synths | Rumble; the limiter works on something nobody hears | Thin on big systems; unnoticeable on laptops |
| 60–160 Hz · Bass | Kick and bass fundamentals, snare and low tom body | Heavy, congested, the bass eats the mix | No power or push, the rhythm section doesn't hold |
| 160–400 Hz · Low mid | Guitar and piano body, male voices, general warmth | Mud: the zone where the most things overlap by accident | Hollow mix, lows and highs with nothing in between |
| 400 Hz–1 kHz · Mid | Fundamentals of nearly everything, the body of the voice | Nasal, boxy, telephone-like | The voice loses weight and the mix comes apart |
| 1–4 kHz · Upper mid | Lyric intelligibility, percussion and pick attack | Harsh, aggressive, tiring within ten minutes | The vocal isn't intelligible even when it's loud |
| 4–10 kHz · High | Presence, sibilance, cymbal shimmer | Sibilance, edge, listening fatigue | Dull, like a blanket over the speakers |
| 10–20 kHz · Air | Sense of space and of an expensive recording | Hiss and noise floor pushed forward | Closed in, but rarely the main problem |
Read it as a starting point for where to look, not as a recipe. The same guitar can need body at 200 Hz in a ballad and get in the way at exactly that point in a track with keys: what decides isn't the instrument, it's what else is playing at the same time.
The problem isn't a band: it's overlap
When a mix sounds wrong, the reflex is to hunt for the guilty frequency. There almost never is one. What usually happens is that five elements occupy the same strip with the same energy and none stands out — the effect is dirt, not a specific excess. That's why turning the vocal up doesn't make it intelligible: if the place where its intelligibility lives is crowded, it arrives louder but just as blurred.
Checking it costs a minute: mute everything but the two elements you suspect and listen to them together. If they sound fine apart and dirty together, you've found where they're fighting. That pairwise diagnosis is faster than any analysis of the master bus.
- Kick and bass fight between 60 and 120 Hz almost every time. It's the most common case and has its own guide.
- Vocal and rhythm guitar compete between 2 and 4 kHz, where both keep their presence.
- Snare and vocal cross around 200 Hz for body, and again at 3 kHz for attack.
- Cymbals and vocal sibilance share 6–8 kHz: if you've opened the drum bus highs, the vocal hisses without you touching it.
How you learn to recognise them
Recognising a frequency by ear isn't a gift: it's memory, and it trains like the vocabulary of a language. The method that works is short and boring — hear a narrow boost in a known zone, take it away, put it back, and keep the colour it adds. Within a few weeks you start naming zones before touching anything, and that's where mixing genuinely speeds up.
Two ways to practise it without setting anything up: the EQ Surgeon, which makes you locate the boosted band in real material, and the mix analyser, to contrast what you think you hear with what's actually measured. If you'd rather follow an ordered routine, it's in the ear training guide.
Frequently asked questions
- How many bands are there really?
- None, strictly speaking: the spectrum is continuous and the divisions are vocabulary we use to understand each other. What matters is that when someone says «there's mud in the low mids» everyone looks at roughly the same zone. The boundaries you'll see here and elsewhere shift by 20 or 30 Hz depending on who writes them, and that's fine.
- Why does my mix sound good on headphones and bad in the car?
- Almost always the low-end balance. Headphones reproduce sub bass easily and a small room doesn't, so each system shows you a different part of the same problem. Listening in several places isn't superstition: it's the cheap way to spot which zone is out of balance.
- Which frequency do I cut to remove mud?
- Mud usually lives between 200 and 500 Hz, but cutting there on every track as a matter of routine leaves the mix thin and bodyless. What works is identifying which specific tracks overlap in that zone — normally too many at once — and relieving only the ones that don't depend on it.
- What if I can't hear sub bass on my system?
- That's normal with small or portable speakers: below 60 Hz they simply don't reproduce. The answer isn't to guess, it's to look at an analyser to know what's down there and check the mix on headphones, which do reach. Working blind in that zone is like correcting colour with the lights off.
- Is there an ideal curve for every mix?
- No. There are tendencies by genre — hip hop takes far more energy below 80 Hz than folk does — but a target curve is a reference, not a destination. Two excellent records in the same style can have quite different balances.