EQ Question

It depends. What does it sound like now? What's lacking or overly exaggerated? Listen to the mix and it will tell you what it needs. Maybe nothing. I've never had to eq and orchestra but the approach would be the same for any music. Don't do anything without a reason for doing it. Start with a fairly narrow eq and sweep the upper levels to see what jumps out at you, good or bad. Accent the good pull out the bad. Anyway, that's what I'd do. Someone with some experience in this genre might chime in. Peace.

Exactly! Eq is a great tool but it's one of the quickest ways of making a mix fall apart. Again, maybe someone else could help you more. Run it through the quad curve eq and see where your frequencies are. If you have some extreme lows maybe just use a high pass filter but be careful not to take too much out. Only the subs like 40 to 50hz maybe.

First of all, apologies for butting in here 
 

Jeff Evans
So you can think of the spectrum now being broken into 5 areas.  Lows, Lower Mids, Mids, Upper Mids, Highs.

This is something I have been looking into more in the last month or so... Yeah, I know I should have done this about thirty years ago...
 
Anyway, I've used google to try an establish what are the actual frequencies being referred to when we say, low, low middle, middle, high middle and high. It's just the way I am... I need labels and sharply defined boundaries and I find "grey areas" a tad frustrating (just the way I've grown up, much to the annoyance of those close to me).
 
I found a few interesting articles, although, this is the internet and it's always a question of what can be trusted.
 
This Wikipedia page is a short article about audio frequency:-
 
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audio_frequency
 
Although it doesn't mention low, low middle, etc. it does have five distinct "bands" that relate to octaves, so I'm sure most of us can relate to that. From the Wikipedia page:-
 
16 to 32, 1st octave - The human threshold of hearing, and the lowest pedal notes of a pipe organ.
32 to 512, 2nd to 5th octave - Rhythm frequencies, where the lower and upper bass notes lie.
512 to 2048, 6th to 7th octave -  Defines human speech intelligibility, gives a horn-like or tinny quality to sound.
2048 to 8192, 8th to 9th octave - Gives presence to speech, where labial and fricative sounds lie.
8192 to 16384, 10th octave - Brilliance, the sounds of bells and the ringing of cymbals and sibilance in speech.
 
Then there is this article:-
 
http://www.teachmeaudio.com/mixing/techniques/audio-spectrum
 
It suggests that there are seven "bands" as follows:-
 
Sub Bass: 20 to 60 Hz
Bass: 60 to 250 Hz
Low Midrange: 250 to 500 Hz
Midrange: 500 Hz to 2 kHz
Upper Midrange: 2 to 4 kHz
Presence: 4 kHz to 6 kHz
Brilliance: 6 kHz to 20 kHz
 
I suppose that both articles are helpful, but it appears to me that this may not be an exact science and is another one of those areas open to experience and opinion.
 
To anyone who may have got this far, I suppose the question is, what are your thoughts?
 
cheers
 
andy

Cheers Jeff, yet again 
 
It's getting easier for me now, with your words here, amongst others, and the second article I linked to, to form my own understanding. I certainly don't have the hearing skills required and I'm mainly relying on SPAN at the moment. I am spending more time listening to other peoples music at the moment and, where possible, putting it into Sonar so I can use SPAN. So that is helping a great deal.
 

Jeff Evans
The lower mids is often an area where a mix can get clogged up a bit.

I'm having a lot of trouble in this area... But I'm working on it.
 
And I should probably have raised this in my own EQ topic, so sorry, again, to the OP of this topic.
 
cheers
 
andy