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In this Audacity software tutorial, we’ll show you how to equalize your Audacity tracks.

So, let’s start by opening Audacity. Now a new window opens for another project. So, let’s start by grabbing some of the guitar loop. Let’s open up one of the recent files of ‘Guitar Loop’ and copy a few seconds of it to play with. Copy it with the shortcut key on the top and get back to the new window and paste it. Now we have the guitar loop window to play with. Let’s minimize it a little bit by clicking on Zoom Out, so we can fit it on the page. Now, let’s highlight half of it, so we can hear the difference. Once the portion is highlighted, go to Effect >Equalization, and the new window for equalization opens. Right now, we just have flat equalization. We also have the option of Predefined. If you want, go through these, change it, take a listen. And look, you have Load Predefined Curve, click on it, and now you see the predefined equalization. So, in this instance, it’s taking up the low end, boosting up around the 100Hz and then taking up to high end as well. Take a listen to that by clicking on Preview (Guitar Playing) and then click OK, to take a listen to it side by side. You see the highlighted wave portion has changed a little bit than the other side. Let’s Skip to beginning and then hit Play (Guitar Playing) to listen. So, there we hear a slight difference.

Now, let’s go for something either more or radical, so we can really hear the difference. Highlight half of it again, and then go to Effect > Equalization, where we can do our own predefined equalization. In this instance, couple of points are taken and lowered way down and in the middle point way up. Click on a point on the equalization and you can bring it down. If you want to flat it out, you can click on the point and move it flat. In this instance, we are having a mid range. Now, to play it, click OK, and now we can see the wave form changed considerably. Let’s go ahead and take a listen to that now. We could hear quite a difference now. If you don’t like this change, you can simply click on the Undo short key on the toolbar on the top or Edit > Undo Equalization (Ctrl+Z). Now we see the wave forms back into its original format.

Another thing we can look at here too is the Pop. We could see the Pop wider enough in-between. Let’s highlight that portion of it again and click on Zoom In (Short cut key on the top in toolbar). Now we can see the tens of the second here. So we can really specify just those two little pops. Let’s highlight it right through here and those of the two pops which hit the line here are astounding. There are number of ways to clean this up. But, since we are talking about equalization here, we are going to do it through equalization. So we are highlighting, just those portion here. So, let’s start by analyzing why this pop is happening.
Go to Analyze > Plot Spectrum and the frequency analysis opens. We could see the pop is happening here on the very low end. Scroll over the mouse on it to see the exact frequency down over there. So go back there and we could see the lower ended things where we are getting that pop. So what we can do is, to take down that low end and eliminate that pop. Click Close here and then go to Effects > Equalization and now on our spectrum, click on the pop place in the equalization window. Somewhere between 100Hz to 300Hz, take two points and drop the line down there. Click on Preview now to see if we hear the pop. As the pop is still heard now, go a little bit higher around 300Hz and bring it down. If you still hear the pop in Preview, bring the line down some more. Here, you can see how you can play with equalization. Preview it now and we could still hear the pop. So, bring it down again. This is how we could do equalization. You can play bit by bit, to see what’s working for you. Click Preview and now it hears ok. So, click OK. Now we see our wave is half the peaking line. Let’s take a listen, and now we can hear it is removed.

Again, there are other ways of removing those pops. But in equalization here, it was better to explain it this way. Last thing to see here is, go to Effect > Repeat Equalization. We can repeat this, for any of the sections we want. For instance, go to next pop and Zoom Out. Taking a portion, assuming it’s our next pop, highlight it and then go to Effect > Repeat Equalization, which gets it adjusted, taking the peak sound a little bit.

Again there are two things here to remind about saving the project. First thing is, when you try different equalizations, save the project with different names, so you can go back and listen to the different ones and see which one we like. The second thing is, try the whole workflow and see which you are going to end up with.

Again, do your samples for whatever you are going to do, whether it is your CD or broadcast or whatever it is going to be, make sure equalization is working for you on a shorter piece and then go ahead and play it on the whole piece.

That’s how you do equalizations.