Best equalizer settings for EDM and electronic music

Set the five bands to +7 dB at 60 Hz, +1 dB at 230 Hz, 0 dB at 910 Hz, +5 dB at 3 kHz and +7 dB at 14 kHz. That's the Electronic preset in the five-band equalizer: heavy at the bottom, untouched in the middle, bright and snappy on top. One thing to do before you dial it in, though — pull the volume down first. Modern EDM masters are limited so hard there's almost no headroom left in the file, and adding 7 dB at both ends of the spectrum will run a club track past full scale within a bar or two.

The Electronic curve in numbers

Every band is a peaking biquad with Q = 1.0, so each one covers roughly 1.4 octaves around its centre frequency. Nothing here is a shelf, which matters: the 14 kHz band lifts the air region and then falls away again rather than climbing forever, and the 60 Hz band tapers off below about 37 Hz instead of dumping energy into subsonic mush.

That's 7 dB between the flat middle and the boosted edges, and 7 dB of extra level going into everything downstream. For reference, +6.02 dB is exactly a doubling of amplitude, so +7 dB at 60 Hz is a bit more than twice the sub level you started with.

Worth checking your source, too. Low-bitrate lossy files are usually low-passed somewhere around 16 kHz, so on a 128 kbps MP3 the 14 kHz band is working on the last scrap of spectrum that survived encoding. It still does something. It does a lot more on a WAV or a high-bitrate stream.

Why the middle stays flat

This is where most EQ settings for electronic music go wrong. People see a smile curve and assume the mids should be scooped, so they drag 910 Hz down to −4 or −6. On a rock record that works. On a house or techno track it hollows the whole thing out, because the mids aren't in the way here — they are the track.

A supersaw lead, a reese bass, a plucked chord stab, a vocal chop: whatever their fundamentals, their harmonics pile up between 300 Hz and 2 kHz. The producer already carved that region so the bass and the lead don't fight. Scoop it again on playback and the drop loses its punch even though the sub got louder. Leaving 910 Hz at 0 and 230 Hz at only +1 is deliberate: add at the edges, don't subtract from the body.

The +5 dB at 3 kHz is the band people underrate. That's transient territory — the leading edge of a clap, the click at the front of a kick, the attack on a pluck. Boost it and the groove feels tighter and faster without the tempo changing. Push past about +8 and claps start sounding papery and thin instead of sharp.

Why EDM clips faster than most music

Commercial EDM is mastered to be the loudest thing in the playlist. Sample peaks sit within a fraction of a dB of 0 dBFS and the average level is crushed up close behind them — on a big-room master the gap between the peak and the RMS is often under 7 dB. There's nothing left to give.

So when you add +7 dB at 60 Hz to a file that already peaks at −0.2 dBFS, the arithmetic isn't subtle. Boosts in separate bands don't literally add in dB, but the waveform they produce still gets bigger, and in four-on-the-floor the kick and the hats land together constantly. When it goes over you don't get a warning beep. You get a gritty crunch on the kick that a lot of people read as "loud", and then wonder why their ears are tired after two tracks.

Smart Boost takes the guesswork out of the starting point. It scans every sample and reports sample peak in dBFS, RMS in dBFS, integrated loudness in LUFS (a real ITU-R BS.1770-4 measurement — K-weighting, 400 ms blocks at 75 % overlap, both gates), headroom in dB, and the exact percentage that produces zero clipped samples, with a 1 dB margin below full scale. One click applies it. Run it on a club track before you touch anything and the headroom figure will tell you how much room you're actually working with.

Two honest caveats. It measures sample peak, not true peak (dBTP) — inter-sample peaks in a heavily limited master can sit a few tenths of a dB above the highest actual sample, which is exactly why it leaves that 1 dB of margin rather than aiming at 0. And it won't re-master to a loudness target for you. It'll tell you the file measures −8.3 LUFS integrated and what gain would land it at −14 LUFS for Spotify or YouTube, or −16 for Apple Podcasts. You still move the slider.

The soft limiter is on by default and catches what's left. It's a tanh-knee waveshaper: transparent below 0.7 of full scale, asymptotic to full scale above that. A limiter, not a compressor — no attack, no release, no pumping. It'll stop a stray transient turning into a click. It is not a licence to leave the volume at 200 %.

What your headphones do below 60 Hz

The +7 dB at 60 Hz assumes your hardware can reproduce 60 Hz. Plenty of it can't.

• Over-ear headphones with a decent seal. These do 40–60 Hz honestly. The full +7 lands, and on an already bassy pair it can be too much — try +5.
• In-ear buds. Sub response depends almost entirely on the tip seal. A loose tip can lose 10 dB or more below 100 Hz. Swap tip size before you swap EQ settings; it's a bigger change than anything the sliders do.
• Laptop and phone speakers. Most roll off hard below 150–200 Hz. Boosting 60 Hz there mostly makes the driver work harder and adds distortion you hear in the mids. Move the energy up instead: +3 at 60 and +6 at 230 lifts the harmonics the speaker can actually produce, and your brain fills in the missing fundamental.
• Car audio. Cabin gain already adds several dB below 80 Hz for free. Pull 60 Hz back to +3 or +4 or the low end turns to soup.

If you want more weight than a single peaking band can give, don't fight the EQ — run the 120 Hz low shelf alongside it. A shelf lifts everything below the corner evenly, up to +12 dB, so it fattens the whole bass region rather than sculpting a hump, and it stacks cleanly with a modest 60 Hz peak.

Tweaks for house, dubstep and trance

"Electronic" covers a lot of ground, and the same five bands want different numbers depending on what's playing.

House wants a gentler version of the default, because it lives on groove rather than weight; +7 at both ends starts to smear the shuffle. Dubstep goes the other way: 60 Hz to +9 and 910 Hz down to −2, which is the one place a small mid dip genuinely helps, since a wobble sweeps its harmonics straight through that band and a couple of dB off stops it getting shouty. Trance wants the top more than the bottom — +8 at 14 kHz makes a long riser feel like it keeps climbing.

If you're doing this on a phone, the iPhone app keeps a library of your files with the EQ and bass settings stored against each track, so your dubstep folder and your house folder can hold different curves without re-dialling every time.

How this differs from the hip-hop curve

People try the Hip-Hop preset on EDM all the time, on the grounds that both are bass music. They're not the same shape.

Hip-Hop scoops 910 Hz by 4 dB because an 808 and a sampled loop both crowd the low mids, and the scoop clears space for the vocal. Electronic leaves that band flat — there's usually no rapped vocal to make room for, and the synths need their body. The other split is up top: +7 at 14 kHz against Hip-Hop's +3, because hat sizzle and riser air are a defining texture here rather than a garnish. And +5 at 3 kHz versus +2, for the hard transient edge.

Put a hip-hop curve on a trance track and it sounds veiled. Put an EDM curve on a rap track and the vocal disappears under the beat.

How to check you actually improved it

Turn anything up slightly and it sounds better, even when nothing else changed. That's why almost every EQ preset feels like an upgrade for the first few seconds, whether or not it is. The level-matched A/B button fixes that: it flips between the processed and untouched signal and automatically trims the processed side back to the original's peak, so both sides hit your ears at the same level. What's left is the tone difference alone. Nothing else in this category does it, and it's the fastest way to discover that your +12-everywhere setting is worse than +5.

A workable order: load the file, run Smart Boost to see the headroom, set the EQ, back the volume off until the clip warning reads zero, then A/B against the original. Export when it's right. Export is WAV only — 16-bit, 24-bit or 32-bit float, rendered offline faster than real time, no MP3 option, no watermark, no account, and nothing leaves your machine because the whole thing runs in the browser.

For video, the video volume page loads MP4, MOV and WebM, plays them with the audio boosted live so you can set the curve against the picture, and exports the boosted audio as a WAV. It does not re-encode the video file. If you need the louder audio back inside the video, that's a separate mux step in something like a video editor or ffmpeg.