Best equalizer settings for hip-hop, rap and trap

Set a five-band EQ to +8 dB at 60 Hz, +4 dB at 230 Hz, −4 dB at 910 Hz, +2 dB at 3 kHz, +3 dB at 14 kHz. That's the Hip-Hop preset in the app and on the site, and the number people leave out is the cut at 910 Hz. Boosting bass alone is what makes rap sound thick and blurry. Cutting the low mids is what makes the same amount of bass read as deep. You can run the whole curve on your own file in the five-band equalizer. It works in the browser, the file never leaves your device, and every band is adjustable if you want to tune from there.

The five numbers

All five are peaking filters at Q = 1.0, which works out to about 1.4 octaves of bandwidth each. They overlap. The 60 Hz band still has real gain up at 100 Hz, and the 230 Hz band still pulls down at 120 Hz, so what you get down low is one broad hump rather than two separate bumps. That's why these numbers look bigger than what you'd type into a surgical mixing EQ.

Why the 60 Hz lift is so big

+8 dB is about 2.5 times the amplitude of the untouched signal. For reference, doubling amplitude is +6.02 dB. That sounds extreme until you notice where 808s actually live. An 808 tuned to E1 has its fundamental at 41.2 Hz. A1 is 55 Hz. Plenty of modern trap 808s sit below the 60 Hz band's centre, and a peaking filter at 60 Hz with Q = 1 doesn't deliver its full boost down there: dial in +8 dB at 60 and you get roughly +4.7 dB at 40 Hz, about +5.9 dB at 45 Hz.

So the +8 isn't "make the bass two and a half times louder". It's "push hard enough at 60 that something useful survives at 45". If you're on a system that genuinely reproduces 30 to 50 Hz, meaning over-ear headphones with a decent seal, a subwoofer, or a car with a real sub, +8 at 60 Hz will feel like a lot and you may want +5 or +6 instead. On earbuds it usually lands about right.

What your earbuds physically cannot play

Here's the part most "best EQ settings" pages skip. Small drivers roll off in the bass. Typical wireless earbuds start losing output somewhere around 40 to 60 Hz, phone speakers give up far higher (often nothing useful below 300 to 400 Hz), and laptop speakers aren't much better. When an 808's fundamental is at 41 Hz and your driver stops moving air at 55 Hz, no EQ setting conjures that note into existence.

What you're hearing instead is the 808's harmonics: the 2nd at 82 Hz, the 3rd at 124 Hz, plus the buzzy upper harmonics producers deliberately add for exactly this reason. Your ear reconstructs the missing fundamental from that harmonic series. It's a real perceptual effect and it's why an 808 still reads as an 808 on AirPods.

The practical consequence: on small drivers, the +4 dB at 230 Hz often does more audible work than the +8 at 60 Hz, because 230 Hz is inside what the driver can actually reproduce. If your setup is small, try 60 Hz at +5 and 230 Hz at +5. You'll get more perceived weight and less wasted excursion. Cranking 60 Hz on a driver that can't reproduce it just eats headroom and pushes the driver into distortion.

The 910 Hz scoop is the whole trick

Every genre preset here has a personality, and hip-hop's is the −4 dB at 910 Hz. Account for the filter's width and you're really touching roughly 560 Hz to 1.5 kHz. That's where "boxy", "honky" and "cardboard" live. It's also where energy piles up: upper harmonics of the 808, the body of the snare, the low end of the vocal, the sample's midrange, all stacked in the same place.

Boost 60 and 230 without cutting 910 and the mids get crowded, and the low end stops sounding like a distinct thing. It smears into the middle. Pull 910 down 4 dB and the bass has room around it. Nothing changed below 100 Hz, but it sounds deeper and better separated, because contrast is what your ears actually judge.

You do lose a little vocal body at 910, since vowel energy sits partly in that range. Consonant definition doesn't, though. That lives higher, roughly 2 to 5 kHz, which is exactly what the +2 dB at 3 kHz is protecting. So the trade is body for clarity, and on rap that's usually the right side of the trade. If a particular vocal starts sounding thin or distant, ease 910 back to −2 rather than adding treble. Treble makes it harsher, not closer.

Setting the level after EQ

Four of the five bands are boosts, so the EQ'd file carries more total energy than the original before you touch any volume control. That makes honest comparison hard. Louder almost always sounds better for the first ten seconds, which is how people talk themselves into terrible EQ curves.

The site's level-matched A/B exists for this. One button flips between the processed and the untouched signal, and the processed side is automatically trimmed back to the original's peak so both land at a comparable level. You hear the tone change instead of a volume change. Flip it a few times over a chorus. If the EQ'd side still wins at matched level, the curve is doing real work. If it only wins when it's louder, you've just turned the volume up in a complicated way.

Once the tone is right, set output level separately. Smart Boost reports sample peak in dBFS, RMS in dBFS, integrated loudness in LUFS (a proper BS.1770-4 measurement, K-weighting, 400 ms blocks with 75 % overlap, gated) and your remaining headroom in dB. If you're prepping something for upload, −14 LUFS is the Spotify and YouTube reference and −16 LUFS is Apple Podcasts. The tool shows the number and the gain needed to hit it, then you move the slider or click the suggestion. It doesn't quietly re-master the file to a target behind your back.

One thing no EQ can do, here or anywhere: raise your device's system volume. Nothing running in a browser can, and no app on iOS can either. If the phone is already maxed and it's still too quiet, boosting the file helps, but the hardware ceiling stays where it is.

Export is WAV, at 16-bit, 24-bit or 32-bit float, rendered offline faster than real time. There's no MP3 export, so if you need MP3 you'll convert the WAV elsewhere.

Hip-hop vs the Electronic curve

People often try the Electronic preset on rap and can't say why it feels wrong. The numbers explain it.

The sub is nearly identical. Everything above it differs. Electronic leaves 910 Hz flat, because a four-on-the-floor kick and a synth bass don't fight in the low mids the way an 808 and a sampled loop do, and it goes much brighter up top for shimmer on synths and open hats. Run that curve on a dense rap mix and you get back the mud you were trying to fix, plus sibilance on every "s" in the vocal. Going the other way, Hip-Hop on a house track sounds hollow, because you scooped mids the track needed.

Tuning it per track

The preset is a starting point. Older boom-bap records from the sampler era usually want less 60 Hz, around +4 or +5, and more 3 kHz, because the low end was recorded modestly and the drums need the snap. Modern trap wants the preset as it is. A muddy YouTube rip or a phone recording of a live set usually wants a deeper 910 cut, around −6, before you add any bass at all.

Quick diagnoses:

• Bass is loud but not deep. The problem is 910, not 60. Cut 910 another 2 dB before adding anything low.
• Vocal buried. Reduce 230 Hz first, since the vocal's body is fighting the bass there. Then add 3 kHz, not 14 kHz.
• Crackling on 808 hits. That's clipping. Turn the limiter on or run Smart Boost.
• Harsh "s" sounds. Pull 14 kHz back to 0 or +1. Air and sibilance share that range.
• Nothing happens when you move 60 Hz. Your speakers don't go that low. Work at 230 Hz instead.

If you only want low end and don't care about the other four bands, the bass booster is simpler: one low shelf at 120 Hz, 0 to +12 dB, with Off/Light/Medium/High/Max stops. A shelf lifts everything below its corner instead of a band around a centre, so it behaves differently from the 60 Hz peak. Broader, more even, and with no scoop to keep it clean. For hip-hop the five-band curve usually wins because of that 910 cut.

The same five bands and the same six genre presets are in the iPhone app, which saves settings per track in a library and works offline. It's free, with an optional subscription that lifts the export limit. Two things it doesn't have yet: the soft limiter and the level-matched A/B. Those are website-only, and they're the two features that keep a heavy bass curve honest.