Free tool
EQ frequency chart
A map of the speaking voice from 20 Hz to 20 kHz. Pick a band to see what lives there, what it sounds like when there is too much or too little of it, and the standard move with typical dB ranges. No audio, no account, nothing to install.
Interactive reference
The voice on the frequency axis
Click or hover a band on the chart, or tab to the band buttons below it, to see what lives there, what too much or too little sounds like, and the standard move. Nothing plays and nothing records; this chart is a map, not a meter.
Green ticks mark the patchd default EQ bands: a high-pass at 80 Hz, a peak at 3 kHz, and a high shelf at 10 kHz.
Rumble and plosives
20 to 120 HzHigh-passRoom rumble, desk thumps, chair creaks, traffic, and the burst of air from p and b plosives. A speaking voice carries almost nothing useful below about 80 Hz.
Too loud
The channel sounds thick and muddy, plosives pop, and meters jump on energy you cannot even hear as tone. That same energy trips gates and compressors before your ears notice it.
Too quiet
Nothing to miss. Cutting below 80 Hz costs a spoken voice almost nothing.
The standard move
Filter it rather than cutting with a gain band: a high-pass at 80 to 120 Hz. The patchd EQ ships with a high-pass at 80 Hz already in place.
Bands overlap on the chart because they overlap in real voices, and every voice and mic is different. Treat the ranges and dB numbers as voice-centric starting points, not laws.
The chart tells you where to look; your ears decide whether a move is needed. For the full workflow on your own voice, including the sweep trick for hunting down a problem band by ear, see how to EQ your microphone.
How to read the chart
The band edges are fuzzy on purpose. Body ends around 250 Hz while mud starts around 200 Hz because real voices do not respect tidy boundaries: a deep voice carries its fundamental lower, a bright voice pushes its sibilance higher. These ranges are voice-centric starting points drawn from common mixing practice, not laws.
The dB numbers follow one logic everywhere: cut narrow, boost wide, stay small. A 2 to 4 dB cut fixes most problems, and if a band seems to need more than about 6 dB, the real fix is usually the mic, the distance, or the room rather than the EQ. If bands, Q, and shelves are new territory, start with what an EQ actually is.
The green ticks show where patchd starts. A fresh EQ in patchd ships with three bands: a high-pass at 80 Hz already filtering rumble, a peak band parked flat at 3 kHz ready for a presence move, and a high shelf at 10 kHz ready for air. That is the shipped starting curve for the three most common voice moves; sibilance gets its own tool, a de-esser whose detection frequency defaults to 6.5 kHz.
Make these moves in real time
patchd is a Windows audio mixer with a real parametric EQ free on every channel, shipping with the starting curve above, plus a de-esser, gate, compressor, and AI noise suppression. Join the waitlist to be the first to know when it ships.