Hi

I'm recording acoustic/electric guitar int oCakewalk, and need to know where you stand on the following issue...

To achieve optimal results, do I turn up, down, put in middle position, or set to my liking, all the levels of the eqaulization sliders on my guitar's onboard preamp?  I read in another post that the levels should be "flat," but I don't know what "flat" means in this sense.

When people talk about EQ they reference lows, mids, and highs; however, in some preamps you can have up to 8 sliders from low to high. On a guitar preamp, you will most likely have three.

The EQ turns up the volume of all three pitches of the sound. If you slide up your high EQ, you'll get really loud, audible highs compared to the other pitches. Same goes for the other two.

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Flat = in the MIDDLE (usually on a line) across the EQ board (or vertically, however yours are set up). This means everything has equal volume to other pitches.

Let's say your recording a jazz piece with a lot of bass notes with the rest of the melody kind of following this "bass lead". You might want to EQ your bass up to make it sound like the bass is actually leading the other piece.

On the other hand, maybe you're playing a flamenco piece with a lot of piercing high notes. Dial that high fucker up!

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Usually, recording with/into a flat board is considering boring (any mixing engineer would tell you that he always EQs everything at least a little). Even if you get your guitar tone perfectly the way you want to hear it in real life, a mic (or in this case your guitar piezzo pickups) will not always pick up the exact same volume levels for each range of pitch. A condenser mic will pick up far more low and high pitch while a condenser will pick up mids well.

If you really want a perfect recording sound, you should use your guitar's EQ or a preamp EQ because it will preserve sound quality better than a computer or amp EQ (the degree of this is debatable).

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The way you EQ everything is YOUR CHOICE. There are people that go to school for years to learn how to produce and record music (something I'm thinking about) and a large part of this is learning how to mix (EQ things). It's a real artform.

And it's a HUGE pain in the ass to get the right EQ, but it will significantly improve the tone of your music

Thanks for the reply.  That'll be a great help.

your ears are the final eq'n master... flat is usually just a starting point.. you don't want to much of one frequency (lows, mids highs) overriding all the others(unless your doing it for effect). 

your ears are the best tell of what is going on.. if the low end( bass freqs) are to boomy or muddy then turn em down some.  same if it is boxy (honky sounding) to much mids, turn em down.  same with the highs.. shreik'n ear piercing stuff ,, turn em down... Listen to recordings of guitars that you want your guitar to sound like then try to get that sound from yours.. usually impossible but you can come close. 

Experiment ,, there is no wrong, just try it and see what happens.

Thanks again!  Now how do I get my picture to be on profile.  I enter my picture into the browse box, and I fill in the other two fields, and then when I submit it, the screen blinks, but nothing else happens.  I don't see any requirements for size, weight, etc., and I'm loading in a 20v20 pic that's like 7 kb.  What am I doing wrong?