Instrument Frequency Range Chart: Fundamentals, Harmonics and Problem Bands

This is the chart I keep open while mixing, because nearly every EQ decision comes down to knowing whether you are touching an instrument's fundamental or its harmonics. Cutting 250 Hz on an acoustic guitar removes boxiness. Cutting 250 Hz on a bass guitar removes the note. Same frequency, opposite outcome, and the only thing that distinguishes them is where each instrument's fundamental range actually sits.

What does every instrument's frequency range actually look like?

Read this table in four columns rather than one. The fundamental range is the span of actual pitches the instrument produces, which is a fact of the instrument's tuning and physical size. The character region is the harmonic band that makes it recognisable, and it is almost always higher than people expect. The problem band is where that instrument most often fights everything else in an arrangement. The last column is what the problem sounds like when you have it.

Why is the fundamental almost never the loudest part of the sound?

Pluck the open low E on a bass guitar and the string vibrates at 41.2 Hz. That is the fundamental, and on most bass recordings it is not the loudest component of the note. The string also vibrates in halves at 82.4 Hz, in thirds at 123.6 Hz, in quarters at 164.8 Hz, and onward in whole-number multiples. Those are the harmonics, and on a bass the second and third are often stronger than the fundamental itself.

This is why the human ear can hear a bass line on a laptop speaker that reproduces nothing below 300 Hz. The brain reconstructs the missing fundamental from the harmonic series above it, an effect that has been understood for more than a century and that every mix engineer relies on without thinking about it. It is also why aggressive high-pass filtering on a bass track can leave the part perfectly audible on small speakers while gutting it on anything with real low end.

The practical consequence: when you reach for EQ, ask which zone you are in. A boost at 800 Hz on a bass guitar adds articulation because that is deep harmonic territory. The same boost on a male vocal adds nasal honk because 800 Hz sits in the first harmonic region of a voice whose fundamental is near 120 Hz. The frequency is identical. The musical meaning is not.

Which frequency bands do instruments fight over?

Masking is the real subject of this chart. Two instruments occupying the same band do not politely share it: the louder one hides the quieter one, and the quieter one contributes nothing but level. The collisions below are the ones that recur in almost every home recording.

How does the room change what you record?

An instrument's frequency range is only half of what ends up in the file. The other half is what the room does to it. A room mode is a frequency whose half wavelength fits between two parallel surfaces, and in a typical spare bedroom the lowest one lands somewhere between 40 and 70 Hz. Look at the chart again: that is exactly where a kick drum fundamental, an open low E on a bass and the bottom octave of a piano all live.

An 11 ft wall resonates at 51.4 Hz. That is between the low E and F of a four string bass. Play a bass part in that room and one note in the line will be noticeably louder than its neighbours, not because the player hit it harder but because the room amplified it. Put a microphone in front of an amp in that room and the boost is now permanently printed into the track. Run your own dimensions through the room mode calculator and then compare the result with this chart. The overlap tells you which instruments your room is going to lie to you about.

Mid and high frequency problems are different in kind. Above roughly 300 Hz, small rooms stop behaving modally and start behaving as a collection of early reflections. Those reflections arrive a few milliseconds after the direct sound and produce comb filtering, a regularly spaced series of notches that reads as a phasey, hollow quality on acoustic guitar and drum overheads in particular. That is what first reflection point absorption fixes, and why 2 inch broadband panels at the mirror points change the sound of a room more than the same money spent anywhere else.

Which microphone suits which frequency range?

Microphone choice is partly a frequency question. A dynamic microphone has a heavier diaphragm than a condenser, which limits how fast it can follow high frequency detail but also makes it tolerant of high sound pressure. That tradeoff maps neatly onto the chart.

For sources whose important content is below about 5 kHz and whose level is high, a dynamic is usually the right answer. The Shure SM57 on a snare drum or a guitar cabinet is the canonical example: it captures the 200 Hz body and the 3 kHz crack, it rolls off the cymbal bleed above 10 kHz that you did not want anyway, and it survives 130 dB SPL without complaint.

For sources whose character is in the 5 to 15 kHz region, a condenser earns its keep. Acoustic guitar sparkle, cymbal shimmer and the air on a soft vocal all sit above where a typical dynamic stops being flat. A Audio-Technica AT2035 on an acoustic guitar captures string detail a dynamic simply does not resolve. The catch is that a condenser also captures the room at that level of detail, which is why untreated rooms flatter dynamics and punish condensers.

For a voice in a room you cannot treat, the Shure SM7B is the standard answer, and the reason is a frequency reason: its tight cardioid pattern and its deliberate presence peak let it deliver intelligibility in the 2 to 5 kHz band while rejecting the room reflections that would otherwise arrive with it. More on the tradeoff in the vocal microphone roundup and in the polar pattern chart.

Can your monitors even show you these frequencies?

This is the check people skip. If your monitors do not reproduce a band, you cannot mix it, and you will make bad decisions there by default. A pair of PreSonus Eris E3.5 pair, with isolation pads and cables with 3.5 inch woofers publishes a low frequency limit around 80 Hz. Look back at the chart: that is above the fundamental of every kick drum, above the bottom two thirds of a bass guitar's range, and an octave and a half above the lowest note on a piano.

That does not make small monitors useless. It makes them monitors you have to know the limits of. Mixing bass on 3.5 inch speakers means mixing the harmonic layer and trusting a meter, a reference track and a set of headphones for the fundamental layer. Stepping up to 5 inch monitors pushes the published limit down near 49 Hz, which covers the fundamental of most kick drums and everything above the low E of a bass.

The trap at the other end is buying more woofer than the room supports. An 8 inch monitor that reaches 38 Hz put into a room whose lowest axial mode is 56 Hz produces an octave of energy the room cannot resolve, and what you hear at the desk is the room's response rather than the mix. The monitor size by room size chart works through the matching, and the small room monitor roundup covers the models.

How do you use this chart while actually mixing?

Not by boosting. The most common misuse of a frequency chart is treating it as a shopping list of boosts, which ends with every track boosted in its character band and a mix that is louder and no clearer. Use it as a subtraction map instead.

1. Decide who owns each band before you touch an EQ. One instrument owns 40 to 80 Hz. One owns 2 to 5 kHz. Write it down if the arrangement is dense.
2. High-pass everything that does not own the bottom. An acoustic guitar high-passed at 100 Hz loses nothing you can hear in a full mix, and gives back headroom that the kick and bass can use. This is the single highest-yield move in the list.
3. Find the problem by sweep, not by chart. Boost a narrow band by 8 dB, sweep it until the sound becomes unpleasant, then cut at that exact frequency. The chart tells you where to start sweeping so you are not hunting across ten octaves.
4. Cut the competitor, not the star. If the vocal is buried at 3 kHz, dip the guitars at 3 kHz rather than boosting the vocal. The mix stays the same size and the vocal steps forward.
5. Check the harmonic layer alone. Play the mix through a phone speaker. If the arrangement collapses, you have leaned too hard on fundamentals that most listeners will never hear.

What are the useful reference frequencies to memorise?

A short list carries most of the load. These are the anchors that make the rest of the chart easy to reason about, and they are worth committing to memory.

Two facts from this table do more work than the rest combined. First, the entire fundamental range of a rock arrangement fits between roughly 40 Hz and 1.3 kHz, which is five octaves, while the full audible spectrum is ten. Everything above 1.3 kHz is harmonics, noise and air. Second, the middle of the piano keyboard sits around 260 Hz, right inside the mud zone, which is why piano-driven arrangements need more low mid discipline than guitar-driven ones.

Where this chart connects to the rest of the site

• Room mode calculator: find which of these frequencies your room exaggerates
• Room modes by dimension chart: the same numbers for common room sizes, no typing required
• dB reference levels chart: the level side of the same discipline
• How to set recording levels: getting the signal in cleanly before any of this matters
• Best studio headphones for mixing: checking the bands your room hides