But I clearly see that you don't give up. OK. This is really, really good.

 

Yup, great plugin. In my mix template, Claro sits on my master track and the mix view of this instance sits in full screen its own little angled 24” monitor screen right behind my fader controller.

 

Hey, I appreciate your openness to talk about the difficulties you have. I'm all over the place with attention and mood disorders, so I can relate, but I don't think I deal with it to the same degree you're describing.

In one sense, the advice you don't want to hear is kind of it - you can't one-size-fits-all EQ a track unless it falls into very similar parameters and the mix is very similar and the tempo, vibe, audience, etc. is very similar... what a guitar needs in a slow jam is going to be different from a metal song. You can generally guess that you can high pass around 80hz and there's probably some junk between 300-600hz that should be scooped, but beyond that it's going to be up to what that track needs in that mix.

HOWEVER, one thing I think might help you is to get an EQ that has a very limited and intentional set of bands so that you're not spinning your wheels trying to notch out resonances when you should be focusing on the arrangement and writing, but you're still able to broad stroke sculpt stuff into sounding good for now, and you can go back and get more precise later if you want.

I think everyone experiences this kind of thing but I seem to have it bad enough where it actively causes me problems in getting anything done - if I have too many options, too much available to tinker with - I'll get stuck micro-mixing a parallel subgroup of a drum buss into an IR of a rotary telephone for three hours and then wonder why I only have 4 bars of a song done.

MAAG EQ4 comes to mind - you've got a small handful of generically useful bands to cut or boost. No picking bell/shelf or setting Q, just boost or cut in the 4 bands available, with some sub and some air too if you want it. I tried it a while back as a UAD plugin demo and remember thinking that I was surprised as how usable it was considering it was so limited - Plugin Alliance has it for $19.99 right now but you can do the same sort of thing with other plugins - this one just has a good set of predefined bands and has a pleasing quality.

Hope that helps - sometimes I make myself use a Logic template that I've preset with a drum VI, some synth channels, a guitar channel, and a bass channel, with all my routing already set and all the plugins/channel strips/eqs already pre-loaded where I'd probably want them. I try to force myself to not load anything new until I'm absolutely out of options. Sometimes it helps, but at the end of the day you're still only at war with yourself... lol.