100hz roll off addiction...bad habit?

[dokushoka]

I finally woke up to this just a few months ago when I got fed up with low freq's I wasn't paying attention to causing prob's in my mixes. So I started just simply cutting off the lows with my HPF like a madman and my mixes sound so much better for it. I have no problem cutting off everything below 15Hz on alot of stuff - including acoustic guitars. Definitely gives me more headroom and definitely opens up more sonic space for the bassier instruments like hand percussion and bass guitar. LPF for highs helps alot too.

I just bought a Tascam PE-40 4 channel EQ (1983?) and one of the reasons I opted for this unit was the LPF (60Hz and 160Hz) and HPF (15kHz).

Honestly, if you put an acoustic guitar into a frequency analyzer, you won't see much happening down below 15hz... Most preamps/line amps/mics are naturally rolling off down at that point, anyways, with the exception of some of the really modern stuff.

Here is a chart of a Microtech Gefell M300, an excellent microphone for recording acoustic instruments that is fairly typical while still retaining a wide frequency response.




You'll notice that even at 50hz, its starting to roll off pretty dramatically. With the distance that this microphone would typically be placed from an acoustic guitar, this roll off will look even MORE dramatic.

My point is:
If the low end in your mix isn't working, its probably NOT because of the sub-octave except maybe if you are doing lots of electronic music.

The problem area, more than likely, is going to be in the 80 to 250hz range. This is where a keen ear is really necessary. Pinpointing where problems are building up is not easy! Its tempting to just sweep up with a high pass filter, but this is not the solution!

I would say compare your heavily high passed mix to a commercial release and level match them with an RMS meter. It should be obvious which one sounds "bigger" and has more apparent volume...

[dokushoka]

The real "omph" from a mix will come from the low end. Guitar, vocals, snare drums, etc all have a lot of info happening in their lower registers and that information, if correctly captured, is crucial to its sound.

Totally agree with you about the low end driving a good mix. The problem for many of us in subpar spaces with subpar monitoring isn't in the capture, it's in not being able to reliably hear what's going on in sub-80hZ-ville. I know my monitors (Tannoy Reveals), and my room (ghetto bass treatment) are far from ideal when it comes to managing low end in a mix, so I play it safe and end up with less weighty, but less muddy, mixes in the process.

You should be MORE than fine with your Reveals. Plenty of great sounding mixes have been done on them. The trick is to keep them off the back wall a bit and keep your levels LOW. I mix on NS10s and some very small Apple speakers (nothing else, really) and no one is complaining about the low end in my mixes (unless the mastering engineer does something to it )

Here is an excellent article by Charles Dye on monitoring and lots of tricks you can use for perceiving low end in a more useful way.

http://emusician.com/tutorials/emusic_m ... g_success/

[ctmsound]

I find a nice high pass filter on most things like guitar, snare, vocals, piano, etc. and then adding a plug-in to the track like Sony's Transient Modulator to bring out the frequencies that matter more. I find my mixes to be much more intelligible, especially in the low end. Yet, my mixes still have more bottom where it matters. Kick drum, bass guitar, and other low frequency specific instruments are much clearer and present in the mix than in the past.

[thethingwiththestuff]

i think "15Hz" was a typo, and he meant 150...

[dokushoka]

Kick drum, bass guitar, and other low frequency specific instruments are much clearer and present in the mix than in the past.

Guitars and most male voices actually have a lot of low end. This is sort of the point that I am driving at. There is a lot happening on an electric guitar down below 100hz and this is the very thing which "connects" the guitar to the bass guitar. And like-wise, there is a lot of sub 100hz info on a vocal which ties the vocal to the guitar/bass, etc.

I find that intelligibility comes from managing the low mids/sub-octave, not REMOVING them. All those filters will create a harsh, separated and distorted sounding mix. It might have more intelligibility than the muddy mix, but it won't have the "depth". A lot of the sound that people associate with "ITB" mixes, I find, comes from the overuse of high pass filters.

Its worth it to sit down with a really great mastering engineer and see what they do to manage low end... it can be very enlightening!

[dokushoka]

i think "15Hz" was a typo, and he meant 150...

In that case, 150hz is VERY high for most acoustic guitar parts...



My high pass filters are typically no higher than 50hz on an acoustic guitar and they are a 3db or 8db per octave slope...

[???????]

interesting discussion!

How do you deal with "masking."

For instance: One reason I will grab the high pass is if I'm losing something in the kick drum.

Do you not find it's ever better to strip something of a certain frequency for the greater good? I mean, we have two speakers actually creating the sound, if multiple things live in the same space something's gotta give, right? What are your thoughts on this?

[dokushoka]

interesting discussion!

How do you deal with "masking."

Well this is the whole craft of mixing and what separates a good mix from a bad mix. Its not an easily answered question and it has less to do with working the low end then it does with working across the entire frequency spectrum as well as managing dynamics, space, width, etc.

I hate to say it, but I think the best thing anyone who is serious about mixing can do is to go out and buy a pair of NS10s, a great amp and some small, but "detailed" sounding small speakers. If you can work between those two, you'll get a mix that translates between 90% of playback systems.

Listen to any Spike Stent mix. The level of clarity he gets is amazing but he still manages to get HUGE low end out of everything. Its worth just studying his catalog.

I'm sorry that I can't clearly answer you question because its just far to broad and impossible for me to do over the internet. I person, if you were sitting next to me as I was mixing, I could explain things much better, but not with a compooter.

[RefD]

high pass is almost routine for me as well, with exceptions.

as for phase shift and distortion...more, please!

http://www.rothenberg.org/Phase/index.htm

good article, but i meant i wanted more of it.

[GooberNumber9]

When I mix live sound, I high pass the bejezus out of almost everything. Kick and Bass won't get it, even keyboards get it sometimes, depending on the situation. Headroom is critical in live sound.

Hardly ever high pass when mixing a recording. If a source produces a frequency, then I want it. Of course, I've been blessed with some decent rooms and I have HR824s, which for all their faults go pretty low. I will often high pass snare around 80 - 120 and overheads as high as 250 depending, but only if it sounds better that way. Sometimes it makes the kick sound better, sometimes worse. Same thing with toms and any other drum mics.

I guess like anything else, there's times and places for the HPF, and it's something I'll try any time given the situation. I almost always do a side-chain for compressors on any sources with a lot of low end (drums buss, whole mix, even bass guitar sometimes).

In terms of masking, sometimes I want it. If I don't, usually cutting something like 250 and maybe boosting something like 800-900, 1.2k, 2.5k, 5k, something like that does the trick. Like I said, if the instrument is putting out that low end, I want it. If I'm getting low end sounds that aren't the instrument, I'd rather fix it at the source, and I'll only high pass if that's my only option.

Todd Wilcox

[centurymantra]

Hey guys...this is a great discussion! Much food for thought. In honor of this topic, I sat down to revisit a mix the console was still set up for and consciously disengaged a few high pass filters. It's a twelve-step program ya know...

In particular, the comment about an issue with "digital" sounding recordings coming from over zealous low end chopping struck a chord with me. I'll get some pretty nice mixes going, but sometimes they are clean - not necessarily "digital" sounding, but lacking a little weight. Low-end management is a really tricky thing.

[MoreSpaceEcho]

How do you deal with "masking."

For instance: One reason I will grab the high pass is if I'm losing something in the kick drum.

i think a lot of times when the kick is getting masked, it's not the subby stuff at all, but the midrange...yunno you can always hear the kick just fine when it's just drums, bass and vocals, but then the army of idiot guitar players comes in and takes over the mix and suddenly you can't hear anything...

[japmn]

I agree that 100 Hz is a very high place to be cutting frequencies (especially depending on the slope) 40-50 Hz is a good place to start and work your way down from there. A lot of great tonefull boom lives in the 70-80Hz range and I wouldn't want to get rid of that in a kick, bass, floor tom or even some distorted guitars. Vocals though... I cut them shits! A lot.

[drumsound]

I like Doukushka's comment about using low shelves more than full on filters. I filter a few things when tracking, but I use the frequency sweeps on the low shelf when I'm mixing to really dial in how the low of the mix really ends up.

[logancircle]

I'm a 90Hz cutter, too, but shelving sounds less unnatural than hpf, might be worth looking into. Either that or doing a hpf at like 130 with a not-so-steep slope.