19-04-2024, 02:40 AM
What are you using to mix? Monitors? headphones? Sometimes having a really high fidelity headphones gives you a fake impression of what your high end really sounds like. It may sound great in your listening system as you mix (because the high fidelity has little to no distortion on the top end), but when you play it in the car, or in cheap headphones or in a small speaker the mix sounds harsh. At the same time having a low fidelity system can lie to you as those usually are very midrange heavy and lack that brittle in sound so sometimes you end up boosting a lot more than what it needs. That's why referencing tracks helps you spot the inconsistencies in frequencies. Pros do it all the time so it's not just a beginner tip.
As far as organic goes sometimes I too emphasize boost on highs and lows but when your midrange is there it's bearable or not that noticeable. I think that's why pro records sound so amazing.. they focus a lot on the midrange and just enhance highs and lows just to put that ear candy on it. Something I'm still learning but I no longer go crazy on my highs like before.
I would say to keep it organic balancing the tracks as whole is one of my approaches. When you balance all tracks to the point where you pretty much hear everything to some degree, the mix slowly tells you what it needs without going crazy on the eq, compression fx etc. When you have things at a good spot, for example if everything sounds too thick in the low end, then you begin to highpass tracks to clear out the low end. In comparison if you solo every track and try to make it sound great in solo, by the time you bring all tracks to the balancing process you get a lot more chaos and now you gotta go backwards to tame or fix some things.
After a while you get used to the most basic moves so you do them without thinking first. For example for me I know every single vocal track gets highpassed from 100hz(depends there are times where I don' highpass vocals but has to be for a specific reason) and below. Once all tracks come in I then I check and see how far up in the freq. it needs to be.
For this particular mix I highpassed the vocals up to 165hz-200hz. I boosted high shelf of 1.3db from 7khz. I did a -4.3db cut at 1.6khz with medium Q. on top of that highpass filter (because the curve of that roll off is not that big) I used a low shelf cut of -6.3 from 200hz down. (I used the ssl channel plugin for this). Again all of these choices were done in reference to all balancing of the tracks. Sometimes you think you are done.. then you tweak something else.. and then you gotta come back to what you thought was good.
Anyways this was a long comment. sorry.
As far as organic goes sometimes I too emphasize boost on highs and lows but when your midrange is there it's bearable or not that noticeable. I think that's why pro records sound so amazing.. they focus a lot on the midrange and just enhance highs and lows just to put that ear candy on it. Something I'm still learning but I no longer go crazy on my highs like before.
I would say to keep it organic balancing the tracks as whole is one of my approaches. When you balance all tracks to the point where you pretty much hear everything to some degree, the mix slowly tells you what it needs without going crazy on the eq, compression fx etc. When you have things at a good spot, for example if everything sounds too thick in the low end, then you begin to highpass tracks to clear out the low end. In comparison if you solo every track and try to make it sound great in solo, by the time you bring all tracks to the balancing process you get a lot more chaos and now you gotta go backwards to tame or fix some things.
After a while you get used to the most basic moves so you do them without thinking first. For example for me I know every single vocal track gets highpassed from 100hz(depends there are times where I don' highpass vocals but has to be for a specific reason) and below. Once all tracks come in I then I check and see how far up in the freq. it needs to be.
For this particular mix I highpassed the vocals up to 165hz-200hz. I boosted high shelf of 1.3db from 7khz. I did a -4.3db cut at 1.6khz with medium Q. on top of that highpass filter (because the curve of that roll off is not that big) I used a low shelf cut of -6.3 from 200hz down. (I used the ssl channel plugin for this). Again all of these choices were done in reference to all balancing of the tracks. Sometimes you think you are done.. then you tweak something else.. and then you gotta come back to what you thought was good.
Anyways this was a long comment. sorry.