It's My Right - Matt's mix

[pauli]

it can be difficult passing comments on posts, because fundamentally we should be judging the objective characteristics of the mix. we cannot readily do so, however, if the mastering process has been applied in a less than qualified manner. just something to think about......

+1. I've come to realize that if I'm trying to broadly change the character of a mix during mastering, something's amiss in the mix itself. Lots of internet advice suggests a linear phase high shelving boost at mastering for "air" and "sheen" and a mastered sound. I think that usually only works if you're using really high quality mastering processors... lots of stuff between 15 and 20kHz, even the the junk I can't readily hear above 17kHz... well, I usually find it annoying, so I avoid boosting the trebles like that with the free/cheap processing that's available to me. Lots of folks think digital EQs sound brittle when boosting the highs.

just before i sign off and get some work done, i will mention a feature that haunts a lot of people learning to mix. given that most instrument's fundamentals occur in the low-mid's, it's a zone which gets crowded pretty quickly. when it does, the temptation is to seek clarity further up in the harmonic's, and that's when problems start. i think this is why you're pushing the trebles and i'm getting fatigued by it.

+5 Side note, not really related to this production, but worth thinking about: A lot of the times it's an arrangement issue more so than a mix issue IMO which really sucks... the slice and dice associated with addressing things like that is a real drag. If the majority of the fundamentals are occurring within the same octave, the production will become effectively unmixable. When you have to highpass and/or severely attenuate the fundamentals across most of the instruments in the mix, you're gonna cut the balls off the mix as a whole and wind up with too much high mid. But then if you try to pan your way out of it, you wind up with too much non-directional frequency content on the sides... which is generally bad both artistically and scientifically, unless you have a specific reason for doing so.

When you think about it, low shelving the bottom half of the spectrum isn't much different than boosting the top half after you volume match.

One more little bit... electric guitars by and large don't produce any musical harmonics above 5000 kHz... just noise... and the ratio of analog noise to harmonics starts getting unwieldy around 4000. The potential ugliness gets a lot worse if the signal is overdriven pretty hard, too, because the distortion is adding harmonics to the noise as well as the good stuff. The takeaway is that you can get away with lowpassing electric guitars most of the time, but a gentle lowpass, 6dB per octave, is usually best, since steeper curves usually create a sharp resonance at the corner frequency and that's just going to make things worse.

You can clear out a lot of the fatiguing crap in the treble by attenuating or removing it from electric guitars... acoustic guitars are another matter altogether and the two of the same make/model acoustic guitars can sound quite different in the highs depending on string tension, technique, how often the instrument is played, how old the strings are... it's mind boggling. But electric guitars are much more predictable in the highs-- you don't need em. Save that stuff for the vocal and cymbals. Might sound a little dull after the guitars have been sizzling your ears for a few minutes, but take a break, come back and you'll see what I mean.