8 Tips for Amazing Low End!

hello everybody hope you're doing marvelously well in this episode we're going to be talking about mixing low end this is an absolutely massively huge topic so we're going to try and cover as much as possible and get behind all of the different issues you can have and how to solve them there is a link here to a blog and a cheat sheet where you can download these as a PDF file and have all of the points that I am going through at your disposal at any time so please click the link to do that as ever please hit the like button if you haven't already please subscribe to go to produce like a pro com sign up for the email list and you'll get a whole bunch of free goodies ok so there is so much to talk about on this subject I think the most important thing the number one thing to talk about is your monitoring how are you hearing the low end the fact is you can't mix what you can't hear if you don't hear those frequencies you can't mix them yes a subwoofer could be a useful thing to have however there are so many potential risks with the acoustics in your room the only place you can guarantee that you should be able to make it sound good is in the seating position between the two speakers if you've got speakers pointing here that seating position should be what lots of people call the sweet spot now with subs you could potentially get all kinds of problems with low end being too aggressive or too soft and you're compensating for it ultimately a subwoofer is a great thing but I almost feel like you need it once you've learned your speakers in your room a little better acoustic treatment is an important thing not everybody can afford it initially and not everybody fully understands it there's a lot of you know mumbo jumbo talked about it but ultimately you don't want to be in a massively reverberating room you don't want standing waves where frequencies seem to be really boosted you want to be in a place where it feels pretty flat so I know the question you're asking self and to be honest the question I asked of myself when I first started how are you going to know when it sounds good many many people believe in not mix in rooms that don't sound that great that aren't completely flat there aren't anechoic chambers they work in environments that have all kinds of challenges but still managed to get great results I've been to mixed rooms with really well-known mixers and not understood how the mix sounds until I take it to an environment I know and trust and then I can hear it in their rooms I'm a little confused maybe seems to be too much low end or not enough low end and then I go to a room that I feel is flatter maybe I'm wrong but I go to a room and it makes sense to me what's the lesson in that the lesson in that is like those people are mixing in rooms that they understand and maybe the rooms do have issues and they've overcome them your company can't hear so that would point to maybe using a subwoofer I don't know if that's something I would recommend straight off the bat I think if you're using small drivers like four five or six inch monitors the last thing you want to do with those small speakers is put a whole bunch of low-end through them and not know what they're doing so if you can't hear it through those little speakers don't just sit there and keep turning up the low-end and continuously until it starts to just start to feel really really good because the reality is is like if you're starting to hear you know 20 40 60 Hertz pumping through a 4-inch speaker then take that mix out to the car and it's gonna blow your head off the whole thing is it's going to be the car is going to be shaking if you can't hear it don't go down there and try and deal with it there's plenty of things you can do like high passing we'll get to that in a minute but as far as boosting don't boost frequencies you can't hear so now you're probably confused and saying well how am I going to mix that well that's where headphones are really quite useful I have blue headphones and I have Odyssey headphones both of them I absolutely love the Odyssey headphones are super flat cameras bon civ and I actually have a model of my room that I'm able to hear on the Orang C headphones just really fantastic but they are an open-back headphone and they're really super accurate so I love them but what I love about the blue headphones is they're closed and they actually have a hypes low end but you probably thinking what why would you want something with a hype low end well I can work on those a little easier a little bit of extra lift just a tiny bit down there is my way of hearing some of those super lows and so I'm able to move between speakers and headphones and get a really good balanced mix and I've mixed many many times if you've been watching some of my live streams I mix on headphones all the time now and I've been doing that because I want to demonstrate and live in a world where many of you are living where you have to work on headphones maybe you're you know you're living with your parents still maybe you have kids and you're working you know at night after work you don't wake them up so you're on headphones it's really possible or you're in a small apartment and you don't want to annoy the neighbors I mean headphones are a reality it's been a lot of discussion about headphones apparently they're like year-over-year sales are going through the roof on headphones so it's the future so actually mixing on headphones although not necessarily ideal isn't a bad thing because the reality is a lot of your clients are going to end up listening to the music that you work on on headphones it's all about balance don't boost what you can't hear find the headphones with the extended low end like and these are closed back headphones and that will help you don't be afraid to check the best mixers in the world have boom boxes in their rooms have 3 or 4 sets of speakers have other rooms that they go to to listen to playback and then honestly I've worked with a couple of guys I absolutely admire and they go and sit in their cars and listen so I know there's a lot of mumbo-jumbo talking about you know oh don't do this and don't do that well you know what all of the best people do whatever it takes that's really the answer whatever it takes to get the mix out great you will eventually get to know your room you'll understand what translates to other places so you'll be working on a mix and you'll fill to yourself Wow you know if I boost this area here and cut this and all these different things that you learn you'll go away you'll start feeling it translates into other environments you'll come back and you'll start getting a system in place I do not go to the car anymore I don't turn on a subwoofer anymore I know how to make the low-end sound good in this room through a combination of speakers and headphones many of the speakers but they have phones as well I can get the low end to be just what I want it to be I think one of the most important things and I hope I say this enough cut yourself some slack the likelihood of you being in an incredibly acoustically treated amazing sounding room with the pair of $10,000 aside speakers in the perfect seating position is pretty remote and quite frankly so is that for most professional mixers they're not sitting in the most ideal situations they're just sitting in places that they know really well and they know how to get it to sound good the most important thing about mixing low-end is this the last thing that everybody gets it really is we have an amazing online community we have the produce like a pro Academy and it's the number one thing where people come in they start getting like the mid-range detail and panning and all that stuff but the one thing we're always talking about initially when they come in is how to help them getting that low end to just feel right and it's everybody I was in another online community a couple of years ago and I was bemused by that because I've realized that not everybody understands how to get a beautiful full sounding low-end and we all know doesn't matter whether you're doing EDM or reggae or just straight ahead classic rock or metal low-end is really really important everywhere we go now sound systems are amazing you go and see live shows now it's nothing like it was 20 years ago now the sound systems are incredible so your music if it's played through that has to be really really well-mixed on the low-end you can walk through moles and go in and out of stores I've been in stores that have the most incredible sound systems and just blow away what I used to hear everything is moving rapidly everything is improving the base price of equipment is getting cheaper and cheaper so with all of that you know with some teething problems there's always going to be teething problems but ultimately everything is getting better everything eventually is going to sound better I'm always optimistic about this so you're plenty of opportunity to check out your low end and you have plenty most importantly a reason to get it right number two this is personally a big one for me not all low end tips are created equal you're like what does he mean okay I've watched a Sneasel ton of videos on low end I thought I'm gonna do this video on low end and I'm going to go out there and see what information is there so I went through a lot and I would say I don't want to exaggerate but at least 90% of them used program drums virtual instruments or bass guitars that weren't really bass guitars bass synths all this stuff all which is absolutely fantastic but that is only addressing a part of the problem if I've got a bass synthesis we're going door or door playing exactly a blob of bass compression is not an issue if I'm using a program kick which is the same every time going thump thump thump thump thump half of the things that we're talking about here aren't even addressed in those videos no disrespect because obviously dance music and EDM and prog drums and all this stuff is really really important but it's only part of the story when you get a live drummer for instance the kick can be kick kick kick it can be here here here all over the place there could be 6 DB minimum dynamics between hits I've seen all kinds of things and not only that when a drummer plays a kick drum depending how the beta hits the kick it can give you a completely different sound if I take the beta and lay it into it it goes click and it just goes does this thud but if I allow the beta to come back immediately afterwards it gets more appealing mmm it rings you get flood god boom boom the reality is in a drum performance with the exception of a handful of the best best drummers you can work with most drummers will do a bit of both so you might get boom boom boom boom thud mmm thud thud thud boom and so all of that with the dynamics as well creates all kinds of issues so yes there's some fantastic tips out there but when it comes to things like acoustic drums and now bass guitars when a bass player plays say an open strings softly the low end is gorgeous because that string just vibrates gorgeously now maybe they play that same open string but slap it really hard or play the pic really hard and certainly that string hits the fret board on the neck guess what happens all the low end disappears it kind of goes flat at the third letter they played too hard down and they're hitting it really super hard it's just fretting out it's just reducing the movement of the string hitting the fret board all the low-end disappears so a great great bass player somebody like Dan Rothschild I was remember the first time I work with him I could not believe how even he was I was barely compressing at all because he had played the same bass his whole life I believe it's like a 72 or 73 P bass and I think he bought it new if you didn't buy new he got it like a year old and that's his bass that's what he tracks everything on so he knows just how hard to play it and in each different position he knows whether maybe the bass resonates a lot and then maybe doesn't resonate quite enough and he knows how to get that one bass to sing everywhere across the neck that is rare that is super rare even some of the best bass players in the world they might pick up your bass and it sounds great and they love the way it distorts or they love some characteristic about it but they're not going to know it intimately like Dan knows his bass so you're going to get an uneven performance maybe a great bass player it's not quite so uneven but with less parents player there can I get a massively uneven performance so yes you've got tips on mixing basins tips tips on mixing virtual bases all of those are fantastic however they're not reproducing the reality of mixing a live base if you're mixing a live base you're gonna do a lot of different tips and tricks so you need to learn a lot of things to get this so for instance here is a combination of live and program drums you can hear and you can frankly you can see how I'm even at this but I'm doing all kinds of things to help that so if I turn off everything on the drum sub for instance for a second and just listen to the live kick here's the live kick on so I mean it got super quiet there he's laying the beater on it so is there's no oom oom it's just that that that needs a lot of work so the first EQ moves there is like massively drastic pulling out low mids all of this lime in here so a huge amount of EQ was done on that and then the other thing we can do is even out here if we go and listen to this we get super dynamic having it got so quiet there so I'm probably going to want to put on a bit of compression so I can go in there and grab a compressor and if I go to that section there where it's quite dynamic to where it's not dynamic so here in this area here is when they're super quiet ones are so let's just go to that just tap those [Music] so what just done there is just apply a bit of compression so that those quieter ones can now sort of shine a little bit and that's just a reality which is just not something I'm going to worry about with with say a synth kick which we have before here it's programmed the same every single time so I don't have to do the same treatment at all and then I have a programmed kick from addictive drums here and you can see how massively even that is this is one of those things when we're talking about not everything is created equal the tips and tricks that I'm going to do on this would be completely different I'm not worrying about you know using compression on on a synth kick which is the same each time and if I was applying compression it might be to do an interesting effect and the EQ I would apply would be for different methodology and would be consistent I could say they're in cotton boost EQ that would remain the same on every single hit we end up using dynamic EQ and multi band compressions quite a lot on organic stuff because it varies so much it's a tip that she is quite often on bass guitar you know because maybe that big whoopee low note like on an a-flat or something is blowing up more and then everywhere else it's barely in at all not a problem you're gonna have on a synth bass line like we have here [Music] I mean the dynamic range of that is so limited it's great but it's just literally the same hitting every single time not giving me the problems of dynamics that I would with the bass so to illustrate what I'm talking about for instance here's a c-sharp on an a string hearing bottoming out not much low end I can go open E or I can loud but the low ends disappearing so we have to find a way of boosting a low-end the octave again if I played that c-sharp now here that's got a lot more low-end on the E string I know a lot of producers myself included who liked to keep things on one string if you can because it gives you a more even turn you can go I hit that be a little harder it was these are things when you're playing live you don't think about you're out there you're like rocking out in the studio you want to be even soon as I get a pick for instance all heck is gonna break loose yeah so you can see there's all kinds of issues let us track just the chorus part here [Music] hi [Music] again go so simple octave line let's have some fun with this and see what we have to do to get it to sound even [Music] I'm not gonna win any awards for performance but you can see it's a little uneven I'll probably just quickly cut and paste one bit here you see I let's just take this part here and put it here right flub denote a bit it's quieter on some notes louder on others and wasn't any compression going on the way in to even it up but ultimately it was my performance it's just a little bit uneven and yeah there's definitely some great things about that but nothing compared with the program pace [Music] [Music] so you can see it's like incredibly different so we're gonna have to do some work on that we'll get to that in a second number three I think this one is a really good one when you're starting off use a frequency analyzer so if you go to your master bus and there's some really old-fashioned ones that I still love like the paths there's tons of really flashy modern ones but I've been using this one for years I can go now and listen to the low-end say on this program bass [Music] pretty done even let's go and listen to my live bass [Music] you see I'm talking about a frequency analyzers really going to help you you'll be able to hear and see what's going on I mean for instance just being able to see the low lows that you can't hear through your little speakers is going to be massive I mean if you've got this huge spike at 20 or 30 Hertz that you can't hear through your little speakers frequency analyzer will show it to you don't get me wrong it's not a tool for making everything completely even it's not all about making it like 20 Hertz to 20 K like all this and beautiful and even it's not what you want music is not like that music has spikes of mid-range and aggression at wrongness is fantastic however when you're doing things like low-end it's a beautiful thing to see where there might be some weird spikes that you have to take especially if your speakers are not telling you if the low-end disappears for a second you can't figure it out you've got the frequency analyzers to go oh look it's dipping it highly recommend one I think it's a great tool for identifying issues and then when you listen in other environments you can go oh I hear what was being shown to me by that frequency analyzer there's plenty of them on the market there's some for free probably your da W comes with one you don't have to use the pass it's just something I've been using forever but I highly recommend it and quite a few plugins these days come with a frequency analyzer built in number four we did touch on this at the beginning don't boost what you can't hear if you've got these 4 inch 5 inch 6 inch speakers maybe even sometimes as much as an 8 you're not gonna hear 20 to 40 Hertz you might in an 8 get a little bit of a touch of it that's okay but in those small speakers you're not going to hear it so don't boost those super lows if they're not in the speaker view come to a point where you're boosting it so much what you'll end up doing is having an enormous amount in another environment you'll go to a car test or you'll play it through a big system and the low end will be monstrously huge and then you'll come back to your little 4 5 6 even 8 inch speakers and be like Oh sounds even therein lies the problem so don't boost what you can't hear go to places where you can hear it or use headphones like what talk about closed back headphones use those if they've got a little extra you know they'll extra bump in the low-end that's actually not a problem because if you are mixing for your little speakers and you do boost a shnizzle ton of low-end put on those headphones and they will literally blow up with the amount of low-end so another reason why I think moving between speakers and headphones is actually a very very good idea in a small studio environment number five I talked about this in every single video it feels like don't be afraid to high pass high passing is your friend if you've got a ton of instruments and vocals and all kinds of stuff that have excessive low-end even if it's not audible in your little speakers high passing out the way is beautiful because it will let the true low end breathe naturally if you've got a kick drum a bass drum depending the way you're from just sitting underneath and then you've got a bass just you know just slightly above that nice and full maybe there's some guitars and synth that have some low on it but those lows could kind of disappear by about a hundred Hertz maybe even 150 and then just let the low lows happen from the kick the bass bass drum or the bass guitar or the bass synth whenever you're using it's really really important and there's many other reasons as well why you want to high-pass but essentially if you can high-pass things and create some room your low end will be super clear I've talked about this a lot but I'll mention it again imagine if you've got a synthesizer that has a huge amount of like sixty to eighty on the low end but it's not a bass synth this does pretend it's a stereo synth with this big fat low-end but you also have a synth bass line going waveforms you know a pretty big when they're low frequencies as you know they travel in like huge huge cycles now imagine you've got these big waveforms and you've got a big fat synthesizer playing and then now you've also got a they synth all it needs is for one waveform to be look like this and then the other one to look like this and it doesn't even have to be exactly opposite and yes they're gonna cancel each other out so you don't get more low-end you can actually get less low-end less clarity when there's a whole bunch of things fighting for the same area you'll you won't get a full of sound you'll end up with this big lump of mud down there so you want to clean it up down there and give it definition and you can have that kick that bass drum just full you can have that bass sense or that bass guitar just be full and then you can just glue it together with other synths or guitars and suddenly that whole low ends just starts to feel really tough and really really huge so don't be afraid to high pass High Pass is your friend number six evening out the low end on organic instruments now this is a big deal we have just recorded an electric bass it could be a stand-up bass it could be a contrabass double bass whatever you want to call it but it's a bass and as you heard earlier when I performed it it's a little uneven as we were talking about a bass synth that we have controlled you know with MIDI and may vary even is perfect on the song sounds great sitting the same every single time now our base di not so much so there's a couple of things I can do I'm going to show you the tips that I've done quite a few times of electric bases but we'll do it again I'm actually going to shift option D so that should duplicated that section now and I am going to take this top one here and I'm going to grab an EQ and I am going to get rid of everything above 200 I'm going to low pass it so that's a low passing so the low end is allowed to pass through you could call it high cut or low pass so now that is just playing low end if I go to the other one I'm gonna do the reverse so I can actually make it 200 here so I can just type in 200 I can do the opposite so now the other di I've got now why am I doing this so I'm doing it for some fun reasons I don't want distortion on my low end I want my low end to be really really super fat I want it to be clean and a DI is perfect for that if I had an amp track I would be doing crazy weird things on the Amtrak now what I'm gonna do is I'm going to immediately just put some compression on it well just grab something generic like an R comp you can use whatever compressor you have in your da W doesn't have to be the exact same one I use but apply a little bit of compression so we'll go like three or four to one so immediately I've taken that di that I've turned into a low-end only and I've compressed it so it's starting to get nice and even if I go to the other one I can have some fun with it I'm using this as like my amp track it's the duplicated TI so when I go and grab some kind of saturation so we can go and grab a sans amp which comes free with Pro Tools it's just a saturator I'm sure you have one in your da W so let's give that some Drive so a little bit of Drive there actually like that and then I'm going to actually copy this compressor down here so now I've got the compression on the saturated track sad bit more aggressively lend the two together [Music] definitely more low-end so if I just take if I mute this second one for a second take off these plugins have a listen to where we started now go back to where we just ended up just nice full controlled low-end now another thing we might want to do is just bust those two together so it's take bus twenty-one which is not being used create a mono subgroup or auxilary or bus whatever you want to call it and now those two elements are coming into one input everything I've done there is specific for a live instrument I'm controlling a dynamic range of it far more aggressively than I would if this was a program baseline there's no actual input any compression on that vacuum based sound I just put a bit of the Gullfoss on there just to even out some of the highs just to control it but it was really pretty minor what we're doing here is a lot more aggressive I'm gonna grab a compressor so I can compress both the signals together again I'll go for an R comp a renaissance compressor which is a very very inexpensive like I say you can use a stock compressor if you like and I'll give a similar amount of compression [Music] there's three levels of compression here there's a buss compressor of the two elements going in and then each of those two elements has its own compression so already it's starting to even out my performance it's also in evening out maybe where a string wasn't ringing as much next thing I will grab is an EQ and I can just use something really basic like this and I'm going to go to about 60 where the kick would live and just have a very gentle slope so it will allow the kick drum to breathe in this area here this is another reason for doing this is because I'm going to go into the waves are those this is a secret weapon of mine it's not secret for any mixer I know we all love this because the our bass does something quite special so what I'm doing is I'm controlling the low end going into the our bass reason for me doing that is because this is going to boost some low lows and I don't really want to bring in a lot of extra low-end because if it's boosting 80 like I'm doing it at the moment it's also going to boost below that so 60 and 40 is going to get pulled up quite a lot as well so if I shape it going in I'm sending in it high past a little bit that's that 60 and 40 that's coming up is not as aggressive as if I hadn't high past going into it [Music] and that's just great that's just adding some sort of super super low lows there another plug-in that I absolutely love is the MV - a lot of people will parallel their bass guitar which I totally understand you could parallel it compress it really aggressively I saw a video talking about that that's an amazing technique and I've done it many times before and then bring it up alongside however the MV 2 with this low level control is going to do that for me it's going to allow the low level information to get extra compressed and come up underneath hence this and then the high level is going to come in and squash it down over the top you can bring the output down it's going to get quite aggressive [Music] it's great even where that there was that huge drop-off there where I was playing supersoft or here so even where I was sort of you know fretting out a bit or wasn't really playing very evenly it solved it for me so pretty remarkable now I like the grit and the distortion I'm not going for a clean base sound I've already got the synth bass doing that there it is it's great now I can blend those two bass sounds together and what I might do is take off some lows or scoop out an area for the two to sit together and that would be fun that's where our frequency analyzer going to come in because we don't want too much of a buildup in the same area or I could decide to only use one or the other both of those things are very valid let's just hear that with the drums [Music] one of the things I'd also like to mention about the our base is it generates additional harmonics in octaves so I've got an eighty going on there order 160 or 320 etc etc that also gives it more personality so it leads me to another thing when it comes to low-end this is a big one could have put this right at the beginning it's not all about the low-end yes of course this is a video on low-end but our ear gravitates towards it if it's got a bit of pizzazz a bit of saturation a bit of high mids a bit of present something like I did there putting some distortion on it just helps the bass sit apart I don't just want a bass down that goes boom I don't want to kick this goes boom it needs some click on the kick that could be anywhere for like two five three four five six seven K or metal kicks two fives great for rock you know I know on front kicks they'll go for like one or a one five K you know just to harden it up a little bit there's all kinds of different things you can do but those mid-range and high mids are there for bass guitars and kick drums to give it a little bit of a point so you hear that kick going you kind of hear a click and that helps your ear identify it so the low end is reinforced by a bit of attack attack from the kick a bit of grind from the bass so remember that that's very very important and when you're on your small speakers you should be able to hear that pretty evenly that's another thing to do when you go to earbuds check them on the earbuds and you can hear like some of that that little grit and grime and that attack it's a really good way to pinpoint and focus in on the bass the low-end it happens with sense as well put some grit on that bass synth just so it feels like it's there some people take like a sine wave a synth take off all any high-end from it whatsoever and then use a doubled up synth sound that plays along with the Bose sound there's maybe a sawtooth synth and then blend it together so you've got the low fat synth and a sawtooth synth playing on down on down there like thousands more same kind of effect that we just did with the bass guitar so remember presence mid-range high mids is going to make those instruments stand out of the mix and how reinforce what is going on in the low-end otherwise she'll just keep turning the low end up on the base trying to get it louder quite often when I'm mixing a bass player will say I can't hear my bass the low-end might be absolutely perfect but it just sits in a track and it reinforces the guitars and reinforces the kick and it's fat and beautiful but the bass player saying I can't hear my bass what they're telling you is they can't hear the definition on the bass so I'll boost those high mids I might even start like 700 750 8 8 51 k15 and then start looking at 3 4 5 area just to kind of give it a little bit of nose trying to bring out some of the fingers trying to bring out a little bit of the grit of the high mids and suddenly they're like oh my base is louder now I can hear it so that is a way to make an instrument more focus because obviously our ears are more sensitive to the high mids without just sitting there and turning it up so that it's just blowing up the speaker's with too much low-end 7 keep your low lows mono now there's quite a few plugins ozone in particular has a way of focusing just a low-end but there's a lot of them on the market you can say everything below 150 or 200 only comes down the middle I know for a lot of mastering engineers that have to cut vinyl it's a must for them to get that low-end focus down the middle or don't use a plug-in and mix it that way mix it so you've got bass drum kick drum bass guitar bass synth whatever you want to call it just pumping low-end down the middle take your guitars take your synths etc pan and left to right create some width and wipe off 100 150 even up to 200 and not only will it sound more powerful because the low lows are down the middle it will also sound wider it will sound wider because the low lows will fill mono and so if you have guitars with say nothing below 150 or even as much as 200 on the acoustics and stuff they will stay more in the speaker they will sit there they were sitting there place you start putting a lot of low lows in them they sort of start to more thin to the middle they don't feel like they're just sort of sitting in the mid range and the tweeters over here they start feeling like there's sort of somewhere blurred in the middle so it's good for many many reasons low end focus down the middle mid range high mids and everything thermally in their place on the guitars and the synths and having the pianos and everything over here you can get some really really wonderful wide sounding mixes by keeping the lows directly down the middle and again it's high passing gently I'm not suggesting that these are all like high power shelfs that like this I'm saying go to like 150 on a guitar and do this give me a gentle slope just like a little slope just get it out of the way of the bass guitar a little bit out of the way of the base of a bit out of the way of that kick bass drum whatever you want to call it you know just get it out of the way of that just so it starts it feels more like it's coming out harder left and right get some width and allowing that kick in that low-end from all of the instruments that are reinforcing it to just breathe down the middle like I said you can use it in plugins and maybe that's not a bad idea but don't mix waiting for a plug-in on the master buss to solve that issue which brings us to the last point number eight solve the problems of your mix inside of the mix and don't try to solve them on the master buss I know there's a lot of talk about that top-down mixing and I've seen have lots of videos on it and there is a obvious reality that if you put like multiband compression or ozone and and compressors that eq's and limiters are across your master buss and then just mix into it you can keep pushing things in turning them up push them in push them in push them in and bounce it all out and then the multi bands and all the clever wonderful plugins that we have now will sit there and even it out so it always sounds even sonically so you don't get like too much bass low-end blowing up you don't get too much high mids all this kind of stuff however you won't get a very good sounding mix you'll get a very soft sounding mix because when it gets hard gets too loud it will duck the high mids meaning it will duck the high mids on absolutely everything it's a global it's like sitting there like I said just like pushing all of the high mids down said it even down comes the electric guitars but so does the high mids on the vocals and suddenly everything just starts to sound really really soft so go in and find out where the issues are coming from if you've got low end which is out of control go back in and find him do you need to do some more high passing do you need to go to your bass guitar or your kick drum or whatever it is that's causing the problem and get it to be more even so it hits more evenly and more continuously even across the whole track and not just blowing up because obviously you can get build-up you can get a kick bass and a synth all hitting at the same point and sometimes they get a little bit of control so maybe there's a low note on the synth that just needs to be ducked when it hits that low note therefore instead of ducking the mix in the low end at that point you present yourself a nice beautiful even mix that is more controlled going to mix bus don't solve your problems on the mix bus great put the frequency analyzer on there find issues but don't use the mix bus to solve the problem you can high-pass on the mix bus you can but I rarely do and if I do it's like 20 Hertz and it's a really gentle slope so maybe I'll go to 20 Hertz and then maybe do a very very gentle slope and it's purely because I might be worried about 10 or fight' whatever some really super lows that might blow up some speakers but the reality is is like if I've controlled everything in my mix by the time it gets to my master buss there shouldn't be any rumbling of a vocal mic there shouldn't be any air conditioning in my acoustic guitar all of that stuff's been removed and hi passed out before it gets there there shouldn't be kicking of a mic stand of room none of that stuff will be in my master buss because I have mixed the elements leading up to the master buss so yes you can do things on the master buss safer for mastering save that for mastering try to get your mix as beautiful as you can at the very very end and then all of those little mini fixes that you may have to do a mastering stage not a mixed stage well thank you ever so much for watching please download the cheat sheet have a Marvis time recording and mixing and please leave a whole bunch of comments and questions below let us know what your lower-end experiences are because this is a huge huge topic and I love to share ideas with everybody have a marvelous time recording a mixing please download the 8 tips below there's a cheat sheet down there hit the like button leave me a bunch of comments and questions have a marvelous time recording and mixing and I'll see you all again very very soon [Music] [Applause] you [Music]

Channel: Produce Like A Pro

Views: 478,118

Keywords: Warren Huart, Produce Like A Pro, Home studio, Home recording, Recording Audio, Music Production, Record Producer, Recording Studio, Low End Tips, Mixing Tips

Id: Pgq9IeRF8l4

Length: 44min 41sec (2681 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 24 2020