Fixing Frequency Masking Between Instruments (Part 2: Chords & Melodies)

frequency masking is an extremely common problem when it comes to mixing and if you watch my video last week you already learned some of this last week's video was all about frequency masking with the kick and the bass which is a very very common problem when it comes to mixing in fact us mixers cannot avoid frequency masking when you have a bunch of sounds in the mix that deal with the same frequency ranges you're definitely going to have some overlap and you're definitely going to run into this issue now last week's video i focused it solely on the kick and the bass but there's actually more parts that i shot that continue the story of that video and show you the different ways frequency masking comes up now luckily for you in today's video i'm going to show you the second part this will be a three part series but this second part will focus specifically on chords melodies and basically instrument sounds that are clashing with one another and the frequency masking that takes place between them and more importantly for you how to solve this issue so your instruments don't clash so they sound great in context with one another and so that you ultimately sound better as a mixer are you ready let's go [Music] five so as mentioned at the beginning of this video this is a three-part video series i'll leave a link up above or in the description below for part one where we talked about the kick and the bass but this second part is going to be focused on clashing instrument sounds chords melodies things of that nature and how to ultimately fix frequency masking issues between them before we get into that i wanted to ask if you could please like this video subscribe to the channel i drop something new every single week always focused on helping you sound better and helping you make more money with your music so if you want help with these areas definitely subscribe to the channel so i can help you with that with that in mind let's rewind to last week and continue talking about frequency masking with clashing instruments here we go so now i got two sounds here i got a piano pad and i got a grand piano i'm just going to play the section and maybe i'll solo each sound as well so you kind of hear what i'm talking about check this out [Music] now the issue with these two sounds is they very much live in a similar frequency range and again there's probably going to be some masking that's going on between the two i've already got my pro-q set up on each sound and i've already set it up to recognize on the analyzer the opposing sound so let's just look at the piano pad just for a quick moment and see where the masking is happening and i'm going to do the exact same thing on the opposing sound and then we're going to make some decisions again [Music] so it seems like these three bands even though i've reduced them again i don't mean to do that i'm just doing that to mark the area seems like these three bands are a bit of the problematic spot so i'm gonna just leave them marked i'm gonna go to this opposing eq now [Music] and i've marked the same kind of spots looks like there might be one additional band i couldn't see it on the other one maybe they're very similar we're going to find out but these are ultimately the spots where there's some overlap between the frequencies on both of these sounds and we want to fix it of course so let's just listen to each of these sounds now listen to the individual frequencies that i've identified and isolated and let's see exactly what kind of frequency content you know is important to each one because what i might ultimately do is i might remove you know this frequency from the opposing sound but then this one from this sound and ultimately go back and forth and decide which one should be prioritized for which sound to prevent masking or reduce it [Music] and this and this pad sound has a little bit more low end stuff it's kind of got a wide spectrum to be fair of everything but anyways let's listen to this next frequency so this frequency seems somewhat important for this band let's see this next one i'm just going to tighten the cue again because they're very very close with each other so we want to be careful here so this band is kind of droney sort of sounds the same has the same sort of note playing the whole time even during the key changes so this one might be cool to get rid of on this uh the low one i probably won't touch but then this one i might want to prioritize and get rid of it on the other sound let's now do the same thing for this last frequency so we're getting some note articulation on that one so just to have an example of of you know to point myself in the right direction i might do something like this where i boost this reduce this and boost that i'm not going to keep it like this i'm just doing this as a marker for myself to come back to so i'll bypass this i'll go to this other sound this piano pad and let's just see now for these three that i've identified you know how important are they overall right i'm just narrowing these cues check this out [Music] 222 seems somewhat important there okay that one seems somewhat important as well [Music] and now i just want to double check and cross-reference both let me see if they're basically at the same frequency so i got 202 222 pretty close 436 429 extremely close 653 i didn't have that marked here so i'll just ignore that one and then 1043. also very close 9.29 so what i think i might do is if i'm gonna you know have this one prioritize i'm gonna obviously get rid of it here this one i kind of like so i'll actually make it maybe more important there and make it less important here and then this one it's tough if i decide to make this more prioritized and obviously i got to get rid of it i'm going to just play this in context with both so i can hear them once again and just discern which one makes more sense and obviously this is a bit of a more long-winded process as you can tell but it's worth it because you're trying to get the best possible sound right so here we go both sounds together for a moment so this this bottom sound this string part i think is more important so i will get rid of this top end frequency so that being said now what we got to do real quick is just make sure we set up our sends so i'm going to just create a new bus here it's u6364. i'll call it pianopad sidechain and i'm going to do another band or another bus here i should say and i'll do the opposing one i'll rename that let's just call it string side chain i'll make both pre-fader that way i can avoid any issues and then we're just going to set this up so i said that i want to reduce this so let me just first set up the key to recognize what i just created being the piano pad okay and now this band i don't want to reduce it exactly but i'm going to just get rid of it a little bit there and by get rid of it i just mean you know make it flat i'm going to right click and choose make it dynamic i'll make this a three band per uh three db perspective we widen it just a little bit use this cross button to make sure it recognizes the side chain and let's just see for a moment how to set this up so now i'm going to just dial in the threshold [Music] so a little bit more clarity let's go to the 653 we're gonna do the exact same thing i'm gonna flatten it so there's no gain reduction right click make it i make it dynamic and then i'm gonna drag the range so it comes down to about minus two i'll probably keep it pretty tight because as you could tell this is a very you know this these two sounds are very much living in a very similar area so it's a little bit more intricate and i'm going to just select auto choose this cross looking sign for the side chain and i'll dial the threshold in and as you can tell when i dial the threshold in i'm not having it fully slam it the entire time it's kind of dynamic it's it's going down at certain moments and then it's not it just sort of depends on the exact volume because even as you could tell when we were identifying this the red shading wasn't super super red the redder it is the darker it is you know the more masking that's taking place by doing it this way you know it's obviously showing there's less masking taking place so i don't have to really clamp down on it so aggressively at least that's my logic so i'm going to just do this again let's do this threshold here we go [Music] okay so this seems good so now that i've done that i'm going to go into the pro-q on the opposing sound i'm just going to make sure that my send level is good on the strings looks like it is and once again i've already boosted this so i'll just get rid of this band altogether we don't need it but now i want to make room for the strings on these two particular frequencies so every time the strings hits it gets out of the way so i'm going to just right click make dynamic on both i'm going to flatten these so that there's no reduction happening the entire time i'll change my view so that i can see it a little bit better for a smaller movement so roughly minus two for each and then i'm just going to set up the reduction to be triggered by the side chain and now i'm going to go in and obviously finesse my threshold make sure it's at the right level here it goes [Music] so i think that's cool so now let me play it one more time but what i'm going to do is i'm going to just a b this i'm going to take these two sounds out put them in and first maybe i'll do this with both of them soloed and then when it loops over i'll take it out of solo put it in context let's see are each of them a little bit more clearer a little less muddy and and you know in the way of each other right let's check this out [Music] so [Music] so again it's somewhat subtle but hopefully you notice when i put it in there's just a little bit more definition in the whole mix each of these sounds feels a little bit more separate it doesn't feel like they're getting in the way of each other and it just sounds cleaner overall so this is another example thanks for watching part two here part three is coming next week and it's going to be all about the two-track beat and the two-track acapella or vocal basically the vocal and beat masters how do you deal with them how to fix frequency masking issues between them and ultimately how to get them to sit better because they can very often clash with one another and a lot of us at home were dealing with two track beats rather than stems so i wanted to break that down for you as well hope you got value to this video please like subscribe and share once again leave a comment down below if you want to see anything in the future i appreciate you for watching and i'll see you soon with part three see you later peace

Channel: 5piece

Views: 835

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords: fabfilter pro q, fabfilter, Farbfilter pro q3, Farbfilter pro q 3, fabfilter proq3, how to get clear mixes, clear mixes, how to fix frequency masking, how to correct frequency masking, solving masking issues, frequency masking issues, 3 ways to reduce frequency masking in any mix, boot camp tip: frequency masking, masking 101, mixing tips, mixing techniques

Id: T6R7r5gYdvY

Length: 13min 15sec (795 seconds)

Published: Thu May 27 2021