Why Low Passing is Better For Space and Clarity

heya folks Chris Vander Viper here from Y Logic Pro rules calm the website that helps you get the most you can out of Apple's Logic Pro 10 and today I want to dissect high-pass filtering what is for why we use it and it turns out that we've been doing it all wrong all along when in fact low-pass filters are your best way of isolating low level noise that's stealing space and clarity from your mixes so if you're familiar with higher low-pass filtering I'm sure you're thoroughly confused so let me explain when I pull up the channel EQ here and first let's just talk about what a high-pass filter is you see this filter right here that hangs out in the bottom of the frequency spectrum on the left side of the channel or linear EQ it looks like a brick wall I tend to set my slopes very high you can set them pretty low but I like I'm just chopping everything out so this is set to 70 Hertz and everything below 70 hers is being removed from this instrument why would we do that well aside from kicks kick drums and bass guitars most instruments tend to have some low level noise that is not really necessary and though you can't quite hear it when you stack it across 30 40 50 tracks it tends to balloon in size and it takes away from the clarity of your mixes I sort of think of a pane of glass with a light snow on it you know there's a light dust you can still see through the glass it's fine you know it's being obscured a tiny bit now imagine 50 panes of glass all on a line where the same light dust now there's so much snow over the 50 panes of glass that it's distorting your view and you can hardly see through them right so it's the same thing in audio one track by itself with a little noise not a big deal 50 tracks now starting to add up into a significant amount of noise that's not helping your mixes okay so there's a low-level noise and we use the filter to remove it I'll demonstrate with this synth here I'm going to bring down the filter and I'll show the spectrum analyzer and we'll see some of that low level noise so you can see that there's something going on down here and this most likely is noise that we don't need to worry about or having our mixes so we remove it with the high-pass filter the typical way that you would go about using a high-pass filters you would bring up the filter until you hear it start to change the tone of your instrument and then it's like okay that's too far back it off the problem here is when we do that it kind of becomes a game of guessing where the right frequency is for this filter to be set let me let me show you [Music] [Applause] right you can see that the keys are walking down to lower notes and so it becomes sort of difficult to discern where is the best spot to place this filter it turns out that low-pass filters are your best way of isolating that noise now a low-pass filter is the exact opposite right it's a brick wall that comes from the high end down and anything above this frequency is removed now this seems counterintuitive right you're not trying to remove highs or mids from your instrument it's the low level noise that's the problem but since the highs in the mid our most prominent when you listen to a track that's the part that you pick out the easiest they obscure what's going on down in the low end of the spectrum when you remove these frequencies now you're only listening to the low end of the spectrum so it's kind of theoretical let me let me show you so I'm gonna play this synth track and I'm going to start introducing the low-pass filter I'm going to bump up the gain so we can hear the low-end [Music] so clearly we can see there's some noise down here we could probably bump it back a tiny bit but we're in a good spot now so we can remove the low-pass filter set at 58 Hertz and let's bring in a high-pass filter and I'll bring my game back down and now we found the perfect spot to set this high-pass filter now I'm undoubtedly someone on the internet is going to point out to me if you bring in both filters they don't quite line up exactly they there's a bit of an arc here and some noise potentially and that's fine you can fine-tune the high-pass filter from there and really isolate it but now you know exactly where that low-level noise exists and then you're not carving into the fundamental tone of your instrument or some low-end girth that is really important to your instrument so I want to demonstrate this to you as well with a piano track so let's do the same thing I'm going to remove this high-pass filter and bring the low-pass down [Music] [Laughter] so you can kind of hear that there's like some thumping of you know like the keys or the strings being hit by the Hammers of the piano so though 99 hurts let's set it to that and you know don't blow yourself away by forgetting to turn the game back down and this can be really helpful when you don't have a subwoofer or you don't have monitors that are really demonstrating to you what the low-end sounds like rate if you have small monitors or earbuds or something this can be really helpful so I want to demonstrate on one more this other synth here the codex same thing [Music] and you can hear that there's like some thumping I was something having to do with the keyboard so I said to 164 and now you're not impacting the important tone of your instrument but you're removing that low-level noise that's not helping anything so then when you've got high-pass filters across your mix you know we can quickly turn these on and off to hear the impact that they're having on our track you know there's a subtle lift on the track and this will be compacted as you go on mixing adding compression adding different dynamic you know saturation etc by high passing on the front end you're adding clarity and space to your mix that wouldn't have existed and by using low-pass filters to isolate that low-end noise you're just making your life insanely easier than trying to guess with a high-pass filter while listening to how the mids and highs are being impacted so I hope that was helpful to you as always if it was I highly suggest subscribing to the YouTube channel or subscribing on the blog why logic pearl rules calm every week I post new blog post new videos content to only help you achieve more with Logic Pro 10 thanks so much

Channel: Why Logic Pro Rules

Views: 14,278

Keywords: logic pro x, logic pro, high pass filters, low pass filters

Id: 3SNToQ7xGHw

Length: 9min 9sec (549 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 25 2018