How Much to cut from lower frequencies?

[Caine123]

hi guys,

my standard setting on the master bus is this and also on basses, Kicks etc. (of course i eq them more) so i cut everything below like this



or would you even cut more out? eg. techno with heavy bass etc. i dont want to cut too much away.

thx

[CinningBao]

I wouldn't recommend having a standard EQ setting on your master bus - that will cause problems as each song will have different sonic properties and energetic build-ups in different frequency ranges.

Compare your kicks and basses to tracks you like, and try to match those settings using your ears. Listen to the songs you want to sound like in different equipment; speakers, headphones, phone speakers.. and take time listening to your work on that same equipment, and trying to understand what you need to do to get it closer to the sound you want.

No-one here can tell you "you should be high passing at 50hz" or "always knock out around 3dB from 300" - people who say that are idiots and people who follow those instructions have a lot to learn about how to listen.

Learn how to listen properly and use that to make your judgements about how to manage your bass frequencies.

[imrae]

If you want to cut away sub-20Hz rumble without losing bass, cut it away from the tracks that are creating it. Where does it come from? Does it actually exist?

If you put a 4-pole highpass filter on every track, and another one on the master in the same place, that's equivalent to a 48 dB/oct 8-pole filter! That's going to do some funny things to the phase...

[Caine123]

I wouldn't recommend having a standard EQ setting on your master bus - that will cause problems as each song will have different sonic properties and energetic build-ups in different frequency ranges.

Compare your kicks and basses to tracks you like, and try to match those settings using your ears. Listen to the songs you want to sound like in different equipment; speakers, headphones, phone speakers.. and take time listening to your work on that same equipment, and trying to understand what you need to do to get it closer to the sound you want.

No-one here can tell you "you should be high passing at 50hz" or "always knock out around 3dB from 300" - people who say that are idiots and people who follow those instructions have a lot to learn about how to listen.

Learn how to listen properly and use that to make your judgements about how to manage your bass frequencies.

thx a lot!

yes i think the basics i know and especially frequency clashes, like sidechaining etc. and EQ'ing same ranges so something doesnt sound muddy. BUT your reply actually surprises me!
i checked so many tutorials and also read many articles where it is (always) common to use an EQ / maybe LINEAR PHASE EQ and cut e.g. everything below 20Hz. and when i solo this range it is mostly non-hearable on my subwoofer (i dont have a 2000 bucks subwoofer from a club though ) so i mostly thought this is ok then?

thx!!!

[imrae]

People who say "always use X here with setting Y" are either cargo-cultists or they are working with a very narrow range of arrangements - so the advice is only useful if your inputs and outputs are supposed to be very similar to theirs.

That being said, cutting low-end is harmless for many sources where no content in that range is expected. It makes sense for e.g. microphone recordings where anything that low in frequency is probably wind, handling noise, the stand moving...

But from a synthesizer there should be nothing down there that you didn't ask for.

[mystran]

i checked so many tutorials and also read many articles where it is (always) common to use an EQ / maybe LINEAR PHASE EQ and cut e.g. everything below 20Hz. and when i solo this range it is mostly non-hearable on my subwoofer (i dont have a 2000 bucks subwoofer from a club though ) so i mostly thought this is ok then?

A lot of tutorials on the internet are done by people who don't really understand much about the subject. It is absolutely not specific to music, it's the same situation with everything.

Now.. the phase thing... there's essentially two types of filters in common use: so called "minimum phase" and "linear phase." While Pro-Q calls minimum-phase "zero latency" that's not entirely accurate, because what "minimum phase" really means is that essentially every frequency individually is delayed as little as possible in order to get the desired amplitude response. When you cut out low frequencies with a minimum-phase EQ, the frequencies around the cutoff get delayed, while at sufficiently high frequencies (eg. an octave or two above the cutoff) there is basically no delay at all. This not necessarily a bad thing (sometimes you might even want that), but it's something to be aware of. The steeper the filter, the worse the phase-shift (and therefore frequency dependent delay), although what we typically hear with steep filters is not really the delay, but rather ringing from the transition: the regions where the filter response isn't flat tend to smear out and the more selective the features of the filter are in frequency, the more of this smearing we hear. It's the same thing as the resonance of resonant filters, but it happens with all steep filters.

Now, linear phase solves the whole non-linear phase-shift issue by introducing enough delay that we can delay all the frequencies by the same amount, but what it does with ringing is that it distributes equally before and after the sound itself. The way our hearing works, there is significantly more psychoacoustic masking going on after a transient compared to before, because our brain is used to filtering out echoes from acoustic places and what not.. so even though linear phase can solve the smearing of transients in terms of delay (which is why people frustrated with the phase-shift of steep minimum-phase filters are inclined to think linear-phase is a silver bullet when they first discover it), it will introduce a potentially worse problem of pre-ringing. In a sense, this is why we need latency with linear phase filters: all that delay is filled with pre-ringing.

So.. the moral of the story is that if you don't need a filter, you really should not be using one, because you'll only cause damage to your signal. If you need to use one, then a gentle one will always be more "transparent" compared to a steeper one. The steeper the filter, the more you start to suffer from the problems introduced by the filtering itself. Cleaning up individual tracks is always better than trying to take the shortcut by processing the master, because whatever damage you cause is hopefully masked by other tracks that didn't get that processing.

This applies to just about all processing: you'll fix one problem, you'll introduce another. Processing makes sense when the benefits are greater than the downsides and there's nothing wrong with doing a lot of processing with purpose, but whatever you do with your signal, always ask yourself: is this actually doing something useful that justifies the side-effects?

[legendCNCD]

Yes. If you dont need it, dont put it there. If you really need it, and have a mix, I'd suggest going into the mix first and find the culprit there, then see if you really need it anymore on the master?

[vurt]

one size fit all, rarely does...

[thecontrolcentre]

To know which frequency needs cutting, and by how much, you need accurate monitoring and some experience with mixing. There's no "engineers ears" plugin (yet) ... tbh I doubt it will ever exist.
I agree that cutting/boosting at source is better than doing it on the master channel.

[lfm]

To see where your mix is at you can use something like Izotope Ozone to compare with reference mixes you feel sound terrific, in low end for one.

http://cloudmanfilms.ownit.nu/Ozone-Guides.jpg

You can save guides from references and compare always, visually and by ear.
Only reliable way to calibrate ears which quickly adjust and also become fatique after some time.

[Caine123]

great infos guys, thx a lot! this gave me news i didnt expected!
i will use Reference 2 and compare the tracks to some tracks i think which are great sounding in the genre and will A/B compare them.

[mr. jazzmaster]

I've been learning mixing now for four years (I know it's not a lot ). I have two tips for you. If you're mixing with speakers and with not so loud volume remember that low and high end will be louder when you listen with volume up. This is because of so called Fletcher Munson curve. What I do is that I have an eq plugin in my master bus and it has a slight curve that makes the mids a bit lower in volume. This way I can hear better in low volume how my mix would sound when it is turned up. I use for this a plugin that has a preset for this eq curve. Then when I bounce my mix for reference listening in another room and with other speakers I of course disable this eq from my master bus.

Also, when you compare your mix to others, remember to match loudness. I think all the refence plugins have this feature. Maybe you knew about it, sorry I didn't read all posts here.

One more thing: train your ears, listen to different mixes.

[jamcat]

You should be high passing at 50hz and always knock out around 3dB from 300.