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Good morning. Today we’re going to discuss the presidential state of the union address last night. I’m kidding. Please don’t leave. We’re going to talk about low-end management uh as it has cropped up in one of the projects I was working on. Um, low-end can cause a problem that you may not be aware of. You may not identify it for what it is because humans can hear down around 50 hertz. If you’re a musician with with really bad hearing like myself, it’s probably going to be less.
But you may be able to detect low frequencies even as low as 15 hertz under very specific conditions. Uh, but the the low end is still there and it’s additive. If you have this lowend floating around on 17 different tracks, you can’t hear it, but there’s a bunch of crap down there that’s building up and it’s going to cause rumbles. It’s going to do all kinds of things. And then because you don’t know how to mix or master like myself, you’re going to push it into an AI product of some kind. in this case, uh, izotopes, uh, mastering software, and all of a sudden, there’s just going to be this giant low-end mess. The AI is going to do everything that it can to minimize it, but it’s still going to be there. And then you’re going to uh you’re going to render the project, you’re going to put it into a car, and that car is going to have some sort of bass boost, and all of a sudden, you’re just going to have a big pile of noisy, low-end garbage. So, we’re going to talk about that today.
Okay, there’s things you can do to avoid. I had to learn that. And so now I’m going to show you what I did. Let’s move on. This is a This is a song called All That Remains. It is very This is going to be a simple part of it. We’re going to listen to uh a few measures. It’s just two guitars, left and right, a bass and drums. Superior Drummer 3 is the drum kit. So that’s processed to the be Jesus and sounds great. Uh the bass is direct in using a plugin called Element Bass from Spectre Sound Studios. Uh excellent software from those guys. And the guitars are using Helix Native. And it is attempting to emulate a uh Mesaoogie dual wreck from the ‘9s. So it’s supposed to sound like a tube amp. Now, I love Mesa Boogie has always been my favorite amp. And I had a dual wreck from like 88 to 95 that I just loved. And uh it has some problems with it.
It had great crunch, it had great sound, and it had great lowend, but that meant it had a whole lot of low-end. And it seems like these patches for Helix Native are also bringing an incredible amount of low-end and a lot of color in the lower frequencies, which is great to a point, and that’s what I want. But if it gets out of control, it sounds like a mess. So, let’s listen to just a few measures and then we’ll start messing around with it. a lot of rumble. And I’d like to e I’d like to push the guitars up further in the mix, but there’s so much low end that it’ll peek out if I touch anything. And you would think it’s the bass that’s doing that. Let’s listen. No, that’s not it. That’s it. All right. So, as I said, humans can hear about 50 hertz. If you’re a a superhero, you might be able to hear down to 20 or 15 and so forth. And actually, I lied. uh 25 hertz is still doable, but not from us, especially not old guys. If you’ve been listening to heavy metal for 30 years, you can’t hear any of that.
So, we can you can wipe it out and you have nothing to worry about. So, what I’m going to do is let’s just listen to this real quick. All right. So, that’s left guitar. I’m going to throw a highp pass filter on it and I’m going to set it at 25 hertz. I’m going to bypass it and activate it. You can hear it thin up. It doesn’t sound bad, but you can hear that something happens. And essentially anything inaudible that’s causing a rumble is gone. And at 25 Hz, it’s starting to eat into the actual sound. And we’ll do it again. That’s with the highp pass filter. And it’s off.
Let’s Let’s crank it up a little. Let’s take it up to 50. Okay. No highp pass. High pass. Yeah, it still sounds. Let’s crank it up to 100. No highp pass. All right, that’s starting to That’s too much. But it makes it very clear what’s going on. One more time. A lot of rumble. Even in my little studio monitors, I can feel it. And there it’s gone too much. We’re going to lower it back down to let’s make it 75. No highp pass. I think I like 75. I’m going to leave it there for now.
That’s probably too much and I’ll change it later, but let’s leave it at 75 and put it across both guitars real quick. I’m going to turn them off. And now you got the left and right. But you can really feel the rumble there. Turn them on. Guitar still sounds good, but the rumble’s gone. Let’s hear it. So, here’s going to be the full mix without the highp pass. And we’ll just listen to a few more measures. Now, we’re turning on high pass. You can even bring further up.
Yeah, I’m going to keep it at 75 and uh we’ll take it from there. But here’s the thing. Just because you can’t hear a problem doesn’t mean it’s not there. And these things can be insidious and they can be across 17 different tracks. This one’s very simple, but there is a section here where I’ve got left and right rhythm uh panned at 99 and I’ve got left and right panned uh 89. And then there’s three solo guitars and they’re all using rectifier uh rectifier, what you call it, patches.
And so it’s trying to sneak all that low into everything. And if you pile them all up, it’s a it’s a it’s a tragic mess. But if you strip out just the stuff you can’t hear, it sounds good. So be very careful. This is a surgical thing. You can’t just go in and start like I did here where I just whacked off se everything below 75 you’re gone. I’m probably going to have to get in there and tune it a little bit better. But it was great as an illustration of how this can get away from you very very quickly.
Now imagine you have two different guitarists going through two different rigs and you’ve got six different stacks of their performances. All of a sudden, there’s just low-end rumble coming in from everywhere. And if you’ve got a bass player with an outofc control rig, uh, and he wants to quote unquote dominate the low end, well, that’s not hard. It just sounds terrible. The low end requires a great deal of care. High-end fizz is identifiable almost immediately. Uh there might be some subtle in the far right hand of these of the frequencies, but they are much more easily identified and you can control them with a graphic EQ fairly simply. It’s that low rumble that you don’t even know it’s there really that can cause tons of problems. So, if you’re having if if things sound muddy, if things are getting weird, go track for track and just throw in a highp pass filter and cut out everything below 25 hertz and see what happens. I bet it’s going to sound better.
Do not do don’t start at 75. That’s crazy. I may like it for this particular project, but that would not be something that I would recommend because you don’t want to strip yourself the low end. It’s the very thing that I love about the Mesa Boogie. So, it’s a that’s a two-edged sword there, right? I mean, if you really want dark, thunderous, low, powerful tones, then there’s going to be a low-end problem built into that equation. So, be very careful. But if at 25, I don’t think you can go wrong. So, a highp pass
filter set at 25 hertz, I think you’re going to be good. So, try that first. And if you’re still getting a rumbly mess, say so in the comments and uh we’ll take it from there. This is it’s good. Moving on. The philosophy is don’t spend your entire life mixing one song. Mix as many as you can in the time that you have. Write as many as you can in the time that you have. Wherever you’re at, you’re going to reach a point to where everything beyond this is diminishing returns. Right? You could I
could spend my entire rest of my very short life on just making this song perfect and what a waste. Write as many songs as you can. Record as many as you can and do the very very best that you can in the moment. And when you reach the end of that, move on and do the next great thing. So, as far as I’m concerned, it’s good and we’re moving on. See you next time.