HP Filters

Yeah. I know/agree and do it, but I recently came across a guy on youtube (mixbus tv i think?) who said HPing everything is am amateur's mistake.
Well I think that if you're adding anything by default and adjusting by eye, that's probably a mistake. You must listen and adjust based on the sound itself and how it sits in the mix. Remember that most filters aren't particularly steep, and the "cutoff" frequency is actually just the point where it's 3db down. It will often attenuate higher frequencies some, but also might not attenuate the lower frequencies as much as you want. That's where the slope/bandwidth/Q of the filter comes in, which leads to...
Another thing I read is that there will actually be a bump in frequencies where they're cut. That I never knew, and I'm not sure why it would happen.
Many filter both digital and analog can develop a certain amount of resonance near the cutoff when they start to get steep, so that if you're trying to get a lot of attenuation of frequencies just below the cutoff, you end up with a boost just above. It can be a balancing act sometimes. Or it can be a sylistic choice.

Which of course is true to the whole question anyway. Like with everything else, it completely depends on what you've got and what you're shooting for. Some mixes - especially denser ones - really do require that most of the instruments occupy a strictly controlled frequency space. Other mixes kind of want that overlap and interplay. At the extreme, it's a question of whether you're shooting for "real" or "hyper real". It's some kind of irony that sometimes to make the mix larger than life you have to make the individual elements smaller than in real life. :)
I use HPF by default mixing live because of bleed. In the studio I do whatever makes it sound right. Usually that means low shelves instead of HPF.
I was going to say something like that, too. I'm fucking ruthless in a live situation. Stage rumble and handling noise and the fact that both mics and speakers are essentially omnidirectional at low frequencies... Cut em out unless you absolutely need them!
 
Yeah I like bass that is thin yet has just enough body, kind of like McCartney. How would you suggest getting that?
I try to get it by rolling off a lot of the low (under 80) and then cutting the boomy frequencies, then turning up the now thinner bass. Is there anything more to it?
I'm not a fan of really thick low end unless it's an upright bass or fits the song...like, I do enjoy the tone of the thick bass, but it just muddies things up so much that as I began to mix I started to hate thick bass.

I don't roll off the low frequencies, it's more like an across the frequencies reduction, like a straight line drop by a few dB somewhere below 200Hz, sometimes I then HPF down around 20Hz to just clean it up a little. The point where you start the reduction and the amount is very dependent on the sound wanted, the type of music and the actual bass guitar and amp used.

A lot of the Paul McCartney sound is from the fact that they could not reproduce low lows on vinyl as the needle would jump out the groove, however the actual sound did fit the music. In the 1980's there was a big swing to rolling the bottom end off all the commercial recordings, this was because they found that if you reduced the lows when the song went to radio the compressors on the radio station line before the transmitter would not compress the song as hard and it actually became louder on air. Remembering that the type of compression used is brick wall limiting.

One of my bugbears is live concerts where they have rows of subs crossed below 80Hz and the bass guitar sounds like complete mud due to a lot of low notes being around the crossover point or in the subs. Lets hear the notes.

Alan.
 
I always thought that was a anti-pirate tactic. The only thing the phone MIC picks up is the din of mud : )

BTW, my MFSL LP of Abbey Road made me wonder if it was bad, as it had more bass than the regular Capitol. I mean BASS
 
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