eliminating the strange frequencies!

G

geeorj

New member
hello there HR people,
i'm looking for some help with mastering things. i know a fair bit about mixing/mastering already but thought the newbie forum would be best for this situation.

i've been mixing a metal track for about a month and i love the mix to bits - now i'm onto the mastering. the overall eq & compression is sounding great on cubase sx3 and i have har-bal to polish any eq problems or w/e,

but one thing is bugging me -

i listen to the mix in front of the speakers from the monitors, and say if i move my head down about 1/2 feet and listen to it, i hear different frequencies coming out the speakers around the 600hz-1.5Khz area - and they go away again once i return to the same position - and when i move my head above the speakers the high end seems to cut out from about 9Khz onwards...

...until now i've basically dismissed this situation as different waveforms going around the room or however you want to put it, BUTTTT i put on a professionally mastered track and wherever i go around the room i don't hear any weird frequencies coming out of the song. when i start cutting out the 600hz-1500hz frequency stuff on my track it still has the same effect btw

how can this be solved? with the right multiband compression? or is it to do with the mix? w/e it is i need to know,

thanks for reading,
andy
 
What are you using for monitors. If they are true near-field monitors, moving around as you say should not "create" those sound differences. Have you listened with headphones or other speakers?
 
geeorj said:
i listen to the mix in front of the speakers from the monitors, and say if i move my head down about 1/2 feet and listen to it, i hear different frequencies coming out the speakers......
how can this be solved?
Click to expand...
Sounds like you need to treat your room.
 
guys thanks for your feedback, it is just a standard ordinary bedroom i'm mixing in, my only remaining question is this - when i move around the speakers the different frequencies are heard, but when i listen to a professional recording this doesn't happen and it sounds properly compressed and eq'd and stuff.. what is causing this to happen in the mix and how do i fix it?

would it help if i sent you guys the track so far?
 
ARe you listening to a professional recording that has the same sort of tonality as yours does? The pro recording might just not have as much going on at the problem frequencies.
 
You might try mixing to mono and see if that creates your perceived issue without moving about the room. Headphones can lie as the L and R channels don't mix. And the issue you're noticing is the mixing of the two channels. A little spectrum analysis couldn't hurt either. L versus R versus Mono. Having a good room and stuff can rid you of a lot of perceived problems that might not actually exist. And/or alert you to some problems that do exist, but otherwise got lost in translation.
 
geeorj said:
...until now i've basically dismissed this situation as different waveforms going around the room or however you want to put it, BUTTTT i put on a professionally mastered track and wherever i go around the room i don't hear any weird frequencies coming out of the song. when i start cutting out the 600hz-1500hz frequency stuff on my track it still has the same effect btw..
Click to expand...

I'd say you're right in that being room humps. So first of all you wouldn't want to use those kinds of normal room effects as defining your mix (or 'master') fix targets!

Ok.. :)
It seems to me that this stuff sticks out a lot more on a single tone (try it with a 600hz sine wave?) then on a combo of many combined frequencies. Maybe your mix tends to be more sparse?
 
Shadow_7 said:
And the issue you're noticing is the mixing of the two channels. A little spectrum analysis couldn't hurt either.
Click to expand...

i use har-bal religiously when it comes to mixing and mastering - are you saying export a left-channel track, right-channel track and mono and compare the frequency balances of each one?

sounds like it could work...:D
 
It's not just the presence of frequencies, it's the timing. If they are inverted and then mixed, they cancel. If the clocks that recorded them differ, it can drift in and out of phase and create a sort of echo effect. Or just a really bad low end if the drift is not enough to notice in the short term. The latency of some devices can also give an effect like this. If you layer one track after another in a multi-track scenario, plus a player that plays behind the beat (most do). You could have enough time differential between track 1 and track 16 to be a bad thing. Even if the software compensates for latency, it could be close, but not close enough in doing so. So it's not just an inventory of frequencies, it's how they interact with other tracks and other frequencies. Or it could just be a bad room and/or bad speakers.
 
problem solved! shadow_7 you were right, it was to do with the left and right channels being slightly harmonically imbalanced.

a quick what-to-do for anyone else with the same problem - i exported both left and right channels separately, imported the right channel into har-bal (search in google for program) and used the left channel as the reference filter to compare. then i corrected the harmonic imbalances and matched the two channels' frequency curves completely, then put them back into cubase and voila!! no more weird frequencies you wouldn't hear in professional recordings.

thanks again guys for all your help and input, i shall be coming back here when i need more wisdom.
 
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