SouthSIDE Glen
independentrecording.net
One thing that occurs to me as I see this thread progress is that there can be a few different things happening that some may be writing off as a single problem called "low frequency mud", and to use a single solution like high pass can be throwing a lot of babies out with the bathwater.
I guess for me the idea of high passing a majority of tracks is meant to address things like DC offset, subsonic rumble, low level AC hum, etc.; things that may seem fairly inoccuous or even sometimes inaudable on any given track, but when the tracks are summed together, the overall buildup is a problem that can get in the way of kick or bass or even rear it's own ugly audible head. These kind of things are usually found in the double digits of Hertz and rarely manifest themselves much above 100Hz (except sometimes an AC harmonic around 115-130Hz.)
But if it comes to a radical buildup of mud in the sounds of the instruments themselves, and competition for sonic space between them, amputating off the bottom third of the spectrum, say from 250Hz down) is a bit radical, IMHO. Sure it's fast. Sure it's easy. But there can be some nice stuff down there that doesn't need or deserve to be just cut off at the hip just because of a few honkers or resonances that are getting in the way. When the only thing you have below 150 or 250 Hz is an occasional kick and bass, sometimes that's OK (depending upon the mix), but sometimes that can be kind of anemic sounding as John put it, for many of the reasons given above already.
At the risk of sounding like a broken record, parametric sweep the tracks, folks. Get rid of the honkers. This is something that I think should be done on almost every track anyway (synths, some vocals, MIDI etc. excluded.) You might be suprised how once that's done, there's a whole lot of room without having to high pass, and at the same time a whole lot more "bigness" to the mix that extreme high-passing can undesireably remove.
G.
I guess for me the idea of high passing a majority of tracks is meant to address things like DC offset, subsonic rumble, low level AC hum, etc.; things that may seem fairly inoccuous or even sometimes inaudable on any given track, but when the tracks are summed together, the overall buildup is a problem that can get in the way of kick or bass or even rear it's own ugly audible head. These kind of things are usually found in the double digits of Hertz and rarely manifest themselves much above 100Hz (except sometimes an AC harmonic around 115-130Hz.)
But if it comes to a radical buildup of mud in the sounds of the instruments themselves, and competition for sonic space between them, amputating off the bottom third of the spectrum, say from 250Hz down) is a bit radical, IMHO. Sure it's fast. Sure it's easy. But there can be some nice stuff down there that doesn't need or deserve to be just cut off at the hip just because of a few honkers or resonances that are getting in the way. When the only thing you have below 150 or 250 Hz is an occasional kick and bass, sometimes that's OK (depending upon the mix), but sometimes that can be kind of anemic sounding as John put it, for many of the reasons given above already.
At the risk of sounding like a broken record, parametric sweep the tracks, folks. Get rid of the honkers. This is something that I think should be done on almost every track anyway (synths, some vocals, MIDI etc. excluded.) You might be suprised how once that's done, there's a whole lot of room without having to high pass, and at the same time a whole lot more "bigness" to the mix that extreme high-passing can undesireably remove.
G.
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