Boominess and a lack of clarity or crispness on the highs

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amra

amra

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I have noticed I am having trouble getting an annoying amount of boominess in my mixes, as well as a lack of sizzle or crispness in the highs. I am not hearing this through my monitors, but it is noticeable when I go out and listen to it in a car CD player.

I am using M-Audio SP5B monitors, and what I always liked about them is their crisp high end. Having 5 inch drivers, they are somewhat lacking in regards to low frequencies, but I thought I could work around it. So here is what I am wondering: could the crisp high end that I liked so much really be exaggerating highs of a recording, that is not really that bright? And is the boomy low end falling outside of the range of what these monitors can reproduce?

How do you work around what you can't hear? I can't seem to pinpoint the "boom", because I can only hear a little bit of it, but I suspect it is coming from the bass line. I also suspect some of it was bleed into the tom mics, so i gated them. Working blind (or "deaf"), what areas are the most frequent cause of boom? Can a spectrum analyzer help me here?

Thanks,
amra
 
amra said:
I am using M-Audio SP5B monitors, and what I always liked about them is their crisp high end. Having 5 inch drivers, they are somewhat lacking in regards to low frequencies, but I thought I could work around it. So here is what I am wondering: could the crisp high end that I liked so much really be exaggerating highs of a recording, that is not really that bright? And is the boomy low end falling outside of the range of what these monitors can reproduce?
Click to expand...

Bingo! :D That, and your room probably is skewing things pretty bad.....
 
I think the most telling thing you could do is listen to some reference material on your monitors so you can get a feel for what a good mix really sounds like in your listening environment. I think you need to do that often so you can stay familiar with it and keep your mixes in check. I just use what I consider are the best sounding recordings in the particular genre.
As far as the extreme low end, perhaps some bigger speakers or some bass traps are in order. Maybe you could start trying some filtering on tracks that don't need the low frequency content. You may already do that, but I figure it's worth mentioning. For instance, do you normally put a high pass filter on things like guitars? I try to cut the low end from anything that doesn't need it. It goes a long way towards controlling the boominess.
 
The trick to mixing is not making the mix sound like you want it to, but making it sound like it has to.

If your speakers are hyping the high end, you are turning it down to compensate. Not having high end to balance the lows will make the boomy-ness sound worse than it is.
 
Thanks for the input guys.
Here is a clip reflecting some changes I made- I applied some low cut to several tracks working 'blind' since I can't hear much difference. How does it sound?

Clip (MP3 256Kb/s)
 
The kicks are just too loud. If you turn it down and it gets lost in the mix, ad more highs to it.

The overheads are lacking the high highs. If you cut back around 5k to 8k and add some high shelf, that might help.

Is there a bass guitar?
 
You might want to spend some time listening to some reference material through your monitoring chain to get your ears calibrated. Listen to similar genre CD's that you consider to be well engineered. See how they translate from your rig to the car, and make it SOP to listen to them as you sit down to mix. It helps a lot. Adding a sub may be a good idea to fill in where the 5" cones leave off, but if the high end is wacked too, it may be better to take the would be sub money, sell the SP5Bs, and buy some other monitors.
 
I have been A/B ing CD's of bands in the same genre, and using the spectragraph in wavelab to compare it to my stuff.

I noticed on the professionally recorded stuff, there are pronounced bumps in the 100-120Hz range, and the 1.3-2.5 kHz range. In fact, it seems that most of the "power" of the music is coming from these two areas, those bars seem to stay up all the time. There is a pronounced scoop in the 340 -500Hz range, that my stuff didn't have. My mixes were real "busy" in that same range (340 -500Hz), even when there were no vox. In the professionaly recorded CD's, those freqs dropped to almost nothing when no vox.
Anyways, lots to learn in these areas, I just recently realized that I can hear things in my mixes that I never noticed before, that I didn't like. I have already been through this a few times, I guess it is part of the process.

Anyway, I have been tweaking things on that song I posted, and I will post a revised mix in the MP3 clinic later. Just wanted to thank everyone again for the advice in this thread.
 
It sounds like you are on the right track. A/B'ing and studying the mixes of bands in your same genre is totally the right way to go. Excellent suggestions in this thread to do that, and great to see you following some good advice!

Scooping out boominess where you don't want it will also makes the highs seem a little brighter, without having to do anything to them.

Chances are that you are over-compensating for the brightness of your monitors. Ultimately, better and more flat monitors will help you get to your final mixes faster. But for now, learn your monitors. Knowing how music sounds on them and how that relates to how music sounds elsewhere is pretty much what you have to do with any set of monitors.
 
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