EQ paradox

  • Thread starter Thread starter Chris F
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Chris F

Chris F

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I'm sure this is real newbie stuff, but this is driving me nuts. I'm mixing some acoustic bass/archtop guitar duets on Audio desk, and making some decent progress with the various types of EQ. However, my main issue so far is trying to get rid of the "boominess" or "tubbyness" of certain notes on the bass tracks, and today a new curve was thrown my way:

On my latest mix, I used a high pass (bass cut) filter to chop off everything under 90 hz, and this cleaned up the sound a lot. I'm doing the actual mixing on my new nearfields ( M-Audio Studiophile SP-8B's), but also checking the mixes on every other system I can get my hands on to check how the mix will fare on "lesser" amps & speakers. This new mix, chopped off at 90 hz, sounded great on the nearfields, headphones, and home stereo, so I was thinking, "great, maybe this is the answer I've been looking for".

NOT. As I was going to my gig this afternoon, I listened to the mix in my car stereo, which is pretty decent: Alpine head with built in semi parametric, 4 infinity speakers, sounds pretty damn good on just about everything......and there's that "boominess" all over again. I wasn't too surprised by this since I've been through it before...but then I dialed in the "60 hz" band of the EQ and cut it by about 4 db, and the tubbiness went straight away, leaving me with the perfect mix that I'd been looking for. So what gives? If my mix had already been chopped of at 90 hz, why does cutting 60 hz on the EQ have any effect at all?

Okay, so I'm a dumbass newbie, granted. But what does this mean? Is it that Alpine is bullshitting about their EQ bands, or is there something more obvious that I'm missing?
 
well, there could've been so much at 60 hz to begin with, that if your high-pass is fairly gentle, a lot of 60 would still be there......

I just recently discovered the wonderful world of multiband compressors, and even more recently discovered how to use them.... :)

if you have a multiband compressor plugin or something, you could mess around with that for a while and see if it helps any.
 
With a high-pass filter you may only be rolling off those selected frequencies, which would still leave some there, but with a multiband compressor you can select a frequency range, i.e. 90hz and below, and just mute it, which would completely eliminate any low end sounds
 
High!

It also depends a lot on how steep your filters are. On some systems you can switch between 6dB/oct to 24dB/oct or more. If you have a filter that cuts 6dB/octave, then you'd have a cut of approx 3dB at the 60Hz, which may definitely not be enough... You might try to use steeper filters.

Kingston: what multiband compressor do you use? I have only two possibilities: a triple c or the MTK from my VS880ex (ok it has an additional bass cut, but thats a simple filter again). They both have only three bands. So would I have to give up the lower band to cut it off? 'I think this would be OK with something like a behringer DSP9024 where you have six bands but not on a 3-band comp... Am I getting something wrong?


Ciao

Axel
 
I wish I remembered the name of it..... considering how much I use it, you think I'd know..... but I usually use this free directx multiband compressor..... although I occasionally use Cool Edit Pro's, since you can get very specific with the frequency range you want it to work on, although I don't like using it very much cause I'm a sucker for meters....
 
Thanks for the replies everyone. Audiodesk is the digital audio portion of Digital performer, and the EQ's all have extremely steep high and low-pass filters - so much so that when I set the filter to "on" and then roll up the frequency to 20,000hz, the sound just completely disappears.

Hmmm, back to the drawing board....
 
Try a cut at 300 hz or so (the mud zone). Also if you're working in a DAW try surgical EQ cuts only where you hear that tubby sound.
 
I find myself using about a -12db roll off (my max available) at around 120hz for acoustics.
 
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