Tips to Deal with Muddiness, lack of soundscape.

[lemonwood]

Any tips to deal with muddiness in a track. Looking to help deal with the mush of certain samples. Guiding principles or perhaps an audio effect that is designed to help create more clarity and or crispness in each sample. Would also like to know if there are some tips for creating more head space. I use mono and stereo depending on the sample and it's helped a bit. But I feel it is not as 3 dimensional as I'm trying for. Panning has helped to some degree but I feel it lacks a back head feel. I use ableton btw.

 

[brassplyer]

Equalization aka EQ. Muddiness is in lower frequencies. See the thread above where he's asking about his mix.

I heard some raw pre-mastering mixes a friend had recorded in a Nashville studio by some of the same people who record the stars. They sounded dull, muddy, instruments somewhat indistinct. After mastering they sounded amazingly different - like what you'd expect to hear on an album - crisp, clear, good separation of the instruments.

They're using extremely high-end gear and software, recording in excellent rooms but the principle is the same.

 

[Mickster]

One of the first questions I always ask when someone has a concern like yours is what they're listening to the playback on. What speakers or headphones are you using? Many times people slave to get a sound "right" when it wasn't as far off as they thought........being a little fooled by the output device.

 

[sasquatch]

Look into high pass and low pass filtering for punch and clarity.
A little housekeeping on the way in provides room for everything.

G

 

[mixsit]

What does 'head space mean in your context? Depth perhaps..

 

[scottfreems]

If all of the previous suggestions do not work, try using the send for each bad track to take some of the signal to an aux track with a early reflection reverb (5-10 ms pre-delay; 0.8-1.0 sec total reverb time) blended to taste. A little bit goes a long way. My personal favorite reverb for this is the SSL Native Reverb. Another suggestion you may want to try is a widener. There is actually a free plugin called "Wider" that's not too bad. If your tracks are stereo, great. If not, duplicate the track, pan one hard L and the other hard R and send them to a stereo bus where you can add the widener and add it to taste.

I hope this helps!

 

[Soundwoofer]

I would also advice using EQ to mainly find where that muddiness is, and then removing from there on, also ... multiband compressing is literally magic when used right! for example i use multiband compressing on all guitars and bass that i mix, and only on areas where the frequencies have a tendency to "boom" in certain situations, it evens all things out.

Sometimes i try to level the frequency spectrum with an EQ as well, lets say a kick is lacking a bit of high end or low end - i tend to make sure the high end and low end peak around the same DB when looking at the EQ before i go in and make small boosts/cuts. Doing this will make more sense once you introduce it to a compressor. If your kick has higher DB in the high end, that will get more compressed than your low end, which will result in you feeling your kick is "clicky". In this situation you might feel that you want to lower the click, resulting in the kick disappearing, so you increase the volume of the kick.. and suddenly you are 4 hours down the mix with a headache!