Low Mids

[Chris_Harris]

Either too much, or not enough. Usually too much since I've switched to digital. "Warm" on the monitors can easily translate to "muddy" in the car, and too often does.

I look at EQ curves until I'm blue in the face, I hack away, and still...they build up. Acoustic mixes, electric mixes...doesn't matter...I usually just end up turning the bass down, which I hate doing. It's not in the guitars, not in the vocals, not in the bass...it's (obviously) in ALL of them...it's necessary, and it's evil.

Any tips on maintaining warmth while still being able to turn the bass up all the way in the car without it turning to mush. GOD, I HATE THAT, lol. Is it just me?

[Gidge]

i dont know crappola about sound but that never stopped me before so ill bite...... .....what monitors are you using?......Im assuming you listen to CD's on them that sound good in the car to reference......

[Ausrock]

Chris,

Have you any idea of what specific frequency range is causing the problems. The low-mids on my condsole range from 50Hz to 1.6kHz, although it is a logarithmic scale and most of it is taken up by <800Hz.

Also what instruments are we talking about?

[Chris_Harris]

Thanks Guys.

Ausrock - yeah, generally, I'm talking about from about 100 - 500. Seems like the easiest thing in the world, since the range is pretty narrow, doesn't it? Just EQ it, right? lol. I do that, and the natural result is that that the mix turns into a harsh, brittle mess...but I CAN then turn it up without it falling to pieces...but then I can't stand to listen to it.

Generally, we're talking about guitars acoustic and electric (I do roll off the low end of them) and vocals, bass and drums.

And Gidge, yes... I've spent a lot of time compiling a little collection of reference CD's, and I can get my stuff to sound close (EQ wise) on the nearfields, even sounds okay on the home stereo, the boombox, and the headphones...but the car is a different animal. A car is like a natural bass chamber, and it just accentuates problems with the mix, I guess...commercial stuff sounds great in my car, and I can crank it and it holds together very well...my stuff sounds decent enough, until I boost the bass and/or turn it up a little...then it just gets all woofy and crappy....ARRRRGGGGHHHHHHH. Looking at EQ curves doesn't help...nothing's hyped as far as the meters go...

...anyway, I think you guys have answered my question...which was "am I the only one?"

Yes, lol...I am. THANKS

[stonepiano]

Maybe if you take those 15" kickers out of your trunk, you won't get the exaggerated bass...

Actually, I just wanted to hijack the thread for a second to tell Chris I recommended a song of yours to a fellow writer as an example of creative songwriting and confident vocal technique. This is the thread

Anyway, carry on...[/url]

[Chris_Harris]

Awww...thanks, man. I'm sincerely flattered.

[stonepiano]

no prob, man. It's a kick ass song.

[sonusman]

I can safely say that low mids are ALWAYS a struggle. 80% of the energy in your mix is in that range, and careful attention to the sounds you record, and having a room/monitors that represent them in a balanced way is important.

Small rooms NEED treatment in the low mids. It is as simple as that. It is incredible how a mic can pick up the comb filtering effects of poorly treated rooms, and usually, the low mids are the first major problem you will experience in your mix. Too much or too little.

It is amazing how I can track a live performance outside, and the tracks sound great with no eq. I track in a small room with a kit that sounds about the same, same mics, same pre's, and all of a sudden the transients are blurred, and the low mids are mostly impossible to deal with.

Welcome to the real world of audio!

Ed

[TripleM]

[Chris_Harris]

[volthause]

what's up man... new here, coming over from that other place.

anyhow, chris, 100-500 isn't necesarilly a narrow range... it's actually two octaves+. remember, octaves increase as the frequency doubles, so 100-200 is one octave, 200-400 is another octave. not so narrow.

for me, 250-850 is fucking crucial and crushes me more often than not. care attention. listen. trim. listen. trim.

it's delicate hand carving, not clear-cut forestry.

[Dafduc]

Here's my thought on this - PLEASE tell me if I got it wrong, cos I have a hell of a time fixing EQ problems sometimes:

Boost low mids for bass and kick (and maybe snare). Roll it off for everything else. It's the "everything else" that gives you the mud, where bass is a single note (almost always) and drums are just thump.

This is following the idea that instruments and vocs do better in their own vertical space. If there's room, the lead voc can reclaim some low mids, but I'd leave em low on a chording instrument or background vocs, unless there's no bass.

This seems to help some with clarity issues, but I'm still tweakin and learnin...

Daf

[Ausrock]

Ed, thanks for chiming in........

I think it is all to easy when starting to set up a mix (ie: at that stage when you are listening to the individual instruments, etc), to get each drum and guitar or whatever sounding the way it does at the time of tracking. Once everything is combined it usually sounds damned crappy and it is difficult to remove that "mud" that we all seem to hear.

These days I find it is easier to start by pulling a lot of the lower end out of kik, toms, bass and acoustics at the start of mixing and slowly add it back in rather than having to remove it later. Sometimes it works better than others.

Also I think Sonusman's theory on the rooms contibution is something that is frequently overlooked and is virtually critical in getting a good sound to "tape".

[volthause]

[SLuiCe]

I'll add to Vaulthouse and suggest keeping the 400-600 range controlled in the vocals, particularly with layered guitars. For me this tends to be crucial in getting vocals to cut through in dense mixes, without sounding hollow nor overpowering.

[skids]

[SLuiCe]

Probably. I used the word controlled because it may not be necessary to cut and didn't want to suggest just mindless hacking them away. But my experience has been that once tracks start building up, about a 3dB cut around 500Hz will help me get the lead vocal right where I need it to give me options for adjusting the vocal track level. This lets the meat of the guitar survive and lets the majority of the important vocal mids (600-2K?) to cut through.

[Chris_Harris]

This has been enlightening for me... Volty, the stuff you said about tweaking, surgically... I'm very very glad to hear somebody say that...seems like 90% of the stuff I listen to on the net are the result of somebody just going..."THREW THIS TOGETHER TODAY!!!," and I tend to fuck with tunes for weeks...then leave them alone for months...then start over again, lol. Anyway, I know part of my problem has gotten worse since I switched to drum loops...there's no EQ'ing JUST the kick once you get a loop put together... so I will be dealing with that earlier in the process now.

Anyway...I screw with tunes until I cannot freaking stand them anymore...I do enjoy it, but the very specific pointers have [edit] NOW been cut and pasted to my desktop, lol.

Thanks again guys.

[SLuiCe]

Skids, hopefully you can decipher whatever screwed up form of English I seem to be speaking tonight! lol

[Dafduc]

Sorry - shoulda clarified that I don't tweak at all unless I hear a problem. But if I hear mud, or need to bring out bass/kick some, low mids are where I go first - first lowering the chording instruments and back vocs, then boosting the bass/drums if needed.

Daf

[volthause]

[crawdad]

Relativity. Way before you start boosting anything, especially in the high registers, work on that low end, track by track, until you get a pleasing amount of low mids without the woofiness and excess bass. Then, work your way up the frequency spectrum and cut or boost as needed per instrument to get everything sitting right.

You may often find that adjusting low frequencies in tracks makes certain instruments right without any boost at all. Sometimes, you'll still want to cut some high's--depending on what mic you used for recording.

At that point, its fine tweaking.

[SLuiCe]

Hi Al.

[Cyrokk]

Well, my first inclination would be your monitors, but you said you use nearfields, so that's probably not where the problem is. My second thought was like what Ed said: the room. I would definately look into this before even touching the eq. Can you set up your system in a larger room and do a scratch mix, and play that in the car to see if that's the problem? Boosting eq is just going to add unwanted noise. If you have to treat your room, then you will be saving yourself from headaches in the future.

I track in a master bedroom.. it has very nice acoustics, and coupled with my Proto-J nearfields, I never have a problem with the lower mids. I also spend a lot of time A/B'ing different distorted guitar sounds against a sample of drums and bass, so that if something sounds too stuffy, or sounds like it is being played under a blanket, I move on to a guitar sound with less emphasis on the mids.

I also cut basic vocals recently, with no processing at tracking.. My voice has a whiny character right in that range, and I found very little knob turning at mix time to make them sound un-nasty (although I could sure use some compression), so I think it has more to do with the room acoustics and how my monitors project in that space.

[pipelineaudio]

For some fun lets play "mix by numbers: an electronic approach " from the popular book " How to record by reading the back of cereal boxes" by Jack Ortman...hey it works for roger nichols, give it a try and you may be able to make SOME of this work for you:

1. Set EVERY channel eq to ditch 6 dB one octave wide at 315 hz

2. Run a hi pass filter up each and every channel till you HEAR it changing something, then back it off a tiny bit

3. Run a lowpass filter down each and every channel until you HEAR it changing something then back it off a tiny bit

4. Sweep the eq that you set to 315hz of each track down to about 180hz and up to about 450hz

somewhere in there youll have a much cleaner mix, now your job is to go back and make it not as anemic. Or just remember the tracks that this experiment did something GOOD on and apply that to your previous mix

cant hurt to try