How do you tighten the low end?

Demonstealer

Demonstealer

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First off I tried searching for a similar topic with not much luck. So if there is one and you can link me maybe a moderator can lock this then :)

Back to the topic.

How do you tighten the low end on your mix?

In the Toms topic. Ahjteam said 'Well the low end is the problem in heavy metal in general, not just toms.'

And that is true, I'm currently also struggling to make my mix sound clean without losing the lows.

When you mix a band am sure the guitarist wants the lows on his guitar and the drummer a more fat kick and snare and what not so how do you balance between everything?

I know there isn't a set of hard and fast rules and everything goes from song to song but there is a starting set of idea's, concepts and principles that you can share which will allow someone else to apply them in his own case study and use it effectively.

Am looking for some of those :)
 
Tight performances are sort of the bread and butter of this. It's hard to get the mix sitting in the pocket if the performances aren't.

Apart from that the simple answer is filtering, eq and dynamics control. Work out in your mind where you want every low-end element to be dominant. Where you want the kick to peak, where you want the bass to sit, and how much excursion you want your guitars to have down there.

As time goes on I find myself filtering guitars higher and higher for metal. Bergstrand's way really is the best IMO. He seems to have this absolute mastery of the low-end that I have no heard from any engineer, and in fact the only mixes I find that rival STD in the low-end are dance/electro ones, where everything is a single velocity layer and constantly controlled.

Be brutal on your bass guitar. Limit it, compress it, parallel compress it, multiband it - whatever works for your situation. Suck out those lower mids and make sure the instrument is singing in a good, tight range. Make sure your kick is tight and not overly ringy or resonant. Then make sure the thump of the cab isn't causing your guitar tracks to conflict with the bass.

Get a good performance, with good gear, mind frequency interactions within the mix & you should be fine.
 
Cutting lots more low end from shit so that the kick and bass can dominate the low frequencies.

Demonstealer, don't be afraid to cut lots of low end from the guitars, if your band's guitar players have a problem with it then direct them to me and I'll gladly sort them out.
Guitar low end is all very resonant and muddy sounding, why bother keeping it in there when you can have tight, controlled, mega punchy low end from the kick and bass uninhibited by muddy guitars?

Hell, I even end up high-passing kick and bass a little bit most of the time. When you get down to 40hz and under it starts becoming a total mess so I usually just filter that out with a smooth roll off up to 60hz anyway (I'd start the roll off at 40hz if my speakers could reproduce that frequency range better though)

With metal production you need to be fucking ruthless. If an instrument doesn't operate fundamentally in a certain frequency range, don't have it dominating those frequencies, full stop.
Guitars are not bass instruments, if your guitarists think they need all that low end on their guitars they are completely mistaken.

If they STILL argue, then say this:
You're the audio guy, you have the ears trained to hear this shit better than them, otherwise they'd be doing it and not you.

I've found that shuts people up quite nicely.
 
It's a bitch trying to glue the guitar & bass together especially if the bassline does not follow the guitars. And in that case, even more of a bitch to make the guitars have oomph, if you do a very drastic HPF.
 
When I was first starting out, all of my stuff was super muddy sounding and everything was just keeping with each other rather than complementing each other, it was just a mess.
I've definitely improved, but like everything you can always get better.
Everyone else has covered what you need to do really, so no point of me repeating that. Aside from good technique, you gotta have decent gear too.
They say tone is in the fingers, but the truth a shitty amp and a guitar with shit pickups that isn't set up correctly is not going to do anyone favors.
If people come to you with shit house guitars, tell them to GTFO and get them set up or just get better instruments, seriously.

Equipment wise, stuff that helps:
New strings on guitars and bass are a must, seriously. Not only with intonation, but they sound clearer too.
Unless you have an overly bright guitar or bass guitar, avoid coated strings like Elixirs.
Pickups that complement the body's wood help too. No point, for example, putting a Seymour Duncan Invader in a guitar with a dark tone wood, you'll just get mud.
If you're playing around with 7 strings or more (and having to play/track tight styles of music), IMO the best way to go is active pickups. There are some passives that work good with 7 or 8 string guitars, but you really gotta do your research, whereas you can be pretty much assured actives can be tight as fuck.
For 6 strings, I prefer EMGs, for 7 strings, I prefer Blackouts, but some prefer EMG 81/7s or 707s.
Something as simple as a pickup change in an otherwise good guitar with lacking pickups can breathe new life into it and clean up the low end of the instrument enough to make a genuine difference, seriously.
 
A bit of a tangent, but it's something I've wondered lately.

Do you guys ever find it odd that people publicly advertising their AE services as a business commonly ask very fundamental questions on here? As in things that you imagine one may have learned in 'AE school 101' when starting.

I just find it a little curious, as I held off advertising myself commercially for a few years, until I was confident that I had the fundamentals worked out to a satisfactory degree.

Gareth is on the ball with that post for the most part. You can be quite brutal with filtering and frequency control in metal. There are so many elements at work that you will inevitably find something suited to each frequency range. We don't have a lot of 'room' to work with in this genre, so we have to make the most of it.

One good habit to get into when working totally ITB is to low-pass every track to some degree or another. We lack the natural smoothing effects of analogue tape working this way, and as a result our audio can at times seem too immediate, present and harsh. Knowing when to pull out the saturation plug-ins, making things gentler etc. can go a long way towards making a thick sounding mix.
 
Ermz said:
A bit of a tangent, but it's something I've wondered lately.

Do you guys ever find it odd that people publicly advertising their AE services as a business commonly ask very fundamental questions on here? As in things that you imagine one may have learned in 'AE school 101' when starting.

I just find it a little curious, as I held off advertising myself commercially for a few years, until I was confident that I had the fundamentals worked out to a satisfactory degree.

Gareth is on the ball with that post for the most part. You can be quite brutal with filtering and frequency control in metal. There are so many elements at work that you will inevitably find something suited to each frequency range. We don't have a lot of 'room' to work with in this genre, so we have to make the most of it.

One good habit to get into when working totally ITB is to low-pass every track to some degree or another. We lack the natural smoothing effects of analogue tape working this way, and as a result our audio can at times seem too immediate, present and harsh. Knowing when to pull out the saturation plug-ins, making things gentler etc. can go a long way towards making a thick sounding mix.
Click to expand...

Off-Topic:
Have been wondering that myself from time to time.. I know I would never advise my AE service before my skills were up to a certain point where I could be proud of the work.

On-topic
Don't have much to add as im also currently fighting with the low end and trying to find a good balance between rumbling/muddy and thin sounding mix.

For now I can only agree on what being said already in the thread.
 
@Ermz - Thanks for the advice. This is the current mix I am on. (excuse the wonky drum fills) . http://dl.getdropbox.com/u/1953726/Unrelenting Clip 6.mp3

I think I'm more lost with what frequencies are 'right' to cut when actually mixing.

@Gareth - I always cut lows from the guitar and since I am the guitar player there is no arguing. I also roll off sometimes below 40-60hz on the kick and boost the low mid, I cut between 200-300 from the bass guitar, this is where I think I have max problems EQing the bass guitar correctly. And right now I'm the only person arguing with myself. My band and other bands I work with are very chilled out they accept my word :)
 
@Petrovsk Mizinski - I think I've got fairly decent gear for what I recorded and my basic tones are also not too bad. If u hear the link up you can let me know what you think. I just basically need that direction to go one step further. Kind of like writers block. You just need some perspective to help you go forward.

@Ermz - I think a lot of guys just dont learn the right way. Its like a guitarist who can sweep and shred the fuck out but you ask him what mode or scale he is in and he has no clue. Its like I know how to play guitar but I dont know what I did to get there. So thats what leads to people asking sometimes the most basic questions. Or so I feel. I could be terribly wrong (self doubt is another important factor)
 
Is it quite possible to learn a lot of things incorrectly.
Because you're learned something doesn't mean you can necessarily do it correctly.
I mean, we can take guitarists as an example, many people learn incorrect technique and as a result get RSI, Carpal Tunnel etc, others have to unlearn bad practice habits etc etc.
 
Yeah I'd say "tightening" the low end is less a case of actually tightening, rather just removing any un-needed low frequency content and compressing the shit out of any low end shit that actually matters, ie kick and bass.

Ermz is right on the ball with the whole electro/dance thing. Try and get your bass track just be like a fucking thickness dial.
You want more thickness? TURN YO FUCKEN BASS TRACK UP MAN
and compress it, limit it, and multiband comp shit to the point where shit isn't popping out or getting buried when you dont want it to. i usually use like 4-5 bass tracks, all being processed differently and focusing on different frequency ranges. I have a subbass and midbass track then the rest is all twang/distortion tracks.
The two tracks that focus on the low end get compressed to the point of being a fucking square wave, then the other shit I don't usually compress on top of any compression added by distortion.
Then I use some mild comp on my Bass group track to glue it all together, then turn it up to a level I'm happy with and then I don't actually have to turn it up or down at certain points of the song for balance or anything. It's constantly, consistently audible without being TOO smushed. I do automate bass so I have fairly constant movement in the mix, to keep shit interesting, but in terms of just having a consistent level where you can hear every note at a near equal volume, I don't have to touch a thing. Aim for that.

Then don't be too worried about using one sample with no velocity layers in metal production. People want every hit audible or they'll fucking bitch at you, and it helps to keep the low end of busy, dense metal mixes somewhat easily controllable. Compress, high-pass some of the shit muddy rumble out, turn up to where you want the level to be, done.

All that's left is to poke a hole in the kick drum with an EQ for the bass to shine through and a hole in the bass for the kick to shine through.
What I tend to do is focus my kick's punch at 60hz and bass around 100hz (that's just me, I know others do it differently.)
So I cut 3db at 60hz on bass, boost 3db at 60hz on kick
Cut 3db at 100hz on kick, boost 3db at 100hz on bass
Just for an example of how I get shit fitting together.

But yeah, the only shit in my mixes with any real low end content is the kick and the bass, the rest of the stuff is all ruthlessly highpassed. Guitars and vocals are rolling off around 150hz usually, lead guitars even higher.
 
^
I'm not a particular believer of someone's personal method being "incorrect."
Maybe conventionally incorrect but check Willie Adler's picking hand for christs sake haha
there's some weird shit going on there, but it works for him, so why not? *shrug*
 
Yeah, I tend to high pass lead guitars fairly high too, around 200Hz.
It's especially important when you have guys that use the neck pickup and utilize the entire fretboard and are playing either a detuned 6 or 7 string, because those lower notes can get muddy fast on the neck pickup if you're not careful.
 
@Gareth - That makes a lot of sense and I do apply similar direction but I do still find I haven't perfected. If you can listen to this clip of my for instance.
http://dl.getdropbox.com/u/1953726/Unrelenting Clip 6.mp3

You thought on the low end in that and some maybe directional input now how to 'clean' up the low end. I'm working harder on getting the bass and kick EQ'd in a ways they don't fight for that low space.

I actually had removed quite a bit of the guitar lows but I'm not sure if i have too little or too much now.
 
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