How To Beat The Fizz

Nauru

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Nov 1, 2009
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So lately I've been working a lot on my guitar sound. I use Pod Farm most of the time, and I'm pretty happy with it, but I'll branch out to the free stuff a lot of people here use. My problem has been that all my tones seem to be fairly fizzy, even ones I record micing an actual amp. It seems to reside in a few places frequency wise, one of the main ones being around 4k, but whenever I cut the fizzy frequencies, everything sounds muffled.
Any advice on how I can get less fizzy tone?
 
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Notch the fizz peaks with narrow EQ, then high shelf the tone to make up for the lost brightness. Sometimes a broad boost around the areas you've cut deeply with the narrow EQ can work too.

This was my first instinct when I started to realize how fizzy my guitars really were, but when I high shelved it always made it sound too harsh by the time I got the brightness back. I never thought of boosting my cuts though, I'll give that a try.
 
P.S. Those candies look delicious where can I get some? I'm a sucker for fizzy candy.
 
If you're finding the high shelving boosts harsh then welcome to ITB. Most of our EQs still suck.

You mean hardware eqs don't do that!?
I've only ever mixed ITB, and I guess i've never really known what I'm missing.
Any suggestions for good eqs? Right now I use URS almost exclusively, though I do have the ssl 4k pack.
 
You could try tweaking the Pod Farm settings after you've cut the fizz, that might work out better. Or try boosting with a wide-ish bell or two instead of shelving.

I find it's better not to go overboard with the cut depth. It's tempting to say "this frequency is bad, I'll rip it out totally" but like as not it's sounding bad just 'cos it's peaked, and if you rip it the freq's bordering it will now sound peaky by comparison...

Hardware eq sound varies from product to product. Depending on circuit design, physical layout, component selection etc.
I've built eq and the high boosts sounded smoother than any of the plug-ins I had at the time. The cheaper end of the commercial units rarely sound great however.

It's possible also that the tracks you're working on just have a harsh high end, which was somewhat masked by the fizz until you cut it. You could use the known good DI tracks floating around on this forum to check if the problem starts at the guitar or later in the signal chain.
 
Don't know if it helps and works, but did you ever take alook at this?
 
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Often, in fact pretty much ALWAYS, the upper mid "fizz" is essential to maintaining any kind of brightness in a high quality guitar tone.
While it seemed acceptable to have a guitar tone very small on core mids, not a hell of a lot of lower mids and a fair chunk of mid bass back in the 80s, along with a healthy does of horrible treble fizz, these days it's not really the sound anymore, unless one likes typical shitty 80s thrash metal guitar tones.
If you can manage to beat the nasty fizz, while retaining the fizz that makes a guitar retain brightness, then you're on the money basically.
To me, it makes more sense to attack fizz in the highest registers where you are hearing fizz most.
While a LPF will tame the unnecessary "air", often, as you know, that's not really enough anyway.
Start by taming 8KHz, 7.5KHz, whatever offending frequencies you can find in the treble range. Don't cut too much obviously, or at least a very large Q so you're not starting to cut into the upper mids otherwise you get muffled
Once you have that done, only then should you really start fucking around with the upper mids.
Upper mids is a pain in the ass. This is really the core component of brightness IMO, so be careful and constantly reference your tone against benchmark productions that have super controlled treble and awesome high mids (examples are all 3 Paramore records, Linkin Park's Hybrid Theory, a fair amount of Sneap's mixes and various Nickelback and all that stuff etc)
 
To me, it makes more sense to attack fizz in the highest registers where you are hearing fizz most.
While a LPF will tame the unnecessary "air", often, as you know, that's not really enough anyway.
Start by taming 8KHz, 7.5KHz, whatever offending frequencies you can find in the treble range. Don't cut too much obviously, or at least a very large Q so you're not starting to cut into the upper mids otherwise you get muffled
Once you have that done, only then should you really start fucking around with the upper mids.
etc)

Im not cutting away the fizz so high in the range. It seems to be somewhere around 4-5khz for me. And then i boost around 8khz to make up for the treble lost.