A Tip For Mixing Down Low Frequencies

I posted this over at DOA where people seemed to find it quite useful, so here it is for all you lovely Renoisers :)

This is a pretty simple but quite useful tip. All you need to do is lowpass both your tune and the one you’re referencing it with. About 200hz should work well. This allows you to listen to and reference sub frequencies much more easily. I find that this works really well with headphones because they don’t suffer from room acoustic problems. Combine this with a spectrum analyser and you should be able to judge your subs and kicks pretty accurately.

This also works with highpassing and bandpassing for comparing mids and tops…

A few people at DOA recommend using a multiband compressor because you can easily mute/solo individual frequency bands, which I think is a great idea.

I’m not entirely sure monitoring subs and bass on headphones with headphones is a wise idea, granted room acoustics can cause lot of grief but especially this spectrum shouldn’t be monitored on headphones imo.

True, but I’d rather trust headphones than a completely untreated room.

Not sure if this is a safe technique. Subs need to be mixed relative to highs… No?

I think its a good tip to get the relative loudness of the different bass-tracks (mainly bass and kick) tight and then take it from there.

Ah ok. That makes since, especially in terms of sidechaining.

Still though, I tend to just solo a bass or kick so I can hear the tops as well.

ofcourse, especially because a good bassdrum and a good bass do have atleast a few mids. But yet again, this is a tip for clubmusic in particular (if you didn’t know DOA is a D&B-Forum) and if you do things for those real big setups in a club it is vital to get a good mix between kick and bass … In pop-music, this is not that vital. Again, it’s all about shaking a room/basement … sigh. (I think most engineers for clubmusic spend 80% of their time for a mix on that foundation.)

This is a good technique for sure, however it should not be the only one you use.

Use everything you know to get things in line. All techniques are good if they are founded in reason.

Once you have the mix sorted technically, start listening to it without your programming brain plugged in. Difficult for me. Probably difficult for you.

:(

and

:)

exactly as vadar said IMO - the way I see it, once you get it right it’ll sound right whatever monitoring methods and tricks you use so best to try em all for the clearest picture… ;)

I never said it was the only way to mix ;)

Soz skunky, didnt mean that to come across in a bad way!

Peace and all that. :)