One thing many amateur mixes have in common is they are too harsh. For whatever reason young mixers like to boost a lot of upper midrange stuff to make their mixes sound exciting. In the end it only sounds painful.
Notching Out The Pain
There tends to be one or two main frequencies that are worth pulling back in your mix in order to reduce harshness and protect the listener’s ears. If you can avoid boosting this frequency that’s awesome. If you can pull some of it out, even better. Let’s take a look.
Comments
I always thought the pain frequency was around 3k. Great tip on making the vocals stand out more. They’re definitely more intelligible with the 2k cut. Very subtle, but it does make a difference. One question: I keep hearing to use subtractive EQ, but Dave Pensado, as well as several people he’s had on his show, has said he boosts most of the time. I’m guessing it’s better to boost with hardware or plugins that introduce coloring to the signal and that subtractive EQ works best on cheaper sounding EQs??? It’s a bit confusing, but I do know the best tip is to use your ears.
Again, no rules. 2k isn’t always the problem. Boosting isn’t always bad. These tips are generally helpful for most mixes however.
Thanks for a great site Graham.
Sure you can call it “the pain freq”, btw 2-3khz that is. But this area is also very important for the clarity if the mix. I think the most important thing is not to start boosting this area like crazy, rather than cutting it away on all tracks except the vocals.
Take care of the following and you have come a long way:
1. Gain staging
2. Mix in mono
3. subtractive eq
Keep up the good work Graham, your tips are really helpful!