Probably Simple Question but.... Removing Everything Below 50hz?

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dtboos
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2007/06/03 21:10:48 (permalink)

Probably Simple Question but.... Removing Everything Below 50hz?

I was told its a good idea to remove all frequencies below 50hz in the final mix to remove muddiness and get rid of the frequencies we cannot hear. I've looked at alot of the built in EQ's and havent been able to figure out how to simply remove everything below a certain frequency. If anybody can point me in the right direction, that would be great :)
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    CJaysMusic
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    RE: Probably Simple Question but.... Removing Everything Below 50hz? 2007/06/03 21:15:22 (permalink)
    Just dont start cutting because it says it in a book, Listen to your music and see how it translates on different systems (Car, Home stereo,Work Radio) You can use the sonitus eq for it. I dont know what EQ's you have, but if you have S6PE, you have the sonitus. But yes, its a good idea to gradually cut below 40KHz or around there. Every song is different.
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    #2
    ba_midi
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    RE: Probably Simple Question but.... Removing Everything Below 50hz? 2007/06/03 21:39:50 (permalink)
    Aside from what Clay said (ie., statements like "cut below 50HZ" are meant to be guidlines, not absolutes), you can use any EQ (Sonitus does fine) with a High Pass Filter setting to accomplish this.

    ORIGINAL: dtboos

    I was told its a good idea to remove all frequencies below 50hz in the final mix to remove muddiness and get rid of the frequencies we cannot hear. I've looked at alot of the built in EQ's and havent been able to figure out how to simply remove everything below a certain frequency. If anybody can point me in the right direction, that would be great :)


    Billy Arnell (ba-midi)

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    #3
    WhyBe
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    RE: Probably Simple Question but.... Removing Everything Below 50hz? 2007/06/03 22:16:56 (permalink)
    I would cut everything below 20Hz but not 50Hz. There's a lot going on from 20 to 50. Most consumer systems won't produce anything below 20 (if THAT low).
    #4
    Middleman
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    RE: Probably Simple Question but.... Removing Everything Below 50hz? 2007/06/03 22:21:51 (permalink)
    Wow, this is so wrong I don't know where to begin.

    First, "mud" is in the 150-350 range and a little dipping in this range is not a bad idea to get your tracks cleaned up. However, some voices and instruments need this range so it's highly dependent on the sound you are trying to create.

    A high pass from 20-30Hz is not a bad idea to take out rumble but, above this point, you are going to take power out of the bass or kick drum, possibly a low tom. So, once again, depending on your intent, you can play with a high pass in this range but you risk taking the umph out of a pop or rock mix in doing so. Mastering engineers do make a high pass on the final mix but its generally not as high as 50Hz.

    The first rule of mixing is not to NOT do the same thing everytime. Otherwise your tracks will always sound the same. Better to know why, when and where you should make an EQ adjustment vs following these type of blanket rules.
    post edited by Middleman - 2007/06/03 22:27:31

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    #5
    Ognis
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    RE: Probably Simple Question but.... Removing Everything Below 50hz? 2007/06/03 23:51:58 (permalink)
    The only problem with this is, a lot of hobbiest tend to use monitors (if they even use studio monitors at all), that are around the 4" range, and start to drop / tapper off at the 80 / 90 hz range. So, one would have no idea what is there in the first place, much less if droping it out would help or hurt.
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    Jim Roseberry
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    RE: Probably Simple Question but.... Removing Everything Below 50hz? 2007/06/03 23:56:37 (permalink)
    but, above this point, you are going to take power out of the bass or kick drum, possibly a low tom.


    I absolutely agree...
    Low drums can lose a lot if you hack off everything with a highpass at 50Hz.
    BTW, the slope of the HP filter is also an important consideration!!

    Best Regards,

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    #7
    subtlearts
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    RE: Probably Simple Question but.... Removing Everything Below 50hz? 2007/06/04 04:15:16 (permalink)
    I am not so much in favor of brute-force hipass in the final mix; for mastering, it's likely better to let the ME do his/her thing with the benefit of serious ears/monitors/room.

    HOWEVER. It is extremely important to cut out low rumble on any tracks where there is no useful information down there - guitars, piano, voice, horns, many synths, drum overheads (assuming you're getting everything you want on the kick from the kick channel)... This will open up those frequencies for instruments that are actually doing something useful with them, and often enormous improvements can be made to the punch and clarity of the low end of a mix without actually doing anything directly to it - simply by eliminating sub-audible rumble in other tracks.

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    calaverasgrandes
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    RE: Probably Simple Question but.... Removing Everything Below 50hz? 2007/06/04 04:56:15 (permalink)
    I think mastering engineers are a luxury that few of us ever get to encounter. My experiences have been limited to vinyl releases a while back. In those cases high passing at 30-50 hz is fairly common because of the physical limitations of a vinyl record. Also with the budget stuff we were doing, you can get more audio on a side if you restrict the bass (less bass means narrower grooves = more grooves! groovy)
    As far as cutting bass to get rid of mud.... there are lots of kinds of mud. There is IMd and cabinet resonances from cruddy monitors which causes you to cut where you dont need to. There is the wall of poo which most entry level preamps give you. There is the transformer resonance in most dynamic mics. For some its in a very audible range like 250hz. Some mixers do this also.
    There is no magic frequency to cut or boost that saves a mix.
    Years ago when I first found out about the fletcher munson loudnes curve I thought it meant you should boost at 3-4k because that is where the ear was most sensitive. Ouch. bad idea. Now I cut in that area to smooth out my mixes. I usually cut the low mid someplace between 120-600. and I almost always cut the bottom off of everything in the mix except the kick and maybe one other thing, like the bass or the snare.

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    yorolpal
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    RE: Probably Simple Question but.... Removing Everything Below 50hz? 2007/06/04 11:05:50 (permalink)
    Yea, I mean Geeze Louise I paid good money for this here sub woofer thang that goes all the way down ta like 35 hz or somethin and now yor tellin me to just lop that off? No way, Jose! (sorry ifn yor name ain't Jose).

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    Jon Bryson
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    RE: Probably Simple Question but.... Removing Everything Below 50hz? 2007/06/04 11:32:53 (permalink)

    ORIGINAL: Ognis

    The only problem with this is, a lot of hobbiest tend to use monitors (if they even use studio monitors at all), that are around the 4" range, and start to drop / tapper off at the 80 / 90 hz range. So, one would have no idea what is there in the first place, much less if droping it out would help or hurt.


    Yep, that's my problem. I noticed early on that mixes from my Event PS6's were coming up bass heavy on other systems. My bandaid for now has been to roll off below 40Hz and it actually has worked rather well, but of course I'd rather get a subwoofer so that I can deal more effectively with the bass.

    Jon
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    stvlush
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    Re: RE: Probably Simple Question but.... Removing Everything Below 50hz? 2017/05/27 07:14:48 (permalink)
    Old thread, but I got pulled in and it relates to my current plight.
    Clearly, there is no simple answer, but lots of good ideas here.
    I have recently been helping an FM Rock radio station tweak their processing.  I'm listening to a budget 2005 Technics receiver with vintage Hegemen Model 1A omni-directional, top firing speakers.  They sound pretty darned good, especially considering they are small (8" main speaker with a modest tweeter), I have no sub, no EQ, no "loudness" button, just a basic, pleasant system in my room to watch TV and listen to music on.
    Wednesday the station played an acoustic Dylan song and I felt a rumble that resembled acoustic feed back from a turntable, though the source file was ripped from CD and played from a computer.  Perhaps it was slight HVAC noise, recorded, but not noticed during Dylan's original session, being expanded by the signal processing.  Today, during a live, acoustic Neil Young song I felt a loud thump on every beat.  I put a high-res spectrum analyzer on my tuner's output and noticed a huge peak at 36 Hz, so it was probably on the original recording, just not evident without massive compression or expansion.  Could be some kind of "Max-bass" type of harmonic enhancer at the station, but that seems less likely.
    Now, how are we to anticipate what our music will sound like under those circumstances?  Getting a good mix on good equipment is hard enough.  Bit rate reduction, radio processing and other sound mangling process are too numerous to contemplate and there are new algorithms being written daily.
    Conceptually, it would seem prudent to filter sub-sonic energy. Inaudible audio you leave on your master could get quite nasty in the real world, as I learned this week. But where is the line;20 Hz, 30, 50? High pass, band pass, both?  How steep the slope of your filter, how wide the Q?  This alone gets dicey.  High pass filters create a very small bump at the cutoff frequency.  Put one on every track set to the same frequency and you will end up with a big hump when the channels are summed.  So it's usually better to run a bunch of tracks you plan to filter in the same way to an aux and use one EQ to avoid this problem, that is, if yon need to roll off the lows.
    Before you release your master, play it back many times and see if it can stand up to the tortures it could be subjected to in the world. Squash the hell out it with compressors, multi-band if possible. Fiddle with AGC, gating, upward expansion, EQ, make low bit-rate MP3s, etc. Once it leaves your hands, it's anybody's guess what will happen to it.  If you can spot potential dangers and prevent them without doing violence to your mix, you will be a step ahead of your average producer, maybe even ahead of some legendary names.
    I don't have an answer, but after 46 years working with audio I discovered something new and disturbing this week. Call it food for thought.
    #12
    Sanderxpander
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    Re: RE: Probably Simple Question but.... Removing Everything Below 50hz? 2017/05/27 08:02:33 (permalink)
    The 50Hz from the initial post seems pretty high to me but perhaps it's not so extreme for radio. Certainly you could roll off below 30Hz.

    But a simple EQ is almost useless if the processor is simply squashing everything. I think general radio processors have intelligent multiband compressors/limiters to avoid this sort of thing happening. Do they not have a dedicated processor on this station?
    #13
    Kamikaze
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    Re: RE: Probably Simple Question but.... Removing Everything Below 50hz? 2017/05/27 08:19:04 (permalink)
    Bark of the Dog

     
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    soens
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    Re: RE: Probably Simple Question but.... Removing Everything Below 50hz? 2017/05/27 09:10:42 (permalink)
    Too much mud is never good!

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