Phase issues and how to check them in mono/EQ?

How do I check in mono if my mix is out of phase?

Also when doing an eq, say I want to bring out the low E in a bass guitar which is 41 hz, Is it a good way to just boost the harmonics like 82 hz, 123 hz, 164 hz to keep the mix less muddy but at the same time making the low E more apparent?


Another thing I wanted to check is about Sound Pressure Meters. I've read that, to ensure the mix is not bass heavy or bass light, monitor sound between 80 and 85 db. Is there some sort of meter plugin to check the sound pressure?

"Yes, harmonics are extremely important for bass guitar. Which frequencies to boost or cut depends on the guitar tone. Sometimes you may end up boosting at 1KHz and cutting at 300Hz. Depends on the makeup of the original tone. " 
 
I'm guessing for people new at this (myself), it would be trial and error on boosting and cutting harmonics until it the bass sits nicely in it's own territory? 
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"SPL meters can be had at any Radio Shack for cheap. Get the analog version if they have them, but the digital version is OK too and, IIRC, slightly cheaper. Don't remember what I paid for mine, but I think it was $25-$30 (it was many years ago, though!)" 

So there is no such thing as a plugin that can be added in the master bus at the end of the fx chain? Though I'm probably guessing.

Though the ears are probably best, there are 'correlation meters' that measure this type of issue.

One thing that many people do is to get all of the EQ done in mono. Then start panning things and do the remaining tweaking. If you can hear everything and it sounds good in mono, then you know you don't have phase issues or frequency masking issues that are just being hidden by being on separate sides of the mix (i.e. they don't sound bad in the sweet spot but out in the room where it's effectively mono they are problematic.)

Plugins do exist that emphasize or add harmonics, and are often used on bass precisely because 40 Hz is poorly reproduced on most playback systems. 

MaxxBass from Waves works on the principle that we will think we hear very low frequencies that aren't really there if the harmonics are raised. A simple distortion plugin or amp sim will do something similar. If you want to experiment, try the free Voxengo Boogex distortion plugin on bass, either in series or in parallel.

Yes, it actually adds harmonics, as opposed to just turning them up as with an EQ.

It could potentially analyze the frequency content and only boost harmonics of the primary note. Dunno if it does that or not. If it does, it would lilely introduce significant latency, and it doesn't seem like that sort of plugin, but it might be. It would have to do a FFT on the signal to do that, and that is a pretty heavy operation.

Anyway, it sounds to me that you, like all of us initially, are over-intellectualizing things. Though there are of course lots of technical tricks, and if you want to make hyper-plastic modern pop then it's probably as much about processing as playing, generally speaking the fundamental issues that we all have to work through aren't that technical. It's all about deciding what's important and what's not, and giving the import things the frequency space they need, and making everything else subservient. And of course coming up with good arrangements that have minimal frequency conflict to begin with.

It's amazing what frequency masking can do. You get wierd effects like where cuting the bass at 2000 makes the mix far less muddy, which is completely non-obvious. It's because the high frequencies of the bass are masking the presence of the guitars or other instruments that have their presence up in that range.

If the mix is muddy, then boosting the bass probably isn't the problem. It's more likely that you need to be removing frequency content from more stuff, like high passing the guitars, making some cuts in the lower mids of the bass, finding a good place to cut the guitars in the mids and let the bass poke through. That sort of thing.

And just keeping in mind that everything can't be the star. Some things have to win and other things have to lose. Decide what you feel is important and work off that. If it's guitar based music, let the guitars sound like you want, and adjust everything else to fit within that. If you want everything to be big, reduce your arrangement to make it much more sparse.

bitflipper

Ok correct me if I'm wrong, but if that plugin "adds" harmonics, isn't that the same as turning up/boosting the harmonics manually in the eq except it does it for you?

Not quite the same thing. You can use an EQ to boost harmonics, but you can only boost what's already present in the guitar's tone. 


Sometimes, you need to literally add harmonic content that wasn't there to begin with. This is exactly what a fuzzbox does, or a distorted amplifier, or a software amplifier simulator: adds brand-new spectral content that didn't originate from the instrument itself.

Or harmonic exciter.


Dave Pensado is a huge fan of MaxxBass. He seems to use it on every track!


From the limited research I have done, nothing seems to match it. But I'm sure there are good cheap alternatives out there which will do similar things regardless. MaxxBass has a pretty good reputation, I believe.

I find that measurement devices may only tell part of the story. They wont tell you if the mix is not good on mono. I use a third speaker and it is small in its own little box similar to Auratone style. I sum L+R and feed that into an amp which drives it. When using it I keep the volume low and well below the main stereo monitors.

It is superior to two speakers with the mono switch on. There is nothing quite like all your mix coming from one small spot. Firstly I aim for a good mix on the stereo main speakers first. Usually after that I switch to the mono speaker and usually only have to trim a few things to keep it sounding good too. Any (technical) issues due to phase cancellations become very obvious on the small speaker. But even if things are all working great collapsing stereo wide mixes down to mono, the mix needs to be refined to get it sounding very strong on the mono speaker. 

All the points mentioned previously reveal themselves and all you have to do is modify things so they fit a lot better and clarity reigns supreme. Up louder on the stereo mains again and all is usually also very well and should not change much.

Using your ears to hear how your mix sounds in mono from a mono speaker is a good thing to do in conjunction with measurements such as phase meters etc.

In a funny way you can control the width of your stereo mix by what you hear in the mono speaker. By summing Left and Right, sounds that are panned in the centre and also sounds that are stereo but on both sides will add in the correct balance on the small speaker. But single point mono sounds that are panned toward either side can sound a little lower. Trimming these up in the small speaker has the effect of almost widening the mix on the extremes a bit. It really helps stopping those single point mono sounds from getting lost. 

It also stops you from using say three similar sounds and just relying on panning them to separate them. Because everything is all lined up behind each other almost on the small speaker you have to go to extra lengths to make those three similar sounds be a little different from each other. On the other hand you may have a lot of similar sounds and done that for creating a wider deeper stereo image. Panning those in stereo will make them sound great. The small speaker will also tell you if all that is being summed OK and you aim for hearing the same lushness in the small speaker as you do in the larger stereo monitors. 

Ozone's exciter is good, but it's a heavyweight plugin that you wouldn't want to use on too many individual tracks. 


Yeah, I totally agree. Though I'm not sure if this is a great workaround, but export and import back the track keeping the original as backup.