Low End Control



The single biggest mixing challenge in the small studio is getting the low end right.

“[I use] a simple high-pass filter... on almost everything,” says Phil Tan, “because, apart from the kick drum and the bass, there’s generally not much going on below 120 to 150Hz. I have always found filtering below this cleans up unnecessary muddy low-level things.”9 Just because an instrument is supposed to be contributing low frequencies to your mix, that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t high-pass filter it, either, because even if the filter barely grazes the audible frequency response, it will still stop troublesome subsonic rubbish from eating away at your final mixdown’s headroom.

“You’ve got to remember,” advises Jack Douglas, “that the stuff that’s going to take up the most room in your mix is on the bottom end. If you just let the bass take up that space, you can get out a lot of the low stuff on other tracks—up to around 160Hz—and it will still sound massive.”11 So if, for example, your main bass part is an electric bass, but there’s also signi cant sub- 100Hz information coming from your electric-guitar, synth-pad, piano, and Hammond-organ tracks as well, then it’s not a bad idea to minimize the low- end contributions of all these secondary parts to reduce the overlap. This not only means that you can fade up the main bass part more within the available headroom, but the sub-100Hz region will also become much easier to control, because you can concentrate your low-frequency processing on just the bass guitar track. You might even split off the sub-100Hz frequency components for separate processing, metering their levels to ensure that they remain rock solid in the mix balance. Or perhaps you might decide to replace those frequencies completely with a dedicated subbass synthesizer part (a common hip-hop and R&B trick), using your MIDI and synth-programming skills to dictate the level of low end with absolute precision.

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