Reply To: Roberto Oppenheimer Dead to the world mix 2022

Hey Roberto :)

You’ll find that, especially with this kind of music, there’s a lot of instruments battling it out for a small patch of sonic real-estate. The kikdrum, the bass and the low-end cabinet movement of the rhythm guitars all compete around filling up the 80-250Hz range.

Regarding these SPECIFIC multitracks (it differs from project to project) you’ll find that the bass guitar and kikdrum trigger are already nicely under control, and that the mud comes from the 150-200Hz region on the guitars. I left the low-end on the bass and kik low-end mostly as-is since they didn’t conflict in the mix.

So…without doing anything to the low-end of your kik and bass, roll off some 200Hz on the guitars; you’ll immediately hear the guitar tone sounding less boomy. (In the case of your mix the guitar tone builds up along with a low-end boost on the kikdrum). Anyway, nothing drastic. Just a little dip. Don’t go too far with that though, since the speaker cabinet movement (the low-end of our chuggah chuggah sound) lives in the 120-200Hz range, and you definitely still want some of that.

To generalise this to all mixes and not just this one: low frequencies really tend to build up, and it’s not a bad idea to decide which instrument gets to live in which part of the low-end, ESPECIALLY with dense mixes. There’ll always be some overlap (things would sound really weird with absolutely no overlap) you’ll immediately notice things sounding clearer and less boomy. The best approach here is just to evaluate every mix on its own, and decide where you’re going to carve out space for the individual instruments.

Hope this helps!