>> I'm going to take a little look at high passing here.
These are some wild,
sloppy gang vocals that
are adding to the energy on the chorus.
I may take a look at some other things as well,
but this is basically about high passing.
Talking about high passing, everything.
Basically, low frequencies can really muddy up your mix,
and you only actually need a couple of
things to have a lot of low frequencies.
Mainly, your kick drum,
sometimes your snare drum,
other types of drums,
and then your bass instruments.
Whatever those maybe, electric bass,
upright bass, synth bass either weight of those things.
Those all need plenty of low frequencies.
But pretty much everything else,
you want to get rid of the low frequencies because they
build up and they muddy up your mix. How do you do that?
Well, it's pretty easy, actually.
I have one of these channel
strip plug-ins on nearly every track,
and every production that I do now just
allows me to grab EQs or compressors,
or just straight levels,
or phase, or whatever really quickly.
This is a console plugin by
brain works that I'm using in this particular case.
We're going to check out these
background vocals, and basically,
what you want to do is start out by soloing whatever
the instrument is [MUSIC].
You can probably hear there's not even a lot of
low-end information necessarily there in the first place.
But I'm actually going to listen to
this particular part because that
has a little bit more low end in it.
All you do is, you activate
your high-pass and then you sweep it until you're
really not hearing it anymore
[MUSIC].
I'm not hearing a massive noticeable difference
in the sound and telling it to like 250,
around there between
let's say that's just an easy choice to make.
Automatically, I can say, well,
I can high-pass at 250 and it's
not massively changing the sound,
so that's a no brainer.
Then what you do is,
you listen to it in the context of the whole mix,
and in most cases,
you're going to be able to even
further high pass without noticing
a huge difference
[MUSIC].
As you can hear there,
I can go even further up above
without hearing a drastic change,
and that just allows me to get rid of all
that low-end information that
might be manning up my mix,
and let me see if I can find
another instrument here and we'll do a similar thing.
Let's check out these trumpets and
trombones here and we can do
something similar there
[MUSIC].
Again, you want to solo
whatever instrument it is
that you're going to be high passing.
In this case, I have all of these horns
going to this trumpet and bone meaning trombone,
ox, or bus, or sub.
Those all mean the same thing.
Going to listen to it, turn
my high pass on
[MUSIC].
You might want to listen to different sections of
the song if the instrument is changing,
doing different things in different sections
[MUSIC].
In this case, it's a good thing I did
that because there's definitely
more low end in this particular section of the song,
and that led me to choose
this 150 range at which I could comfortably
high-pass these instruments when they're soloed
and not really here, a drastic difference.
I'm just getting rid of, essentially,
unnecessary low-end information there.
Then again, I'm going to un-solo it,
listen in the track and see if maybe I can highpass
a little bit more
[MUSIC].
In that case, we're not even
hearing a ton of them in that particular section.
I might want to go to a section where they're
being heard a bit more,
such as the pre here
[MUSIC].
I can easily up that
above 200 without hearing
a drastic change and that's what you're looking for.
Again, you can do this
on a whole lot of different things in your track,
including the vocals, your vocal bus,
any of your keyboards or guitars,
percussion instruments of
various sorts, all those things.
Basically, anything that doesn't
specifically need to have a lot of low end,
such as a drum or
a bass instrument you can perform the same action with,
and that'll allow you to
gain a lot of clarity in your mix quite easily.