From the course: Audio Mixing Master Class

The power of the high-pass filter - Pro Tools Tutorial

From the course: Audio Mixing Master Class

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The power of the high-pass filter

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- [Instructor] A mixers secret weapon is the high and low-pass filters. Many engineers rely on just the low pass to clean up their mixes. But a combination of both can do wonders for making everything fit together. Here's how to do that. Let's come over here to this electric. ("The Bridge You Don't Burn") One of the things about electric guitars is that there's not a lot of highs and not a lot of lows. And usually what's there gets in the way of everything else. Sometimes some low frequencies in fact will cover up the bass and you'll lose some definition. Or it might cover up some of the snare drum for instance. And you'll lose some definition. So this is a way that you can actually tailor everything so it fits a lot better. What I'm going to do here is I'm going to mute the reverb first of all 'cause we don't need the effect on it. (guitar music Playing) Okay. Once again we're using our seven band EQ but only for the filters. And listen when I insert this and usually we can go at least to 100 cycles and sometimes even 200 and it will still work. We're losing some low end but you won't miss it in the mix. (Guitar Music Playing) listen in the mix now. (Guitar Music Playing) That's one thing and again what will happen is if we do this enough we'll find that we'll carve out spaces frequency spaces in the mix for all of our elements. Now the other thing about electric guitars especially is there's no high-end. It goes up to about 6K and that's it. But our microphones are picking up beyond that. So there's no point in trying to amplify that or reproduce those frequencies. Because they're just kind of getting in the way. So let's get rid of those and let's first of all ... (Guitar Music Playing) you can hear we got rid of some of high-end but not a whole lot. Now let's listen to the mix. (Guitar Music Playing) now you can tell what we've done is we've carved this space out in the mix and it fits a lot better. That's what we're trying to do with each of our instruments here. The first thing is find those tracks that were recorded with the mic. In other words anything that had a microphone on it is going to get a filter. Now the first thing is add a high-pass filter. And that means that you want to cut off anything that's 60 Hertz and below. Sometimes 80. You might want to even go a lot higher. You can go as high as two or even 300 on electric guitars for instance and it will still sound good. Now the next thing is to find the tracks that have a limited bandwidth. So for instance again electric guitars that only have a bandwidth that goes to about six kilohertz. There's no point in recording anything else above that because you're probably getting stuff that you can't use anyway in the mix. So the next thing you're going to do is add a low-pass filter and you're going to adjust it so all those frequencies that you don't need above let's say 6K on electric guitar are cut off. Now usually when it begins to dull you've gone too far. So make sure when you cut off those frequencies you're not cutting off something that you really want as well.

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