Want to get an immediate improvement in the clarity of your mixes? Take out the trash!
Specifically, run each track through a highpass (a.k.a. lowcut) filter to remove infrasonics – thumps, booms, rumbles, and more – below the range of human hearing. Here’s the idea:
- Solo the track and listen to it
- Insert a highpass filter.
- Adjust the filter cutoff frequency and slope so that both are set as high as possible without audibly impacting the tone of the track. Do this by adjusting the filter, then bypass/apply the filter and compare the results. A subwoofer is a huge help for this; headphones can also be useful for this type of comparison.
When the filter is set to the highest frequency and steepest slope possible without audibly affecting the desired audio, it is removing everything below that frequency. You’ll find that when you do this on every track, you’ll have a cleaner mix, and will probably also have more headroom, as all the energy contained in unheard infrasonics in multiple tracks can add up to a substantial amount of lost headroom.