It's all about that bass, 'bout that bass, no treble...Meghan Trainor was onto something. A lot of the issues people have with dull sounding and quiet tracks is all down to that bass.
The Tip:
Put an FFT, graphic or other such analyser on your master buss and solo each individual track in your song one by one. The resulting graphic display will show you the range of frequencies that that particular track is hogging. Every instrument with have a 'fundamental' frequency correlated to the note it's playing so for this example, a bass playing it's bottom 'E' will be down at 41Hz while a violin playing it's lowest 'E' will be up at 330Hz. If the violin was recorded in a less than ideally acoustically treated environment, then it may well have some lower order harmonics in it's spectrum (or the air con was creating a low frequency hum for example) which will take up much needed space in the low end of the frequency spectrum of the mix. This means you'll have to boost the bass instrument more in volume to be at a decent level within the mix, meaning less headroom for the mix in general. Mulitply this effect by the number of tracks you have in the mix then you will start to see the problem. Unsolo that track and use a high pass (low cut) filter and sweep up from 20Hz up to the point where you can start to hear it taking something away from that violin part. Ease back a bit until you can't hear it imparting anything significant to that violin part and voilá, you have successfully cleaned up your violin part! Do this to all your tracks and you will immediately hear that your bottom end is clear and defined (unless you have multiple bass parts like kick drum and bass, but that's a topic for another blog and has been covered by countless other mix engineers!).
Yorumlar