Help in intuitQ suggestions: Usually cause bad sound

HarBal · Post by **HarBal** » Wed May 31, 2006 8:27 pm

Sorry Jess,

What's causing the non-uniformity in the mid's. I'd guess that the peak around 450Hz plus the bigger peak at around 100Hz are helping to mask the upper mid's. Hence to compensate you've pushed the upper mids up so you can hear the violins but it is adding to ear fatigure. You need to control the 100Hz and 450Hz regions to get them more uniform. You might want to look at the individual track spectrums prior to mix down to see if you can isolate where they are coming from and then fix them prior to mixing. If you do that I believe the end result will be much better and you'll be able to hear your violins better without having to have them high in the mix.

Cheers,

Paavo.

trina · Post by **trina** » Fri Jun 02, 2006 12:04 am

Hi Jess and Hi Paavo,

Sorry about the jack it's just that somehow your problem is helping mine...
Ussually I at least record clean tracks well enough to get some help........
It turns out that the ever building irritating sound of my tracks seem to be invasion of the heat and air conditioning talking into the wires and recording on every track...(ugly)! I hadn't ever realized that was the souce of the yuk! But through figuring that out and being to lazy to rerecord every track and plus resing every track I tried to denoise the tracks.which only slighted the irritation sounds.

But then I read:
bigger peak at around 100Hz are helping to mask the upper mid's. Hence to compensate you've pushed the upper mids up so you can hear the violins but it is adding to ear fatigure. You need to control the 100Hz and 450Hz regions to get them more uniform. You might want to look at the individual track spectrums prior to mix down to see if you can isolate where they are coming from and then fix them prior to mixing. If you do that I believe the end result will be much better and you'll be able to hear your violins better without having to have them high in the mix

and I aggresively cut most of the mid sounds as far as up to 1k and suddenly it was like someone didn't just windex the glass but opened the window

What a save and a great learning experience!

You guys are so helpful

(Paavo you will always be humble and I will live your happy advice forever! (Thanks Guys)
Trina

jess · Post by **jess** » Fri Jun 02, 2006 9:45 am

Trina,

You can reduce interfearance by using balanced 1/4" TRS cables instead of regular unbalanced 1/4" cables. This is true if your env has got many cables and external devices like air cond, microwave, etc.

Paavo,

I found out it's not just the electric guitar that's causing ear fatigue but something else as I've already got a deep scoop at 3 KH for my guitar...which really not a recommended EQ for electric guitars. Anyway, the culprit seems to be the drum and bass sub mix. So, what you pointed out much earlier is really the root cause. So, I use a linear phase EQ to adjsut the sub mix. That's, I scoop at about 100 Hz, create a peak at 1K and scoop at upper mid of the submix. Then, the whole mix produces a relatively better graph in Harbal. IntuitQ works better too. (It still reduces the upper mid, though), but the mix is still good.

The strange thing however is instead of trying to use a linear phase EQ, I tried to use HarBal on the drum and bass submix. IntuitQ sort of do simlar stuff as I initially did with my linear phase EQ...which I thought is good. BUT, when I throw ths submix into the entire mix and harbal the entire mix, it sounded quite muddy. I guess, my question is really, was IntuitQ design to deal with submix like drum & bass?

HarBal · Post by **HarBal** » Fri Jun 02, 2006 9:15 pm

The current intuitQ algorithm is biased and does not work well for sub-mixes. The implementation I'm currently working on works very well on sub-mixes but it is still in development and won't be out for a month or two. I'd suggest processing sub-mixes manually rather than using intuitQ.

Cheers,

Paavo.

Post by **har-bal** » Fri Jun 02, 2006 9:26 pm

trina wrote:Hi Jess and Hi Paavo,

Sorry about the jack it's just that somehow your problem is helping mine...
Ussually I at least record clean tracks well enough to get some help........
It turns out that the ever building irritating sound of my tracks seem to be invasion of the heat and air conditioning talking into the wires and recording on every track...(ugly)! I hadn't ever realized that was the souce of the yuk! But through figuring that out and being to lazy to rerecord every track and plus resing every track I tried to denoise the tracks.which only slighted the irritation sounds.

But then I read:
bigger peak at around 100Hz are helping to mask the upper mid's. Hence to compensate you've pushed the upper mids up so you can hear the violins but it is adding to ear fatigure. You need to control the 100Hz and 450Hz regions to get them more uniform. You might want to look at the individual track spectrums prior to mix down to see if you can isolate where they are coming from and then fix them prior to mixing. If you do that I believe the end result will be much better and you'll be able to hear your violins better without having to have them high in the mix

and I aggresively cut most of the mid sounds as far as up to 1k and suddenly it was like someone didn't just windex the glass but opened the window What a save and a great learning experience!

You guys are so helpful
(Paavo you will always be humble and I will live your happy advice forever! (Thanks Guys)
Trina

Trina

For your submix if you have Waves C1-Comp use these settings for the Best Bass Sound

http://hdqtrz.com/Files/Best%20Settings ... 20Bass.JPG

Cheers

Earle

jess · Post by **jess** » Fri Jun 02, 2006 9:37 pm

HarBal wrote:The current intuitQ algorithm is biased and does not work well for sub-mixes. The implementation I'm currently working on works very well on sub-mixes but it is still in development and won't be out for a month or two. I'd suggest processing sub-mixes manually rather than using intuitQ.

Cheers,

Paavo.

Wooo hooo!!!

Not to be selfish, but sub mix like drums & bass is the main framework for any mix. That needs to get right before anything else

jess · Post by **jess** » Sat Jun 03, 2006 7:12 am

Paavo,

Just to wrap things up, I remix again and this time the IntuitQ works well. The difference from the past is due to exactly what you pointed out. ...there are just some extreme peaks that really should be sorted out within the mix and not at HarBal level. IntuitQ works!!! if the mix was not extremely bad.

After putting into Ozone's multiband compression and stereo imaging, I bounced it out to HarBal again...and I press IntuitQ again. It still sound good and it got rid of more ear fatigue upper mid. Push it into my limiter and bounced it out again....heh, now it looks very similar to Rock.anl file...except for one wierd peak at the Bass region....but I can't be bothered.

Harbal stilll rocks! Definitely look forward to your sub mix Intuit Q in the future to come.

Thank you.