Today I am talking about how to clear up the low end of your mixes, making your instruments covering the lower range of frequencies clearer and feel less cluttered!

Today’s technique is very simple, it involves eq, in particular, the highpass filter.

A high pass filter is just a filter that will attenuate all the frequencies below a certain specific frequency.

Highpass filters can help you clean all the low end you don’t need from instruments, normally when you are applying a microphone to a source, it will capture everything, from the air conditioner running to all sorts of sounds, and normally at the lower end there is always something happening, whether you can or cannot hear it, trust me something you don’t need is always there, and it’s taking up headroom, taking space from your low-end instruments.

That’s why in a lot of cases the main problem is to make the low-end of a mix to feel right. A highpass filter can really help you!

But be careful, a highpass filter can also be your worst enemy if you are not extremely careful because it can thin out all of your mixes really very fast!

In this video, I will show you how to avoid thinning out your mix but making your low-end feel cleaner!

Now, do you use highpass filter on your mixes? Would love to hear your thoughts, leave a comment below!

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How to do it without destroying the low-end entirely?

This is simple, you need to take a highpass filter on a track. And then bringing the frequency up until you hear it’s starting to thin out, back it off and you should be good to go.

The goal here is to make space for the low-end instruments, not thinning out every single instrument. In solo, you should not hear a difference.

When you bypass everything in one shot you should feel that the low-end instruments aren’t clear anymore. And by bringing the filters back the kick and the bass come out more clearly.

Should I use highpass filter on kick and bass also?

Normally I tend to do it also on kick and bass. but I am filtering off below 30hz and not higher because rarely there is something below 20Hz or 30Hz beneficial for your mix.

How steep my filter should be?

Typically I use a 3rd order filter for high-pass filtering and a 2nd order for lowpass filtering. Sometimes I would go lighter.

I use these curves because I learned how to mix on an SSL duality which has built in filters, steep the same.

I hope as usual that you are enjoying the content. If you know anyone that could benefit from all this don’t hesitate and share this post.

If you have any questions or thought, leave a comment below, we would love to hear from you!