Live's EQ8 - Is the HPF really good enough?

[sheateeley]

First of all, I use Live and Reason for basically all of my production.

I've been producing music for years now, but am just now confident with my songwriting and production capabilities and am trying to get my mixes sounding as good as possible so I can release an EP and try to shop it out to record labels. So basically, I'm not a professional. This is why I get really nervous about what kind of plugins I'm using (EQ's and compressors, specifically), because I don't want to get all the way through a mix and find out that it still sounds like shit on a large system.

The importance of having a high-pass filter on just about everything other than the very low-end instruments has been hammered into my skull via countless sources that it's gotten me a bit paranoid. I'd been using the EQ8 for all of my EQing, including HPFs, for a long time, until I slapped a Spectrum on some very mid-rangey tracks and noticed that TONS of low frequency information was still there, even though the sound was relatively thin. This, as far as I can tell, means the EQ8 is doing something wrong.

So after experimenting with some other plugs, I tried running all of my tracks through Reason's HPF on the SSL-modeled board. Ran those through Spectrum, and what do you know... The low frequencies were ACTUALLY cut out. Like, completely.

So I'm on Live 9 now, and with the EQ8 seems to be doing a better job of cutting low frequencies, but still not nearly as much as Reason's mixer does. So my question is: Does this matter? Am I just being way too anal retentive? The reason I ask via this long-winded post is because it takes a pretty long ****in time to run every single track for every song through Reason, just to do the final mixing in Live. It's a pain in the ass, but if it's really going to make a difference in the end, I'll gladly go through the process.

Insight, anybody? Thanks!

Oh, also, is what Reason's mixer doing actually undesirable? Would COMPLETELY cutting out the lows actually sound worse? This is the area where I start to get lost. I know what my ears like, but I'm not sure what a big beefy sound system is going to like.

 

[THA_REAPER]

It never bothered me nor did i notice...Are you using the 48 db cut instead of the 12 out of curiosity?

 

[MarcDHall]

In my experience really steep high-pass filters sound unnatural. Even if you know you want to cut at precisely below whatever Hz, a gradual cut always sounds better. The intuition that you need to cut of frequencies with brick wall precision is logical except that the side effects are possibly worse than the cut. The cost of frequency precision is often temporal smearing. You might get ringing around the frequency or phase distortion.

I guess the reasoning is that cutting of the unwanted low frequencies makes the bass clearer... and we are all supposed to believe that the bass frequencies should be given star treatment... so the 'more' we can clear from the bass frequencies the better the overall sound. That's understandable given the ideas floating around.

I think, put simply, mixing EQ is subtle. If you want it to be not subtle... what you want to achieve probably isn't something you should use EQ for.

That said, EQ8 in Live 9 has a very steep low-pass and high-pass.