Help With High Frequencies

[South House]

I have a problem with my High-Mids and overall High Frequencies in a lot of my instrumentals. I can't seem to boost the Highs and Mids without creating distortion or "screeching sounds" in my beats. What are some plugins/vsts/etc. or techniques I can use to help with this problem? My instrumentals can be heard at the link below. Thank you.

[laurend]

Remove the bass.

[South House]

Remove the bass.

Remove the bass? So have a song with no bass??? That doesn't make sense. Please be more specific.

[laurend]

Obviously, your mix is unbalanced about lows and highs. If you boost the highs and get distortion, it means the highs are overloaded. One solution to keep things under control is removing some bass which leads to a clearer mix.
You can also bring down the whole mix and boost only the highs. In both cases highs won't be overloaded.

[South House]

I see what you are saying. I'm gonna try turning down the bass and see if it will help boost the highs. I think that should work. Appreciate it homie.

[moses]

Also, ugly metallic mid-highs/highs is a sign of aliasing distortion (due to wrong workflow, bad sound selection, recording or just overprocessing). In this case, there is absolutely no way to cure metallic/noisy sounding high frequencies.

Honestly, fvcked up lows and highs is a typical problem of amateurish approaches without proper monitoring and most of all without basic knowledge of digital audio processing. Don't take offense, the latter happened to many seasoned engineers from the analogue world.. ..and some of them never learned it until today.

However, you can use simple workflows to prevent any bigger problems. The most important is to fix problems at their source, don't try to fix their side-effects. Also, spending one additional hour during recording/sound selection/synth programming will save you 8 hours of fruitless mixing struggle and dead ends. Another important thing is to understand how digital audio really works and how to "work around" its restrictions. Finally, keep the signal path as minimal as possible, don't over process.

[doubledre]

you can try multiband compression to just compress the high end freq that are problematic

---------- Post added at 09:57 AM ---------- Previous post was at 09:56 AM ----------

also maybe using empirical labs fatso? That works very well for me when it comes to taming higher frequencies.

[South House]

Well good thing I just enrolled in school to understand how those things work. I see what you are saying. Sounds like I need to go learn some things about engineering. Thanks for the help playa

[james@refinery]

What are you monitoring on South House? There are so many variables you need to consider that could be impacting the sound of your mix.

First of all if the sound you have recorded is of poor quality and sounds hissy/harsh then there is probably very little you can do. If you are working on poor quality desktop/laptop speakers this will also have a significant impact on the quality of your mix. The best thing to do before really starting to mix is get yourself a descent pair of entry level monitors and if needed some acoustic treatment for the room your working in. Once sounding good you at least know that it is the sound your playing back that is nasty and not any of the other things.

Understanding the basic of digital audio is going to help as well. If you can see red lights all across the meters then you are going to get digital distortion and it isn't very nice to sit and listen to for hours on end.

Hope thats helpful