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Original Message 1/38 18-Oct-02 @ 11:46 PM - brittle mixes

panama

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argh, I've got digital bite. A term I've heard about for harsh brittle mixes done a digital recording setup.

I've been noticing that a lot of my recordings are really brittle. I notice that the uppermids and highs mix together in this weird way causing a digital harshness that irritates the hell out of me. On a low volume everything sounds good--nice and smooth. But once I turn the volume up, ouch, my ears begin to bleed.

I think my problem is that I dont give enough headroom or make enough headroom by cutting off and rolling off frequencies. But this all makes me wonder... I use a digi 001 and I use it's mic pre's and inputs. Could there be any link in the 001 casuing a harsh sound? Or is it that I'm not knowledgable (sp?) enough in getting a good sound that mixes good together.

I hate that feeling when I turn up some music (on the same monitors) and get absolutely no harshness or bite. bums me out.

Anyone have any ideas on what I could do or what to improve with?

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Message 2/38 19-Oct-02 @ 12:06 AM - RE: brittle mixes

bedwyr

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dunno about brittle (though i have heard this described a lot) but maybe it's just a too much upper mids thing that's hurting your ears.

every cd you hear is digital and 16 bit so this brittlness can't be all that's causing your ear bleeding. i've heard the brittle thing being discussed when there's a lot of a/d d/a conversion going on back and forth between tape and pro tools or whatever, i'm no great believer in hi-fi so i'd hazard that it's an sounds/eq thing.

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Message 3/38 19-Oct-02 @ 12:13 AM - RE: brittle mixes

xoxos

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this is how i look at it. nyquist=22kHz as top frequency.. that's 2 points defining the waveform. 4 points at 11k, 8 at 5.5k, 16 at.. wait.. 8 at 5.5k? that's only 4 points per 180� which isn't very bloody many is it. imho it's a limitation of the medium, especially if you've been sitting there making all these beautiful sounds all day and hearing them in their original, prerecorded form.

i just keep that in mind when i'm on the job.

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Message 4/38 19-Oct-02 @ 05:34 AM - RE: brittle mixes

damballah

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it also happens when you have multiple channels of stuff that's all gone through fairly low-end converters and you emphasize the highs on every one of 'em while mixing. what was passable on it's own becomes obnoxious through a cumulative build-up. look at the frequency distribution of some nice sounder older recordings and the highs slope off (this doesn't mean no "air" though) then look at some of the stuff that's passed off now -- a hyper-limited 40-15k flatline.

how do you build your mixes?

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Message 5/38 19-Oct-02 @ 06:03 AM - RE: brittle mixes

psylichon

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x- "nyquist=22kHz as top frequency.. that's 2 points defining the waveform."

I don't understand this. Explain, please.

I don't think digital mixes necessarily lead to bright mixes. I'm always criticized by studio buddies for my dark mixes. Not enough high end. I bet it has more to do with your monitors.

p- "I think my problem is that I dont give enough headroom or make enough headroom by cutting off and rolling off frequencies."

I bet you're mixing too hot. Excessive limiting and compression can hamper low end to the point that even over-mastering can't save it. Mix with your faders at 50% as a start point and see if that helps. Only limit tracks that are dynamically out of control or you deliberately want to alter the attack/release.

psylichon

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Message 6/38 19-Oct-02 @ 10:30 AM - RE: brittle mixes

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simple - START with it turned up and roll off all the tops and drop down the 5-6k mid area too... like knock all the tops off your kik over 300hz or whatever... try things.

___________________________________

I had an idea for a script once. It's basically Jaws except when the guys in the boat are going after Jaws, they look around and there's an even bigger Jaws. The guys have to team up with Jaws to get Bigger Jaws.... I call it... Big Jaws!!!

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Message 7/38 19-Oct-02 @ 03:43 PM - RE: brittle mixes

xoxos

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oh come on, p. 22k frequency=2 samples contain all the data for one complete 360� cycle of waveform, meaning a 22k saw will record exactly the same as a 22k sine or anything.

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Message 8/38 19-Oct-02 @ 05:30 PM - RE: brittle mixes

psylichon

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Ah, I gotcha. Very true and not something I've ever really though about much.

psylichon

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Message 9/38 19-Oct-02 @ 06:24 PM Edit: 19-Oct-02 | 06:24 PM - RE: brittle mixes

milan

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yes but if you take into account that most of us can hear that high, and that any signals in those ranges are going to be only the highest overtones, and not even from majority of sounds... then what?

ok, there�s still the fact that its only 8 ponts at 5.5k. well, there�s your "why" of hi samplerate converters � guess.

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Message 10/38 19-Oct-02 @ 08:50 PM - RE: brittle mixes

psylichon

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man this is starting to sound like another website's forums...

I don't think digital is brittle right off the bat. I think it can be coaxed into such a state much easier than when mixing analog. But comeon, how many of you are mixing thinking, "damn, I wish I had just a few more points of resolution for this frequency!" 16/44.1 works fine for almost all musical applications and you're a snob if you say otherwise.

psylichon

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Message 11/38 19-Oct-02 @ 09:27 PM - RE: brittle mixes

xoxos

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you're just jealous because you've got a stupid k2k instead of an intelligent pro-one. inside, you can feel the difference. outside, you can see the difference. inside, stop. inside. see the difference. dragons, the policeman knew, were supposed to breathe fire.

(yeah.. you can hear the difference, even on something like a dr110 clap)

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Message 12/38 19-Oct-02 @ 09:31 PM - RE: brittle mixes

psylichon

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snob

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Message 13/38 19-Oct-02 @ 10:56 PM - RE: brittle mixes

panama

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I usually build the sound of my mixes off the atmosphere of the drums. If they sound dark or if they sound bright. I tend to the sound of the drums. So if its bright I usually leave high end wide open. But if it's dark I roll off the high end frequencies.

I think it all cumulates as I put things together. One reason is that when I solo a channel and turn it loud, I do not hear the brittleness or harshness that I originally heard at a full mix play. So I'm thinking that it might be the relationship between the two sounds that's causing that 'obnoxious' sound.

I dunno, sometimes I just find my mixes sounding like ass when turned loud. I even tried rolling off the top end 12 - 18k and still got this dry nasty sound but without the harshness. yet again, I'm still bummed.

How do I record? Synth -> Boss VF-1 -> Digi 001 -> Focusrite D3 Compressor Plug-in (which is used on everything except drums). That is pretty much how I do it... and also for my eqing, I use Waves 2.3 and Opcode Fusion Filter.

So any tips on getting it right? Should I eq every channel until I find a good high-volume mix? Or should I just eq the master fader?

One thing to note, is that I use distortion A LOT!!! Is there anything I should know about eqing distortion

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Message 14/38 21-Oct-02 @ 01:50 AM - RE: brittle mixes

influx

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"Should I eq every channel until I find a good high-volume mix?"

each channel

its not the HIGH end thats the problem, man...its usually the mids/high mids that make stuff sound annoying

every tried a freq sweep to see where its comin from?

get a parametric EQ, narrow Q, set the gain high, (careful!) and then sweep the frequency...

the "bad" sound will jump right out at ya. You could do this on a mix, but...then you wouldnt know which sound(s) are the problem...

also a good way to find a sweetspot to BOOST, too

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Message 15/38 21-Oct-02 @ 09:56 PM - RE: brittle mixes

swanofnever

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xoxox -- i _think_ you're overlooking an important issue...

"a 22k saw will record exactly the same as a 22k sine or anything. "

if we can only hear up to 20k, it doesn't matter what the waveshape of a 20k wave is -- all the harmonics (which would distinguish a sin from a saw from a square) will be 40k and up (since 20k is the fundamental)... thus they'll ALL sound like a sin...

i think.

raigan

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Message 16/38 22-Oct-02 @ 02:29 PM - RE: brittle mixes

nomad

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yep, that's right.

and i'm not doing the digital debate again

but according to nyquist, even 2 samples (at 44Khz) is enough to recreate the original sinewave _exactly_ (by post-conversion filtering, a required part of a D/A converter)...

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Message 17/38 22-Oct-02 @ 05:26 PM - RE: brittle mixes

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that's a consequence of mixing to low... when you turn it up you always get thaty harshness as you are OVER compensating those frequencies at low volume to aid definition, but when it then is loud that definition becomes harsh at loud volume.

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Message 18/38 23-Oct-02 @ 08:43 PM - RE: brittle mixes

xoxos

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aah but swan we're not just sensitive to sound with our ears, and the main point is that, if you follow my little 'point count' thing down, you're getting some pretty rough approximations of the true waveform (low distortion, hi fidelity, high distortion, low fidelity, jamaicans know) way down into the mids.

but still.. digital silence makes it all worthwhile imho

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Message 19/38 23-Oct-02 @ 09:14 PM - RE: brittle mixes

nomad

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not exactly... i don't want to get into too much; but that's not a problem at all with digital per se. it may be that you think you need a higher sampling frequency, but that's a different issue (and i have heard differing reports on whether a saw and sine at 20Khz are discernable... some who say they are, some who say they aren't. you need a lab oscillator to test this unfortunately so i've never tried it myself).

but: if the signal fits into the nyquist, it can be reproduced perfectly (with some caveats, yes there are some weird things going on in the higher octaves, but this isn't one of them).

if it doesn't fit into the nyquist, it won't be reproduced distorted, it just disappears. a 20Khz triangle will become a 20Khz sine when sampled on a 44.1Khz system; the 'distortion' is simply a removal of all harmonics outside the nyquist range, to do it without aliasing everything above 20Khz is filtered out beforehand. at 96K they will be slightly different; the 2nd harmonic at 40Khz will then be inside the nyquist and be samples; this will still look different from a typical sawtooth due to higher harmonics.

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Message 20/38 23-Oct-02 @ 10:35 PM - RE: brittle mixes

panama

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so kilo, should I do what you said... turn it loud and tweak the eq?

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Message 21/38 23-Oct-02 @ 11:08 PM - RE: brittle mixes

influx

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jesus you guys are pedantic. I love that word

panama..you gotta do BOTH, man. crank it and listen to it very quietly. and...you do this right..solo sounds and see where they sit?

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Message 22/38 23-Oct-02 @ 11:31 PM - RE: brittle mixes

milan

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nomad, a question: are you sure that hi samplerate converters dont remove stuff beyond 20k prior to sample and hold stage with the anti aliasing filter? i thought that in a "normal" converter the filter is set before the conversion stage, so the sampling frequency has no influence on the harmonic content beyond that.

i�m really curious about this since i�ve never actually inquired about high samplerate converters but have always presumed that they simply offer higher resolution within audible frequency range.

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Message 23/38 24-Oct-02 @ 12:47 AM - RE: brittle mixes

psylichon

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this is true. ADC's use a brickwall lowpass filter at 20k before conversion to eliminate an effect called "foldover." This is the same effect as a car's wheels looking like they're going backwards when it goes real fast. It happens when a system analyzes something at regular intervals that are slower than the intervals of what's being observed. The filter knocks out frequencies that could be interpreted wrong by the convertor.

So one of the selling points of higher sampling rates is that you don't need that filter anymore, or at least can move it way up beyond our hearing range.

psylichon

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Message 24/38 24-Oct-02 @ 03:00 AM - RE: brittle mixes

nomad

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there's nothing magical about 20K; 44.1K was chosen because humans can hear up to about 20K, not the other way around. a higher-frequency ADC should have the filter(s) higher, but don't have to; a 96K ADC i would expect to have the filter set at around 40K.

you always have
audio->anti-aliasing filter->ADC->digital stream
then
digital stream->DAC->reconstruction filter->audio

both filters are VERY important to the full sampling process, but both filters are only required to filter anything about nyquist (the first to prevent aliasing or 'foldback' as mentioned above, and the second is what turns xoxos' two-point squarewave back in to the original nice sinewave). but as long as these are below the nyquist (half the sampling frequency) it's fine; they can be more than halfway down without killing anything.

in the 'old days' a brickwall filter could cause audible effects (phase shift etc.), but this has long since ceased to be an issue... modern ADCs are typically sigma/delta type, which work internally at much much higher frequencies and a brickwall filter there can work without any audible effect on the signal.

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Message 25/38 24-Oct-02 @ 03:06 AM - RE: brittle mixes

nomad

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btw, i'm guessing this isn't it based on what you described, but you couldn't be hitting distortion somewhere (on one of the few songs i've actually finished, i did a mix that sounded OK but the mix wasn't that great and it was too low volume; the next mix i did came out sound brittle, and it was because a couple of channels i had turned up, and they were starting to clip).

note that EQ and resonant filters are often guilty of this; if you take a wave file that's nearly full scale, and give it a +4db EQ boost somewhere, you could potentially push it into distortion.

there are some crappy A/D converters (and curiously enough a lot of old digidesign ones are said to be in this category

but i doubt yours is bad enough to do what you suggested.

also (maybe doesn't apply to you, but can on analogs), often a mixer will have several gain stages, but the 'clipping' light only measures one of them... so in some mixers you can overdrive the trim, then pull the levels down on the fader enough, and you can hear the clipping but the light won't come on. same for EQ boost. those kinds of distortions almost always sound brittle to my ears.

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Message 26/38 24-Oct-02 @ 09:07 AM - RE: brittle mixes

milan

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so you�d guess they�d have the filter set higher? hehe... i was wondering if someone knows the answer to that one. of couse, the real question is what happens when you use 44k resolution on a 96k converter. and sorry about o/t-ness.

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Message 27/38 24-Oct-02 @ 02:22 PM - RE: brittle mixes

nomad

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you can tell where they have the filter set by looking at the frequency range... for instance, if you look at the lucid AD9624, in 88.1/96K modes, its specs say it has a frequency range of 20Hz-40Khz; this means by definition it can't be filtering at less than 40Khz. however, in 44.1/48Khz mode, it only has a frequency range of 20Hz-20Khz. that means in 96K mode it filters out things above 40Khz, and in 48K mode it filters things out above 20KHz. there might be a few badly-designed 96Khz converters that always filter above 20Khz, but then you're not getting much benefit from the higher rate. they just switch which filter they are using based on the sampling rate, it's not that difficult actually.

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Message 28/38 24-Oct-02 @ 02:38 PM - RE: brittle mixes

milan

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interesting. thanks for the info, you know your stuff. obviously the converter technology has advanced since i learnt about it.

cheers, m.

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Message 29/38 29-Oct-02 @ 12:28 PM - RE: brittle mixes

falltdfex

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i had that problem for ages mate could be to do with ur mixer but more than likely its just that u need to spend more time on ur indiviual parts making sure they sound good at high volumes b4 puttin them in ur track

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Message 30/38 29-Oct-02 @ 07:40 PM - RE: brittle mixes

xoxos

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stop trying to discredit my reasoning! it's exact! i never said it would be square! you only thought square wave! the square wave is your mind, not mine! i can't believe it! you lead the reader into misinterpreting my statement, then you waffle on about whether a 20k waveform will be discernible which is vacuous. this signal fidelity is an abstract represented by performance over time, not the quality in any given instance, which is much more musical! heh heh

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Message 31/38 29-Oct-02 @ 07:42 PM - RE: brittle mixes

nomad

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i don't have a clue what you mean, but that's ok because i'm used to that ;)

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Message 32/38 29-Oct-02 @ 08:10 PM - RE: brittle mixes

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look, discerning whether something at 20k
and above is a square wave or a sine wave or
a triangle wave is only important if you've got a
tail and hump the legs of people visiting your
human. THIS ISN'T HELPING PANAMA!!!! :P

yo, panama, where are you getting your
distortion? the boss box?

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Message 33/38 30-Oct-02 @ 09:25 AM - RE: brittle mixes

panama

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yep... from the vf-1

I'm trying all new ways of recording. I'm used
to making sounds by processing and
re-processing sounds over and over. Now, I'm
getting what is good from start... this should
help the sound a bit.

my last mix wasn't as bad as I thought it was.
But I think I got that Pro Tools bottom end that
dissapears with guitars and basses. My
mixes are starting to sound pale now. Either
that or my ears are getting better and most
wouldnt notice the difference.

:-)

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Message 34/38 30-Oct-02 @ 03:33 PM - RE: brittle mixes

damballah

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well, if you distort everything through there, it could end up sounding kinda screechy. mebbe do that trick where you record the synth direct, dupe the sound, high-pass one and low-pass the other, then distort the high-passed one so you leave a little warmth and balls to the tone. you're using an sh and a juno, right? you should be able to have warmth out the wazoo. you could just be overprocessing stuff.

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Message 35/38 30-Oct-02 @ 05:11 PM - RE: brittle mixes

nomad

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screechiness is around 3k. try reducing there.

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Message 36/38 30-Oct-02 @ 07:26 PM - RE: brittle mixes

panama

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wow! this thread has been really helpful to me. Dont wanna sound gay and all but this has been very self actualizing for my music and my mixes. thanks all. not one more shitty mix to come! :-)

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Message 37/38 30-Oct-02 @ 07:50 PM - RE: brittle mixes

psylichon

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even the sample rate shit helped?

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Message 38/38 30-Oct-02 @ 08:09 PM - RE: brittle mixes

panama

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ppl were paying attention to that stuff? :-)

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