high end harsh

[kikidi]

Hello

I do electro house music.
I am happy with my compression/limitation. my tracks pumps very well (for me ) but when I compress/limit hard I tend to have harsh high end.

What advices could you give me ?
I'm looking for smooth high end and open. Like daft punk, justice and so on..

Thank you for your help.

Cheers

[miro]

Originally Posted by kikidi

Hello

I do electro house music.
I am happy with my compression/limitation. my tracks pumps very well (for me ) but when I compress/limit hard I tend to have harsh high end.

What advices could you give me ?
I'm looking for smooth high end and open. Like daft punk, justice and so on..

Thank you for your help.

Cheers

Mix less bright?

[Odeon-Mastering]

Originally Posted by kikidi

Hello

I do electro house music.
I am happy with my compression/limitation. my tracks pumps very well (for me ) but when I compress/limit hard I tend to have harsh high end.

What advices could you give me ?
I'm looking for smooth high end and open. Like daft punk, justice and so on..

Thank you for your help.

Cheers

In addittion to Miro's advice...
Use a good ME who has the proper experience and tools. Explain clearly to him/her what your vision is and you should get the sound you are looking for.
I am pretty sure, that this is what Daft Punk or any other major artists do...

[Darius van H]

If your hi-end is harsh, i doubt mastering will fix it satisfactorily. Harshness is often caused by distortion, the main culprits likely to be over or mis-use of plugins,bad DAW gainstaging and poor production. Distortion cannot be removed in mastering.

[Everbeatz]

Your source sounds are harsh, so limiting/compressing and eqing only exaggerate that kind of quality - advice would be to get back to mixing stage and locate what exactly sounds harsh and try to soften it, or simply replace those sounds

[AK--47]

use higher Samplerates, if possible.

[huejahfink]

What comp / limiting are you using that is making the high end harsh?
Not pushing them so hard might be a good start.
Also, high end harshness doesn't always come from distortion (although it sounds like it in your case)
Have you tried looking at the audio with a spectrum analyser? Often it is rogue frequency spikes in the top end that can make it sound unpleasant. Try SPAN from Voxengo... a very flexible and free analyser.

Real-time audio spectrum analysis plugin - SPAN - Voxengo

Perhaps you could gently filter the worst areas of it to get better results?

[Odeon-Mastering]

Originally Posted by Everlast

Your source sounds are harsh,

He never really said that.

[Salty James]

you need to sell all your equipment and get as many u47, c12, u67's as you can THEN your recording will be perfect!!

[Everbeatz]

Originally Posted by Odeon-Mastering

He never really said that.

Believe me, that's the issue here...

[Odeon-Mastering]

Originally Posted by Everlast

Believe me, that's the issue here...

ok I Believe you

[huejahfink]

Originally Posted by Salty James

you need to sell all your equipment and get as many u47, c12, u67's as you can THEN your recording will be perfect!!

Not sure how relevant a list of microphones is for most electro house producers.

Some very occasional vocals?

[Ace_TX]

think he was being facetious...

anyways op need to remix

might wanna try a parametric eq on the harsh freqs

[edva]

HF shelf?

[Dave Rose]

Sounds like distortion. Not sure what limiting your using but you don't usually want to be pushing it into much more than 2db gain reduction IMO. Try mixing your track so that you don't have to, and can still achieve the loudness you need.

[six_wax]

Low-pass filters are your friend if you're mixing digitally.

Treble tends to snowball in digital. There's a ton to begin with, then you boost to make something seem brighter (relative to everything else), then your ears are fried, so you boost the top end on everything else because you can't hear anymore. Next thing you know, all your sources are boosted on the top end, usually with EQs that aren't so smooth (=phase distortion).

Consider rolling off the extreme highs. Most dance music (as well as rock) doesn't have much happening over 10-12k. This way, when you want something bright, there's perspective in which it can sound bright. *That* is the key to "smooth".

Also, judicious low-mid cuts are a great way to "softly" brighten sources.

[huejahfink]

Originally Posted by six_wax

Low-pass filters are your friend if you're mixing digitally.

I like this point. The largest percentage of mixes I deal with are ITB at 44.1, and in the majority of cases it seems that the very very top end is overlooked.
I am gently rolling off at anywhere between 12k (pretty rarely) to 17k (with regularity) on pretty much everything. Obviously if the extreme top end is already smooth I don't bother.

[Jesse Graffam]

Originally Posted by kikidi

when I compress/limit hard I tend to have harsh high end.

Straight to the point, assuming you're talking about a decent broadband compressor/limiter...

What that's telling you is that your monitoring & room are far from flat. You're changing the crest - the peak to average ratio - which is causing your mix to no longer compensate for your non-linear amplitude/frequency response as well.

The important thing is that you try to mix everything so that it sounds great together on your system, even if the overall EQ seems a slight bit off, and even if you're nowhere near the loudness you wanna be at (if your mastering engineer can't at least make something loud, much less great sounding, then you shouldn't be paying them). Don't overprocess anything. When you then hand that work off to a mastering engineer, the only thing they'll have to do to "un-compensate" for your monitoring/room is use EQ. If you start to over-process the dynamics, you'll -A- accentuate the amount of compensation you need to use to get it back to sounding "OK" on your non-linear monitoring, and -B- it'll be harder to correct on the mastering side the more you use.

[heybub419]

You might want to try checking the mix on some good headphones before mastering, too. And if you're using samples, they'll often sound harsh and may need some EQing or de-essing.

[OceanMan]

dont be afraid to throw a waves c4 (or other multiband compressor) in with everything bypassed except your high end before you limit. Tame down at least the 8.5k and on beforehand if it is getting nasty, and try to pinpoint which frequency range as precisely as possible... I am no pro, but I know that multiband compression is a vital step in my mastering chain and also in many others as well.

[Jean Doe]

Harshness, as I define it, is a problem in the upper mids not in the very highs, so lo-pass filtering and and high shelve cutting might actually make the problem worse.
Go about the problem like this. Use a bell type filter to find out where in the upper mids the problem resides. Say it is worst at around 5k. Now you go back to your mix and listen to which element has too much 5k. Is it a snare, or a hi hat, or a vocal, or the top of a synth maybe? Take EQ, fix problem. Done!

In general, if you keep getting these harshness bi-products from limiting you might want to go about trying only to limit where it is needed in the mix and fix any problems caused by the limiting immediately. That way your mixbuss will need very little limiting and should be able to get the appropriate level in a transparent way...

[cemski]

op has left the building...

[fixitinthemix]

Originally Posted by six_wax

Low-pass filters are your friend if you're mixing digitally.

Treble tends to snowball in digital. There's a ton to begin with, then you boost to make something seem brighter (relative to everything else), then your ears are fried, so you boost the top end on everything else because you can't hear anymore. Next thing you know, all your sources are boosted on the top end, usually with EQs that aren't so smooth (=phase distortion).

Consider rolling off the extreme highs. Most dance music (as well as rock) doesn't have much happening over 10-12k. This way, when you want something bright, there's perspective in which it can sound bright. *That* is the key to "smooth".

Also, judicious low-mid cuts are a great way to "softly" brighten sources.

I like this point too. What I have experienced is that you tend to push above 13khz to much and in the end the mixes lack 6-9 as you try to compensate while listening to reference music. The result is unfocused, and unclear