Mastering top end shine

[mrskytown11]

When I was mixing a project I noticed my mixes came out dark and dull compared to commercial mixes so I added a mastering eq preset that raised the top end around 5k about 5 DB sometimes a lil higher, at times I found it hard to mix and master since I’m pretty new to mixing. I’m trying to figure out why my mixes were dull, because I have to mix more music again and I want to do things right, I pretty much had the master eq on the master track and had to adjust my tracks and it gave me good results, I guess I was thinking it’s not good to mix into a master eq but maybe there is just different ways of getting things done.

Would you recommend mixing into a high shelf master eq setting as a starting point.


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[Harvey Stuart]

When I was mixing a project I noticed my mixes came out dark and dull compared to commercial mixes so I added a mastering eq preset that raised the top end around 5k about 5 DB sometimes a lil higher, at times I found it hard to mix and master since I’m pretty new to mixing. I’m trying to figure out why my mixes were dull, because I have to mix more music again and I want to do things right, I pretty much had the master eq on the master track and had to adjust my tracks and it gave me good results, I guess I was thinking it’s not good to mix into a master eq but maybe there is just different ways of getting things done.

Would you recommend mixing into a high shelf master eq setting as a starting point.


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There certainly isn't any onesizefitsall recipe and I'd even say that no wrong recipe is necessarily always wrong.
Then, your idea of a high bulb may have some reason depending on what the initial trouble in your tracks is.
Though I'd think that instead of first trying any goforit-process you'd spend some time training your ears with comparizons to references and even more important spend some time to identify where are the sources of the "darkanddullness" you get ATM in your mixes, usually a good start for the search would be in fiding which tracks incorporate frequencies that may mask other important frequencies in other tracks and start chirurgically to lower their masking effects.
I won't comment further since it will highly be dependant on what kind of music you mix and which were the conditions of the tracking, good room and bad interprets, good musicians and rotten tracker or any combination, even good players in a good room and a good engineer may suffer of some masking problems for specific moments in the piece :-)

[Tassy]

Hi
I posted on mastering at Mixcoach some years ago, it may help to get ideas what fits you
https://mixcoach.com/mastering-separatel...on-the-go/
best
Tassy

[mrskytown11]

Thanks


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