If you haven’t yet seen this video, I highly recommend it. It’s over an hour long, and he doesn’t even get to walking through the project for 30 minutes, but even that first 30 minutes is full of great information.
That was really insightful. I have to give a lot more thought to depth in my mixing. I was also a little surprised that he used a different reverb on every group, since some people say the instruments should all be treated with the same reverb to enhance the sense of a common space. On the other hand, that might just be for certain genres (say acoustic jazz). Also, it might be a relic from the old days when you only had so many tracks and so many sends. Also interesting that he was perfectly fine in the box. Lots of things to think about.
I agree with your comments about the reverb. Soon, I hope to record a tutorial on how I implement reverb. The script is already written - I’m simply trying to decide how much collateral I want to build for it, or if I should simply record my desktop like most tutorials do.
OK, Larry, will look forward to it. Great subject, and timely.
The biggest takeaways I got from Bob Power were:
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It’s okay to really push the cutoff frequency of the HPF to 150Hz or higher. I had a maximum of mine at 120Hz because I was afraid of losing detail. After soloing the tracks and listening for them to get “in a metal can” sounding, I’m finding I push them to 175Hz or even 200Hz depending on the track type without really losing anything.
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It’s also okay to put an LPF on the bass track. I’ve been using the stuff I learned from the video to remix / remaster You Said, which I collaborated on with Mark Petruzzi (who provided the awesome vocals), and realized that doing this really opened up the top end of the result. I still have a HPF to get rid of the subharmonic mud, but now I have a LPF, 1000Hz cutoff, 24 db/octave slope on the track.
foolomon, Your two points in the post above are one of the fastest ways to get noticeable gains on clarity in a mix. They’re both usually my absolute starting point, often even before matching relative levels.
The idea of pushing the high pass filter up to even 150 Hz is definitely scary if you’re soloing your tracks to check them, but we have to remember that the only thing that matters is how they sound in unison with all of the other tracks in the mix. I’m surprised at how aggressive we can get on a lot of this and have better results.
Speaking of high pass and low pass and reverb, I’ll put my reverbs on a bus and add a a HPF and a LPF on it so you’re mainly only reverberating in the mid-range and low upper frequencies. Helps the bass and crystalline sparkle up top come through, since there’s no need for reverb that high or low. You can also EQ it to notch out spots for lead vocals, etc.
So many little tricks! Now I have to start watching this video you shared. Thanks.
Definitely a good watch… 
enjoyed that!
I hit on something the other day – Drum Track, on the Drums Bus: High Shelf 2K-10K +1.5 db or so ( a little boost ), then cut an offending resonance up around 3.4K, -8db or so, tight Q. It sounded “exciting.” The ear was drawn to it but it wasn’t annoying or fatiguing. There was a sizzling top end, hats and snare, but without any harshness – saved it as a preset.
Excellent videos and take aways from it, particularly about fearless low end filtering. Thanks for posting.