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For anyone interested in production lore and audio physics…

The “only cut, never boost” advice does actually have a very legitimate point but it has been repeated so many times by people without context that it has lost all meaning and people now think of it as a universal rule.

The truth is that its only really good advice if you cant trust your listening environment. If you have an properly treated room or are using headphones the rule doesnt apply.

In an untreated room you have frequencies bouncing around between the walls, ceiling, floor, and anything other rigid surface.

Without getting too specific, the wavelength of some of those frequencies are such that their reflections will be anywhere from fully IN phase to fully OUT of phase.

If a frequency and its reflections are out of phase that frequency cancels and it will sound really quiet relative to other frequencies that aren’t cancelling.

If a frequency sounds or feels too quiet and its due to physical phase cancellation in the room, boosting that frequency will boost the signal and that signal will still bounce off the wall and phase cancel exactly the same.

Theoretically you could boost that frequency infinitely and never hear a difference because from your listening position the frequency still perfectly cancels, BUT its only cancelling in that specific environment and your massive eq boost is actually still being printed onto the signal without you noticing, so when you take your mix anywhere else all if a sudden you have a massive amount of energy at that frequency that you thought was too quiet.

Cutting frequencies is safer in an environment like that because you are taking energy out of the room instead of adding it.

Although its still not a perfect system there is a limit to how much you can turn a frequency down (all the way) and so you cant get sucked into the infinite black hole that is adding power to a frequency null.

If you believe time is money then do yourself a favour and save yourself X amount of wasted years and TREAT YOUR ROOM.

If you cant hear what your doing there really isnt a point in doing it, and once you can hear what you are doing you will be amazed at how intuitive a lot of this stuff is and you wont need to rely on gimmicks and regurgitated misnomers from the echo chamber.

P.S. if you decide to take my advice and treat your room… do your research (at least a fucking little bit, i beg you), build the panels yourself (pennies on the dollar), and DO NOT give money to people who advertise 1 inch thick panels as an effective acoustic treatment option.

Monkkey out. 🤘🐵🤘

There's so much nonsense in so many videos.  'We're going to downtune for a heavier sound, and then CUT ALL THE DOWNTUNED FREQUENCIES'. Glad to see that someone is getting it.

The most helpful advice from all your videos is: “if it’s not a problem don’t worry about it. If it’s a problem, you’ll hear it.” Reminds me to trust myself and my ears :)

I so needed this video. Thanks a ton 🤘

I'm currently experiencing experimenting everything to a Pre master bus/fader.. Then adjusting it until I get optimal sonics from the chain on the main bus itself. Changed everything

I agree with you on cutting low end.  I used to do that because everyone said that is what you're supposed to do no questions asked.  Ive nuetered a lot of my mixes doing this.

This!!! Dude spot on

Very cool advice and great insight. Thank you!!

It sounds good when the transients clip the master.
Thers a ton of popular songs that go to+1db or +2db
The big thing though is you wana use multiband clip and saturation
Compress the lows, saturation on mids and highs

About the reverb, it depends on the subgenre. For Gothic Metal and Doom Metal, even Doom/Death Metal, you'd need at least a small amount of reverb even for the rhythm guitars

The reverb part is probably the only bit I don't necessarily agree, on very aggressive rock then yeah minimise the reverb but plenty of rock and metal has heaps of reverb on it and sounds great, pretty much all the 80s rock bands, doom metal, shoegaze, alt rock, prog rock/metal and power metal often have a bit or sometimes a lot of verb. Rock and metal is quite broad it isn't just djent and hardcore punk. Even then heard plenty of modern metal bands with massive clean sections drenched in reverb. It's more that you don't need it on every source especially room reverb which can be muddy. I think it's more if you want upfront and aggressive than don't use that much reverb if any, if you want to push things back and have slower tempos (or slower note use) then carefully designed reverb can help.
The truth is there is no hard rules just guidelines and there are more factors than just genre that dictate productions type and technique.

holy snare overtone on that opening track!  great video man

On point.
I feel I learned here.
I was putting a highpass on my guitars, now I might just cut in the lowend instead. Same for compression, I wasnt very using it. I got a hybrid genre, so it doesnt very apply for vocals as well as cutting reberb (very made for my type vocals), and some parts for the drums sre more triphop adjacent (so, verb) but everything else: wow.
Thank you !

Damn. What a great video.

Your guitars already have nearly nothing below 50Hz. That's why you don't need to cut. It is already cut from your other plugins. A natural guitar sound has a lot going between 100Hz and 20Hz. Many people will cut at 100Hz or higher until there is nothing below 50Hz. And already from your other plugins the guitar has a very even tone across the spectrum. In most cases the guitar is going to have a wall of sound below 300Hz that you need to bring down to even things out. The point is, you are cutting (or your amp plugins are cutting for you) all the frequencies that you say we don't need to cut with EQ.

Thank you for this permission dude, you caught me on a very frustrating mixing day purely because of avoiding clipping a master when the track sounded good.

This is great advice, and a pleasant change!
The current culture of EDM producer/tutor types are a little toxic in my opinion, and can be very elitist and quite nasty to those who don't fall in line, as I have experienced!
I produce rock/blues/jazz as well as electronic music, and I find it actually really rewarding and cathartic to mix the heavier breakbeat and techno styles just like I would with 90s thrash - mentioning no names made an example of me in a live feedback session, and ripped on me in front of his students - glad I have a thick skin, or my career would have ended then and there!
Thanks, Friend ;-)

Cool to see someone else use infected mushroom pusher on the mix bus!

I'll often use low shelf instead of hipass. If all you need is to tame something, don't cut it out, just tame it. Low shelf is going to be far less destructive while usually doing the job just fine. And you can combine them too, that way you can use hipass to really cut the junk while using low shelf to shape the tone.

In the current project i have probably 40 guitar tracks (guitarists... you should never tell them "sure, we can do another track). Half of them tracks don't even have EQ, they just go to the corresponding bus, and there is not a lot going on there either, glue comp and some EQ shaping, nothing very drastic. There are few that are shaped and crushed to oblivion but.. Distorted guitar is already compressed and if the sound is right in the first place, there should not be a lot you have to do to them. There is so much EQ and stuff going on before it hits the mic, that is where you change the sound, not with channel EQ.