1. The mix chain and the high-pass filter (HPF)
Where to start mixing the guitar: insert order, gain staging and the HPF that clears the mud from below.
You already recorded the guitars (see the recording stage). Now the goal of mixing is not to “fix” a take: it’s to make the guitar fit with the rest of the song — to sound big without covering the vocal, the bass or the drums. Mixing is mostly about removing and ordering, not adding.
Start with the order, not the plugins
Before touching a single parameter, decide in what order you process. The signal passes through the inserts top to bottom, and the order changes the result.
Gain staging: leave headroom
Load the track into the mix and pull the fader down until the peaks of the main bus have room (for example, individual guitars sitting around −18 to −12 dBFS peak). Don’t mix with everything pinned to 0: you’ll have no room for the bus and the master, and plugins that expect “line” level behave oddly.
If you start with everything at the edge of clipping, every plugin that adds level forces you to pull everything else down. Leaving headroom from the start saves you redoing the gain ten times.
The high-pass filter (HPF): the first thing every guitar does
The electric guitar contributes nothing useful below ~80–100 Hz: that range belongs to the kick and the bass. Everything the guitar puts there is mud that dirties the mix and steals room from the real low end. The solution is a high-pass filter (HPF): it lets the highs through and cuts the lows below a frequency.
Raising the cutoff = you remove more lows and the guitar gets lighter and clearer (making room for the bass). Too low = the mud comes back. Too high = the guitar sounds thin and bodyless. Find the point where the rumble disappears but there's still a wall.
How steeply it cuts. 12 dB/oct is gentle and natural; 24 dB/oct is more surgical (removes the rumble without touching the body just above the cutoff). For metal, 24 dB/oct usually cleans up better.
The high-pass is the highest-impact, lowest-risk move of the entire guitar mix. Removing the mud from below immediately unlocks the clarity of the whole song; it's the first thing any engineer would do.
What you should NOT chase yet
Your guitar track to mix (part of the guide song)Pending — this one is on you
For all the mix demos, the double rhythm of the guide song you recorded in
the previous stage works for me: upload to prodmus_frontend/public/audio/guitarra/ a version already
with amp sim/Helix (the one you’ll mix), in WAV 24/48. With that I’ll show an A/B with and without
HPF so you can hear the mud clear out.
Quick path — order and clean up the bottom
Quick path
- Put the inserts in order: cleanup first (HPF + corrective EQ), character later.
- Pull the fader down for headroom (guitar peaks with room, not pinned to 0).
- Insert an EQ and enable the high-pass.
- Raise the cutoff until the rumble disappears but the guitar still has a wall (≈80–120 Hz).
- Repeat the HPF on every guitar track.
Expected result
Expected result
The guitar ordered and light: no mud below ~100 Hz, with headroom on the fader and the insert chain thought through (clean up → beautify). Removing and adding the HPF should make it clear how the bass and kick “appear”. With that done, you move on to corrective EQ to clean up the rest.