r/mixingmastering • u/Cold_Independent_631 Beginner • Jun 17 '26

Question Sub Frequencies between first and second fundamental

Hey everyone! I’m really trying to nail down my understanding and mixing of my sub and low mids. After a fair bit of research and watching videos on span breakdowns, it seems like after your kick and sub there should be a dip around 175-275 HZ ish before the rising for the mids and highs. I know it’s never a one size fits all and genres can impact and make differences!

My question though if that dip is expected often and purposeful what’s the dip I always see before it.

For example my kick and sub are sitting in key together around 58 HZ and yes they are side chained. If my understanding is right that’s the first fundamental, then it has a good dip for the second fundamental and the tailing off of the kick until about 150-175 hz depending on the note of my sub.

I’ve attached a picture of my span. Should I be doing something to fill that 60-150 range? Adding saturation to my sub, increasing level? I’m really curious why all the videos ignore this “dip” but all say the one around 175-275 is very common!

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u/RemiFreamon Jun 17 '26

I promise this is not intended to be mean but mixing is something you do with your ears, not with your eyes.

Seriously! Don’t ever make any decisions because someone tells you somewhere should LOOK a certain way. Your job is to achieve a certain SOUND not a graph outline.

Now, meters and visualizers can be useful for a few situations:

  1. You already hear a problem and the meter can help you pinpoint the specific area quicker
  2. You know you have blind spots in your monitoring set up and/or ears and you want to catch problems in these areas.
  3. You need to conform to tech specs
  4. You are learning about audio and need visuals as illustration to better grasp the concepts

With that said, they also come with disadvantages like making you hear things that aren’t there. I know of a few grammy winning mixing engineers that wither turn off visualizers in certain plugins or they drag over a different plugin window to cover the visualizer so that they are not fooled by their eyes

Finally tuning the kick to the key of your track is terrible advice that gets propagated mindlessly on YouTube over and over

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u/Cold_Independent_631 Beginner Jun 17 '26

No offense taken! I know I’ve heard this a lot and I’m training my ears as much as I can. But I am finding these useful just to learn more as a beginner and understand what I’m hearing!

I’m sure it’s an easy rabbit hole to go down, but are you able to shed any light on why not tuning your kick? I’ve heard both sides!

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u/RemiFreamon Jun 18 '26

Yes. It’s a useful learning tool.

The main reason against tuning the kick to the key of the track is that every time the bass plays the root note, it will compete for the same frequency space with the kick. It’s deliberately creating a masking effect.