How to remove fizziness from distorted guitars using a multiband compressor

Hello and welcome to this week's article!

Today we're going to tackle a problem that is typical of distorted guitars, but that can be applied to anything distorted, from a bass to a synth: the excessive high-end fizz, which often can be very bothering, especially if we're using an amp simulator with a lot of gain.

The problem with fizz, that buzzing, harsh part of the sound that hides between the presence area (2k to 8k) and the high end (10k to 12k) is the fact that it's quite hard to pinpoint exactly by doing frequency hunting, because we can can take down some notch here and there, but the fizz can remain pervasively a bit everywhere, and if we take down the whole area the tone loses presence and bite, disappearing in the mix.

How do we solve? The ideal is to change tone until we find one that gets us 80% there, so that we are happy also without doing acrobacies, but this is a privilege that not all mix engineers can have, and sometimes we're forced to work with guitar tracks which are already processed, and sounds super fizzy.

First the highest part of the fizz we can roll it off with a low pass filter set to 10-12k to taste, until we get rid only of the useless part, but then when we arrive to the part from 2k to 8/10k we need to adopt a different strategy, or we'll murder the good part of our tone trying to clean it.

Then when it's time to find the fizz in the presence area, we need to take a Multiband compressor and create just a band between 2k and 3k, just to start, and in this it would be VERY useful if we had a solo function to hear only the affected part, then we start move this band left and right listening to the band in solo until we find exactly the part in which there is the "bulk" of the harshness.

Once the area is perfectly set, we need to set the comp with a fast attack and fast release, and then just take down the threshold until we hear some gain reduction in that area; now we need to hear it in context, so listen to the tone (not just to the compressed band) and raise or lower the threshold according to how much fizziness you want to remove. 

Finally, if we have a lot of palm mutes we can also create a band between 65hz and 250hz to tame the low end recoil (thus freeing up headroom), so that we'll clean up the guitar even more with just one plugin.

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