beat down uppers?

Steve Zeeeee wrote: I'd just like upper tones to sound like they are farther away, yet remain brilliant or clean, not compressed or muffled.  What is a strategy for this please?

Can't really answer this, because we are short of a load of information. For a start, is this pre-recorded material we are talking about? If it is, you should probably be looking critically at what you are listening to it on first, and if it's loudspeakers, possibly the environment too. It's very easy to start mucking about with the sound of files, but without some knowledge of the environment, etc we would be going nowhere sensible with suggestions.

If it's your own material, then this applies doubly - you really need to check this in several environments (unless you have a known-good system and a knowlege of how similar material sounds on it) before committing to anything at all. But, if this seems to be occuring with most material, then you really should sort out the monitoring environment first, I'd say.

It's hard to tell exactly what you want from a text description (and without hearing the audio you're working on).

However, I'd be tempted to experiment with either the Multiband compression dialed in for just a subtle control of the higher frequencies or with EQ--maybe the FFT or 30 band graphic.

The Graphic EQ is likely the easiest to play with--just start knocking a few dB off the higher frequencies and see if that's going the direction you want.