Making a (sub) bass sound good or full in your mix.

[tone-def]

as an engineer you should know that every sound has a sine.... the color of the sound is harmonics... If you use a jazzbass just layer it with a sine or something else... Like layering drums, you can also do that with ur sounds.

no need for that. a double bass can really move speakers.

i find a lot of modern dance music really lacks bass compared to a decade ago. i grew up listening to bass heavy music and now i have to worry about mastering engineers cutting the lower notes out of my tunes. that's why i'll never release on a digital label again.

[s.k.]

What's more worth it... the math or the sound? Ofcourse it has something to do with eachother, but not in the depth i think you're heading for.

synthesized sound IS math. what depth? steevio and AK's words here barely scratch the surface... i think the OP's question is too wide, thats why some misunderstanding occurs as everyone comments it from a different point.

[Dusk]

On a track I made yesterday I used 2 sinewaves one pitched up to a 7th and it sounded really good.

You just made a kind of triangle wave!

edit - kind of.

[kdgh]

steevio :

I don't wanna bug you or something.
It's super you like harmonics and made a topic about it. You're knowledge is your knowledge, and mine is mine. I'm not telling you're wrong. I'm just try to gain more perspective in this topic.

I try to explain it without math, but in sound itself.

tone-def:

Yup, a double bass can move the speakers! Tho some people who sample doublebasses might have 45 inches from way back. The track might be recorded in a crap studio or with the intension to give the bass not that much low-end.

It's nothing weird you experience more bass in the older tracks. Mostly they had more dynamics, so you experienced more bass. Peeps just put the volume up instead of boosting it into a limiter.

s.k. :

Synthesize is math, but don't tell me you're playing on your synthesizer with a calculator next to you....


I'm not trying to bug you, but trying to light up a new perspective in these topics nowadays.

[AK]

@ steevio. Wouldnt argue with that and like i said in the reply, only talking about personal preference. I was replying to the OP though and these are mix questions not mastering. Since im not a mastering engineer, it wouldnt make sense for me to talk about it and whilst i know the basic principles, i dont see any value of them here. Much better to leave that to those guys, if/when something is to be mastered. Just dont see the value there of addressing anything but mix stuff.

Yeah the church organ stuff is well known but thats not really related to anything at all here, and yeah cant disagree with the bass frequencies although I do have my preference to their range. E is my favourite key/root note and i did say that in my post too so not sure why you are saying that to me. Anyway, im only replying to the guy if you want to pick me up on stuff carry on but i cant be arsed getting into that.

sorry bro, i read my post and it sounded like i was pulling you up or something, that wasnt where i was coming from, hence the edit.

everything you said i pretty much agree with.

i'm pulling out of this as its already a shambles, like you said there are already plenty of threads on this subject.

ps i do think there is value in looking at this from a mastering perspective as well as a mixing one, i never seperate the two proceedures when i'm making music, i'm constantly looking at a track from both angles, adjusting and readjusting in both domains. the more you understand about everything to do with producing the better imo.

No worries, I thought it was going to go in the long debate style thread about the ins/outs of wording or preference. I just didn't have the capacity. Overworked, tired and underpaid.

It's potentially very deep though yes and no pun intended. I have never had the environment to monitor very low frequencies even though my set up was fairly satisfactory. I've always kinda played it safe with 30hz hp filtering and played out tunes on a number of systems before doing final tweaks. But even with a good set of monitors and decent acoustics, it's still safe to assume bass is not the easiest thing to judge. I doubt I'd ever have a room large enough to be able to make exact mix decisions regarding bass, the majority of others will be in the same boat. And yeah, some of those seriously low dubstep tunes are friggin nuts if you've got the capacity to really hear it all. There was another genre ( bass something or other ) which seriously messed about with frequencies below 30hz. How? I dunno!

I don't see a lot of activity below 30hz on mastered techno material, at least not the stuff that I have analysed ( but that's been a while ) I'll notice a 30hz cut gives more headroom without me noticing any reduction in bass or sense of bass but then my monitors don't do a lot below 38hz and I don't use a subwoofer. If I had the room size, money for srriously good acoustic treatment and great speakers, I would probably have a better idea but I still think I haven't done too bad by adopting reasonably sensible techniques. Hard though.

Besides the topic IS quite simple...

It isn't mate, not by a long shot. You can come in at a lot of angles and there could be pages and pages on just one of them.

Try a maxxbass... a plugin with psycho-acoustics that 'adds' bass. It does quite the opposite. It add's harmonics.

What do you mean it does the opposite, opposite to what? I don't know much about it, I remember reading it sounds awful on larger systems but might have some benefit on smaller home stereo type speakers which may cut off in the 60-80hz region. There were great bass tracks way before the advent of plugins, it's not a necessity or replacement for knowledge.

funny to see everybody talking in numbers of hz....

In terms of filtering out frequencies, it's often used in the context of 'around 'X' hz'. As a sort of point of reference. Steevio has mentioned other important factors regarding frequencies.

Anyway, my new studio room needs to be sorted before I am going to be competent with ANY type of bass. A quick test the other days through a pair of Mackies and the bass is twice as loud in one side of the room at the far left. And no, nothing in there yet so is to be expected at the moment.

[kdgh]

are we talking about bass in room's or in the mix? I think the OP was asking about bass presence in the mix.

Maxxbass is just an example of adding harmonics in quite a lazy way. I mean opposite in adding harmonics instead of bass, tho the experience will tell it adds more bass.

And about threating your room is a good thing but just try to do a sine test and write everything down, if you like, what happens at what hz, from where you're producing. You're not producing and listening on that side of the room at the far left, do ya?

Of course we can talk about bass for ages, but if i look at the reply's it's mostly about what bass does in a room, instead of in a mix.

[steevio]

... I mostly trust my ears. Not every sound needs the same processing.

sorry mate, i'm not picking on you here, but this reminded me of something which i think is worth mentioning in this thread, so ive come out of retirement briefly to say it.

its very important to trust your ears as a musician, but its an illusion really because the fact is you cannot trust your ears,

human hearing is one of the most susceptible senses to hallucination. most of what you hear is an hallucination concocted by your brain to get you by in the real world of survival.
so many things affect what you perceive, the time of day, your mood, your emotional state, whether you've been listening to music for a few hours, whether you spent too many years wearing earbuds / headphones / going clubbing. your taste in music !
many of you will already be on the way to developing tinnitus and hyperacusis.
your brain is very selective about what you hear, compared to the barrage of sonic information coming in.

a case in point, and something pertinent to this topic and yet another example of how complex the whole story is, would be The Missing fundamental effect,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missing_fundamental

see also Psychoacoustics

i dont use computers to make music, but i certainly use them to analyse it, my PC screen has a permanent oscilloscope, spectrum analyser, and frequency meter on it. i'm constantly checking whats going on. these tools wouldnt have been invented if they werent useful, they are free on the web. use them.

[kdgh]

Maxxbass is an example of adding fundamental steevio.
I did my research in psycho-acoustics, tho i'm not interested in producing them.

I thought the fletcher curve would be more to the point of your post

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fletcher–Munson_curves

Just adding some useful info and it clears up some reply's in this topic.