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

ICN · Post by **ICN** » Sat Dec 18, 2010 11:40 pm

Enjoy your time off Steevio. Appreciate that post Man.

Hope you have a great xmas too

koen1978 · Post by **koen1978** » Mon Dec 20, 2010 7:00 pm

Thanks a lot Steevio!

steevio · Post by **steevio** » Wed Dec 22, 2010 8:05 pm

damn cant keep away.

just thought i'd give you this link for the free analyser i use;

its called Visual Analyser 8

http://www.sillanumsoft.org/download.htm

try this;

stick a pulsewave from a softsynth into into it and adjust the pulsewidth slowly, you will see a large peak to the left, this is your fundamental frequency, and the various harmonics are the other peaks, and as you adjust the PW, you will see the various harmonic peaks going up and down in intensity.
at 50 % pulsewidth you have a square wave, and you will see that the second peak dissappears.(this is the first harmonic and one octave above the fundamental. also all the even numbered harmonics will dissappear or become reduced in intensity)

if you use a square wave for bass in the region 37 hz to 73Hz , it will not have as much punch as pulsewave which has more of the second harmonic in it, because this is still well in the bass region and adds weight, but it works well to use a squarewave above 73 Hz, because then the second harmonic is in the upper bass region and may start interfering with other sounds there, and make the bass sound wooley, so it might be good that its not there.

koen1978 · Post by **koen1978** » Fri Dec 24, 2010 11:40 pm

pff difficult stuff, but great info. Will cost me some time to figure this out and before i really understand what your writing here. But this was exactly what i was looking for. Again many thanks for the FB! Merry Christmass btw

Sublimator · Post by **Sublimator** » Sat Dec 25, 2010 5:19 pm

You have to decide where to put the emphasis: on the bassline or the bass of the kick. You cant have a big bassline with big 909 kick mushing into that

This is true. Boomy bassline combined with long boomy kick results in too much low end energy especially in techno music where the bassline can be quite busy. Recently read about this topic on some forum somewhere. Some guy suggested shortening the kick decay or/and highpassing it to avoid the problem. Subtle sidechainig can help also i guess.

steevio · Post by **steevio** » Sat Dec 25, 2010 7:34 pm

double post

steevio · Post by **steevio** » Sat Dec 25, 2010 7:40 pm

Sublimator wrote:
You have to decide where to put the emphasis: on the bassline or the bass of the kick. You cant have a big bassline with big 909 kick mushing into that
This is true. Boomy bassline combined with long boomy kick results in too much low end energy especially in techno music where the bassline can be quite busy. Recently read about this topic on some forum somewhere. Some guy suggested shortening the kick decay or/and highpassing it to avoid the problem. Subtle sidechainig can help also i guess.

this is exactly why i said early that this is not a simple issue.

so many people have said things in this thread, and all of it is relevant,
(i think some people haven't read through the whole thread and come in late and simply reiterated what has already been said)

there is no magic solution, because no -one is making identical tunes here, we use different notes, different note arrangements, different amounts of attack, decay, sustain,release on our bass and our kick, different waveforms, different amounts of harmonics etc etc etc.....

i just dont accept that anyone can come in here and say outright 'you shouldnt do this or that'
ive made tunes with big kicks and big basslines that work, its not easy to get right, but it can be done if thats what you want to achieve.

you have to experiment, and not assume because you read somewhere that you should sidechain or whatever, that that will work on the particular tune you are working on. i approach every single tune differently, and dont have some default set-up, otherwise all my tunes would sound the same.

there are no rules other than ' if it sounds good, it is good, if it sounds sh!t it is sh!t.

if you think you know all about sub bass, try going to to a Tibetan Monk concert, and listen to the crazy sh!t that is going on there. Minimal techno doesnt even scratch the surface, and mostly doesnt have any sub bass in it at all.

or how about the Kodo drummers ? theres all kinds of mad low frequencies going on, some below 20 Hz, most of us dont have speakers that can even reproduce most of the fundamental frequencies of those drums clashing around and banging in to each other.

you know all i'm trying to say is - come on guys lets all explore the wacky world of very low frequencies

edit ;; i'm only saying all this because i think low frequencies are sometimes neglected in our music, the term bassline in itself is a give away, theres so much more that can be done in this part of the spectrum than your predictable bassline with short decay kick.

even a piano goes down to 27 Hz for gods sake.

Sublimator · Post by **Sublimator** » Tue Dec 28, 2010 5:12 am

agree everyone's got different aproach to music composition, mixing, mastering whatever. just saying... trying to say i got good results lately just by making kick shorter to make room for the bass (even without HP filter). cheers! i really try to exclude math away from music but should defently try to disjoint kick & bass by perfect fifths as similar as you said steevio...

defenetly not a bass expert and always interested in topics about low end. please keep posting