How do I make my bass fatter?

Yeah, I don't know if you guys have heard of Vicetone, but their bassline is just insanely powerful in the upper harmonics. right around that 250-400hz range, it pops out and sounds absolutely amazing, it's tight and not overbearing. I've tried using distortion as well but I feel like too much can lose the punch of the lower frequencies, as well as being overbearing to the ears. Can too much reverb on the lead synths cause muddiness to the low mids?
 
to offset your issues Coleman1, use a multi-band splitter (aka cross-over) and only apply the distortion to the upper bands only removes the low freq gunk and still sounds amazing
 
Really? Could that have the same method as using a multiband compressor and using saturation on the low mids? Or is that what you're actually talking about?
 
you could do it with a multiband compressor but all that is is several independent compressors fed by a crossover, so using a crossover and then feeding only the channels you want to a distortion unit does the same thing without the overhead of having a potentially coloured compressor unit in the signal chain - even when bypassed some older hw compressors changed the sound the signal for the better, some sw emulations of these devices include the same colouring to the signal when bypassed (i.e. bypass is not a true bypass in the case of suing these units)

an aural exciter is similar in action to what you want do adding distortion to a polarity inverted octave harmonic of the original signal, depending on the sw implementation you may be able to limit the frequency band it is applied to by using an internal/or external hpf filter

which brings me to my final question/statement: why make it complicated when using a hpf cascaded into an lpf to create your bandpass filter that then feeds the distortion unit; of course this would have to be on a separate channel being fed by the bass channel so that you don't lose the low end
 
And if you're talking about muddiness with lead synths, yes, if you dont filter your sends you can make anything with enough low mid content Muddy the mix. If you use too much reverb you will lose definition even if it's filtered.
 
I see.. Yeah I've seen people talk about exciters as well, how it can colour the sound. I tried using some soft saturation on the low mids anyway, and it did actually make it a little bit more crisp although not quite how I like it. I feel like If I was to boost these certain frequencies, knowing the low mids, it would muddy up the mix. It's kind of a tricky one to perfect.
 
hm
  • I'd be inclined to remove the compressor,
  • put eq after the reverb to remove really low and really high freqs (look at what you have done with the eq for the sound on its own and narrow the bandwidth and attack any OTT resonances)
  • put a noise gate after the reverb and have it reverse keyed to the signal feeding that chain so that the reverb only rings out after the sounds stops i.e. the reverb is permanently on but is limited to being heard only after it won't muddy main sound - side-chaining at its best

enjoy
 
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nTehl said:
Firstly, I am happy to be a new addition to this community.
I am trying to give my sub bass a big/fat stereo sound to it.
Share your methods.
Click to expand...

So the bass part itself, like the super low frequencies, are always better left in mono. You don't want to be panning that.

What you can do, though, is send your bass track to 2 different channels and opposite eq them so you have one that contains all the bass information and one that contains everything above that.

Then make the bass track mono and apply some stereo widening effect like phaser/flanger/adt/chorus onto the other track. That will give the impression of a very wide bass while making sure to keep the very low parts mono and panned dead center.
 
Well, I hope nobody throws the wrench at me but they have some very expensive hardware they are using to pull some of those sounds... I'm not going to say anything is impossible to do but... There are some advantages the big studios have obviously (like top of the line gear). Plus when you refer to Martin Garrix please be more specific to which person produced the track, I'm pretty sure he is not doing much producing these days.
 
Ðësantis said:
Well, I hope nobody throws the wrench at me but they have some very expensive hardware they are using to pull some of those sounds... I'm not going to say anything is impossible to do but... There are some advantages the big studios have obviously (like top of the line gear). Plus when you refer to Martin Garrix please be more specific to which person produced the track, I'm pretty sure he is not doing much producing these days.
Click to expand...

*wrench*
 
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