Hey guys, I tend to have trouble creating a good sounding bass when making my tracks. A lot of the time is sounds muffled/muddy, and doesn't really feel like it has it's own space or that it sits well. I EQ and usually cut lows at 30hz and use the compressor in fruity limiter but I'm not 100% on what to adjust to give it a clean clear sound. How do you guys tend to create a good bass sound?
Clear bass mixing
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Epsilon-144
Musician and Producer
Creating a quality bass sound is a pretty complicated and subjective craft. Your EQing is good, but it takes a lot of training on the ear. It's not just the bass that needs a placement, the drums and everything else need mixing properly as well. Everything has to sound nice TOGETHER, so don't work on the bass alone. Work on the bass with the rest of the track so it begins to fit properly.
What kind of bass sounds are you using? A lot of kick drums provide a bass that carries on after the kick. This is probably the easiest way to put a few bass notes into a beat. Writing a bass line with a synth is a little more tricky. As far as I know, if its "covering up" the drums and other melodies, you can try to pan the drums and other melodies a little bit off to give them their own space. Always pan a sound into its own area. It doesn't have to be drastic, but enough to give it some free space to sound clear. Keep EQing as you are around 40 - 60hz.
Mixing into the rest of the track, as a whole, is the most important. It's take an ear for it, but with practice and patience you'll get it.
What kind of bass sounds are you using? A lot of kick drums provide a bass that carries on after the kick. This is probably the easiest way to put a few bass notes into a beat. Writing a bass line with a synth is a little more tricky. As far as I know, if its "covering up" the drums and other melodies, you can try to pan the drums and other melodies a little bit off to give them their own space. Always pan a sound into its own area. It doesn't have to be drastic, but enough to give it some free space to sound clear. Keep EQing as you are around 40 - 60hz.
Mixing into the rest of the track, as a whole, is the most important. It's take an ear for it, but with practice and patience you'll get it.
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For depth you need frequencies below 75Hz and for warmth you need frequencies at 75Hz up to at least 350Hz in conjunction with rounding off the high end. So a good deep and warm bass requires a pretty wide range of frequencies in the bottom end of the frequency spectrum. You also need harmonic distortion in the actual recording of it which is why you need the right bass signal chain in the recording as well, tape saturation will also help you with that later on. But the real sweetness of that low end comes from removing modulation noise in that region caused by other sound sources in the mix and the trick is then to low cut high and steep enough, especially on sound sources that consume a lot of mix signal, such as vocals. That is definitely one technique to a better low end. But in order to have enough size and warmth on the mix as a whole, you need some additional low mid frequencies as well. So the trick is that if you have a mellow sounding electric guitar for instance, you can low cut it, but compensate with a low mid frequency boost, then pan it very hard to one side, to say 75%L. If the bass and electric guitar are well tuned, this will then keep the resonance still present, but now you also have a warm and soft punch in the mix and the mix stays big due to the panning of the low mid frequencies to one side. On the other side you can then add another slightly brighter sound source, good if it does not hit at the same time as the electric guitar. This sound source must be soft in the transients so that you can compensate for the added density on the left speaker. For a good full low end you also must have enough gain on the bass guitar. With a kick drum in the mix this means too much density by default. But that is why you side chain the kick and the bass (the kick temporarily ducking the bass), since the kick ducks the bass it means you can reduce the gain on the kick drum and still have it impact enough, which also then softens the whole low end, because you don't have as much hard hitting lows of the kick drum cutting through the mix. What you need to ensure though is to gate the kick if it has rumble noise on it, but if you have a really good sounding snare on one of the kick drum microphones, then you can leave that rumble and even low EQ boost it to make the snare fuller sounding. But this means you now need to balance the kick drum lower to add low end resonance/bass fullness and that kind of stuff one might easily forget and it can be tricky to get right. But snare frequencies you should take care of, because to get a good full snare sound you need enough information about what it sounds like raw as well as in the room and if you have some snare frequencies that can add to the body of it, that's great, use it. So in other words, a full low end is important up to a certain point, you have to balance that against other qualities the mix needs to have. Also don't forget to hi pass filter the rumble noise on the other sound sources.
So the primary mixing moves to a better low end are: EQ, low cut, side chain, pan, gain. And then later on, ensure that you do not have a limiter that finally takes away the low end energy that you've created. If you have found a sweet spot for the low end, lock it there by bypassing it during the pre-master gain stage process. That will make the gain stage lower the mix density, which usually sounds nice. So instead of lowering the low frequencies as a result of the loudness increase, you raise the loudness of the other frequencies in the mix. In this way you do not lose the nice low end you've created, this also allows you to have plenty of low end in the mix early on knowing that eventhough it is too dominant in the mix, it will be perfect later on when you gain stage the mix.
It is also important to have the right width of the bass in the mix. Too much width on the bass can make the mix somewhat boomy and dark. Too little width on the bass can make the mix somewhat too small. And for this you use parallel processing in combination with panning. Usually I want the low end to expand a little in the chorus, pan automation is important. (not only on bass, but on all sound sources in the mix depending on the production) Sometimes you might want some additional harmonics in the subs, that's when you add undertones to it, using a combo of pitch shifting and bass saturation. This you can do on the parallel processing chain, so that it impacts positively on the stereo image. Watch out with phase when you do this parallel processing, use at least a very low latency system, but even better is to use hardware busses.
Some bass guitars might have been recorded in a room or otherwise in a setting that causes a somewhat problematic 100 - 200 Hz range - you have too little sub and low mid frequencies in the bass transients compared to the frequencies in the 100 to 200 Hz range. For this you need to use dynamic EQ/multiband compression, prior to the side chain. You might sometimes end up having many different stages of compression contributing in many different ways to make the low end sounding exactly like you want it to. The mastering engineer might finally undo some of this, but that's OK... The most important during mixing is to have the overall tone, density and dynamics of the low end at a very good overall balance.
Finally, don't forget the rhythm portion of the pass guitar, which exists above 350Hz. The bass guitar is a very important rhythm mix element and the string plucks contributes to the rhythm vibe and groove of the whole mix especially during the various bass licks, so don't just low pass filter it, make each bass riff have enough definition in the mix. Keep in mind though that much of the warmth of the bass guitar is in having the high end soft enough as you gain it. So high cut it as necessary, also in order to remove enough high frequency modulation rumble noise.
Eventhough a really good bass might be created from an advanced mix of processing stages in mixing and mastering, the better the production and recording is and the better gear you have, the easier it is to succeed with all of this because it offloads what is required from your monitoring process in order to succeed with these techniques, because the milder the settings, the less your monitoring process might mess it up. Therefore always focus the quality to be created as early in the music creation process as possible, so that you do not have to have an unrealistically good monitoring solution and process and the ears of a dog in order to get it right.
Although this technically solves the issue, it might be that in your particular case you are mainly struggling with a phase issue. Most do...
Another technique worth playing with is to low cut the low end in the verses and use automation to remove that during the choruses. You can do this in conjunction with automating the parallel processing, for an even greater impact.
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scrapheaper
Moderator
Why are you cutting at 30Hz? Can you even hear 30Hz on your system?
Highpass everything that might have bass in it (Apart from the bass and kick obviously, that kinda has to have bass in it)
What has bass in it you ask? Listen to all the separate elements to see if you can hear any low end. Temporarily low-pass them so you can see if there's anything left.
Then use some subtle sidechaining to duck the bass when the kick hits.
This is everything you need as an electronic producer to get the bass section right. If you do all this and it still sounds lacking in bass, then you've done something wrong.
Highpass everything that might have bass in it (Apart from the bass and kick obviously, that kinda has to have bass in it)
What has bass in it you ask? Listen to all the separate elements to see if you can hear any low end. Temporarily low-pass them so you can see if there's anything left.
Then use some subtle sidechaining to duck the bass when the kick hits.
This is everything you need as an electronic producer to get the bass section right. If you do all this and it still sounds lacking in bass, then you've done something wrong.
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Free Spirit
College Dropout
Make sure the kick isn't clashing w the bass. Aka that it's pitched to the key of the bass
Cut low mids from the kick around 400 hz because they're unnecessary and actually mask the attack of the bass.
high pass around 30 hz like you said
side-chain compress the bass so that every time the kick hits the bass drops 2-3 db
Cut low mids from the kick around 400 hz because they're unnecessary and actually mask the attack of the bass.
high pass around 30 hz like you said
side-chain compress the bass so that every time the kick hits the bass drops 2-3 db
Kalm
New member
I typically like to highness my bass source around 30-45 Hz. Also helps with random DC offset and rumble. Then I turn the bass up. If I still need sub harmonics, then I'll parallel the bass to another track, squash it, then apply distortion or saturation. That way it creates some order of harmonics to my crafted bass. What I've come to find out about bass is that a lot of it depends on the average level and how it sits in the mix.