[SOUND] Bass Sounds for listeners

[KennyTroy]

Hey guys,

I'm currently in the middle of a new track that I am pleased with, and want to ensure that it comes out with the best sound quality possible.. my dilemma is as follows:

I found an excellent bass-kick for the drop that works very well, and when I listen to the playback of my song with my studio speakers (KRK Rokit 5's) I am pleased with how it sounds.

When I play the song via my computer or in my car, the bass sound is lost. Now I'm aware the frequency range of my laptop is dismal compared to my studio speakers, but for the average listener they will 99% not have the same quality speakers as I do.

How can I fix this issue and somehow fill in the missing bass? Even in my car which has a nice sound system, the bass is just kind of lost. It's almost as if the kick just disappears completely. And of course without this kick, the drop is well.. obviously disappointing. If I put in a regular "punchy" kick, you can hear it more, but without the bass sound it just doesn't work well.

Suggestions? Thanks guys

 

[Tinseltopia]

If it's sub bass this is kind of hard to do, but still feasible. Try layering another bass sound an octave higher and obviously EQ out the original bass so they don't frequency clash in the low end. This will make the bass have a greater frequency range which should be audible on higher treble speakers.

Alternatively, you can try adding a slight amount of distortion as this will give it a lot of mid and high end frequencies to accentuate the bassline

 

[KennyTroy]

Thank you for your reply. My response below is what I posted on GearSlutz forum, I'm throwing it here as well to see if anyone on this forum can offer expertise on it as well.
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I was toying around with another idea, if you guys could offer some insight as to if it would be an effective means of achieving this raised bass sound.

In my situation, I'm layering two kicks. One is a very clean punchy kick, and the other is a very dirty garage sounding punchy kick, with a huge bass tail. Ideally, I want to get this bass tail attached to the clean punchy kick. So far I've accomplished this, using a method described on ADSR Courses to layer the kicks, EQ them, flip the polarities and send them through another audio plugin to sync them (the entire method is way more than explained here, but I don't know it all by heart, I had to follow the tutorial piece by piece).

The issue remains however, that the kick itself and bass sound gets lost (whether in the high reverb tail of my pluck or something else). I have done the whole mixing EQ and side-chaining of course, but it is still lacking.

>> Would it be effective to, seeing as I want to bring out the low end of the kick drum, to use parallel compression and put a high-pass filter on a mult of the kick feeding the sidechain. Such that the compressor will dodge the low end of the signal, and when blended back in, as if you EQ’d up the low end, but without the artifacts?

>> Can I sidechain the large reverb tail of the pluck to the bass tail of the kick such that the reverb will lower its volume as the bass comes in? When I say this I mean it in the sense that I have already sidechained the two channels, however it sidechains the entire pluck and kick -- whereas I would ideally like to sidechain only the reverb tail and the bass tail. Is this possible?