Analysing Waves R Bass 

RBass is a simplified version of MaxxBass, which itself is Meir Shashoua's implementation of an enhancer for the Missing Fundamental Effect. The concept is that psychoacoustically, the ear can make out the fundamental of low pitches even if they've vanished (say, due to a small speaker) provided that harmonics (both odd and even) of the fundamental are still audible. The original intent was to make cheap small speakers sound closer to large ones, which is an honest effect even if it is, essentially, an illusion caused by the way our brain interprets sound.

If you made this a series, where you "investigate" different plugins (Waves or otherwise), I would be HOOKED.

this reminds me of how i once tried to put reverb on a subbass, just because people claimed that is a thing one shouldn't do. so i did that and also put some distortion on it and it creates lots of cool harmonics, which i then highpassed so i could have the original bass in the lowend and badabim, badaboom, i had a sub-bass reverb that actually sounded good

As far as I understand, Waves RBass is essentially a "easy" version of Waves MaxxBass, which offers more granular and specific control over the algorithm. Sound on Sound has a good article on that, dating back to 1998: As far as I can tell, it's running a lowpass into distortion into compressor and a highpass to remove the fundamental from this parallel bus, lowpassing the distorted signal to remove highs, and then mixing with the original, with the original signal optionally attenuated by some amount. It was originally designed to make bass sound good on less-than-full-range speakers.

Came in to learn what R Bass does, learned a really interesting bass mixing technique instead. Thanks Dan as always for your informative videos.

-----> Important to know: The harmonics are in mono, even if you feed it a stereo signal. It will shrink the perceived width. That may or may not be what you want.

I have to say: you’re probably the only one who is actually taking the time to look at Waves’s plugins objectively. I get tired of either the demonstrations that are interpreted as subtle shills or the accusations that Waves are just siphoning customers of money. Admittedly, I “grew up” with Waves. But at the same time, I like to know what these tools can and/or can’t do, especially in light of other ones that are used as often or even more than Waves. Nice job as always and looking forward to more.

One tip I have for Rbass is to use it to free up a little headroom while retaining the "feel" of the low bass. Put the fundamental frequency somewhere low and appropriate for the song, then take the original sub OUT, which high passes at that frequency, then turn intensity up until the perception of fullness is close. Finally, level match it using the output so you're comparing apples to apples. I find that if I have a low tuned kick with lots of sub, and a low tuned bass or bass synth, I'll use it on one or the other and it can help relieve your system some by not having all the sub frequencies compounding and eating up all your mix headroom. I tend to use it as a tool more than an effect, personally, but to each their own. Hope that helps.

First time viewer, at two minutes in- I perceive overwhelming amounts of passion. I’m super psyched to have discovered you.

Thank you! Thank you!!! Youre simply a genius, and it's a blessing having your channel for free on YT alongside with a lot of misinformation goin on other channels. I may not use all of your techniques, but all of them are strong weapons to have in a mixing arsenal. Apologies for the grammar, not native english

Unfiltered Audio's Bass-Mint plugin gives you similar results with a bit more control over how the bass sound is manipulated. I get some pretty fat results with just a few tweaks. That said, I kind of prefer R Bass in that it's really simple and so am I.

Always amazed how effortlessly Dan delivers tips I've never thought of... Reacomp as a distortion tool...🤔

Can you please make a video breaking down how to recreate RVox? The community needs it!

So many people I know put the thumbs down on RBass. It doesn't always work for me, but when it does, nothing else is quite like it. Especially useful for the small speaker bass trick: Run it on a parallel copy and mix it in. Works well.

I'm curious on what RVox actually does. There's a lot of talk of it doing more than just compression - some say there's an exciter under the hood. Would love to hear your thoughts on the discussion!

The quality of your videos is insane! Production, presentation and information!

Oh my god... I have never noticed that original bass in and out on the side and I have been using this plugin for nearly 10 years. THANK YOU

this is what I come to this channel for. You're the best, Dan!

Exactly what i was looking for

I'm learning how to code plugins and these videos are being so helpful! Thanks Dan

Fun fact, if you ever used to use spectrasonics old trilogy plug-in but always found it hard to fit the bass into your mix, it was because they processed the acoustic bass with r bass but forgot to turn it off when exporting the synth samples!

I kind of feared this. Rbass is a well designed plugin, with novel processing.

This is ace! Would love to see a similar vid on analogue obsession's lovend, another bass harmonic enhancement plugin that sounds great but is difficult to use subtly. as the lowest setting is still doing something.

For someone who spends an awful lot of time informing us about aliasing problems, your font rendering settings are surprising... 😂 Thanks as always for the videos!

I used RBass on a few broadcasts in mastering. Now I insert it on my drum n bass stem. It took me some time to realize it’s not a full time thing. It’s so stunning you don’t want to hear it too much. This and RVox are just astoundingly easy to use. Waves was on a huge roll then. I recall that I analyzed Max Bass endlessly in the beginning, trying to understand what it might be doing to my mixes. Once I figured out it was a ‘second speakers’ thing, it became much easier to use. In my main monitors, its effect was not so desirable but after tweaking with constant speaker switching it made perfect sense and my clients were happy without a clue, which is the ideal.

RBass is one of my absolute essential plugins. I don’t know scientifically how it works but I hear it as “inventing” bass underneath the material around the frequency you specify. Anything that I feel doesn’t have the low end present to boost with a normal EQ I just create it with RBass - thin vocal, 808s, bass synths/guitars. Great video.

Dan, you’re spoiling us. 2 videos in one week, it’s Christmas

Works great for laptop, or small bluetooth speakers. And the same mix plays great on high end systems.

I've been watching your videos for a while and man oh man, you and Michael White (Mixing with Mike) contributed so much to how i approach mixing now! Thank you so much! Would love to see your take on Tone Projects Basslane Pro! Feels like to get the most out of this plugin requires an experienced guy to run his tests on it.

Of all the waves stuff. The few things I’d actually consider buying are their R series (Renaissance) X-crackle, sibilance, H-delay and Api 2500. That’s it.

Thanks for all your videos! Please do a video on RVox!

Thanks for analyzing this plugin!! Can definitely considering what's already going on, and not repeat the effect!!

Great plugin, useful for some spice on bass DI. The whole Renaissance plugin range are still the workhorses today that they always were. Super manuals too! Remember them?! Ren EQ reads like a novel, a real page-turner..

Thanks, Dan! There're also interesting plugin for lows called FathomFive by AirWindows. I think that it works very differently, but good thing is that it acts well in parallel.

Your videos are so cinematographic!

Hey buddy, let me tell you what RBass does actually. It's much easier than you think, and you can definitely figure out how to copy it 1:1. So first of all it gets the input, they call it the "original signal". Then what it does is it puts a steep resonant low pass filter on that. The result is called the "original bass". Then, they do non-bass = original - original bass. That is the "high passed version" that you've seen. And when you turn up the slider for "original bass", that re-adds that low pass filtered signal. Now for the bass processing. They take the "original bass" signal and put it through a shaper, which timbre-wise is something that's kind of like a diode shaper. However, they probably use a polynomial shaper that exactly adds the 2nd and 3rd harmonic. Let's call that "the harmonics". So what you can get out of RBass is "the harmonics" + "high passed version" + "original bass" * A where A is some number between 0 and, what, 1? Does it go above unity gain? If you want to analyze what is REALLY happening in RBass, you have to feed it a sinewave at a bass frequency, and look at the sonogram. That will tell you everything that's happening in the curve shaping stage. Enjoy!

PLEASE DO ONE ON ROOT ONE. I’m starting to think that leapwing are mostly hype. Have some high quality filters but that seems to be about it.

I'd absolutely love to see the plug ins that come with Mic Modeling systems analyzed. Something like the Antelope Edge system and Slate ML1. I've always been curious what's truly under the hood.

Aagh, the polarity switch! I’ll keep that in mind, I think I could have used that a few times in the past. Thanks, Dan.

Thanks for (yet) another enlightening video 🙏 Just wanted to suggest another Waves plugin that is very poorly documented and understood: Waves IM (Infected Mushroom) Pusher. I think every junior producer who has seen or bought Pusher would benefit from some of your enlightenment on the plugin!

Glad to finally hear the term 'plenty of welly' in a technical context - where it belongs....

Parallels band pass is fucking brilliant in theory and in practice. So bad ass. Thanks King

RBass is legendary. On rap mixes use it on 808s, coincidentally along with saturn2 but the former is to add sub and latter to add harmonics to help it cut

Greetings from Brum, UK. Good stuff as always.

Great video as always. I tend to gravitate towards Ableton's native overdrive, setting the dynamics to 0% to avoid artifacts. Great results for bass sounds if you use it parallelly (or set the dry/wet incredibly low).

Airwindows Floor isn't RBass but it does a similar job.

Dan keeps dropping the good stuff on us

reFuse Lowender - Found by recommendation of Andrew Scheps. Awesome bass enhancer & you won't have to deal with Waves B.S. 😉

I've not watched the video yet but I am so happy you covered this plugin 😆

I recall there used to be a patent for small-speaker bass optimisation back all the way in the 90s, it should be well and truly lapsed by now, it was issued to Philips or one of their connected companies, i think. It went like this, isolate sub-bass, then run a trickle integrator, resetting it on every zero-crossing of the isolated signal, resulting in a sort of wonky sawtooth with the waveform rising from each zero crossing. Then gently highpass the input to attenuate the most offensive sub-bass, lowpass the synthesized sawtooth, and mix. I don't think the technique as described is complete, since if you had little bass, it will still synthesize a lot and overwhelm it, there has to be some sort of gain or filter control there as well for the synthesized portion. The technique is intended to run completely mixed music through it, as a reproduction device feature that salvages some perceived quality out of limited hardware.

I'll break the flow of supportive comments for a moment with a complaint about a high-pitched noise which correlates with signal on that distorted bass channel. I'd maybe think it's my smartphone speakers acting up but they don't do it normally, plus I can see the noise on the spectrogram in the video. (I know I shouldn't be listening to this with smartphone speakers but nevertheless) Otherwise a great video, as always.

Very Nice. Thank you Dan for the insights. 👍🏻

This guy is like a National Geographic narrator but for audio lol.

i did this a few years back, made an Ableton rack. Always thought it was just harmonics but was surprised to find how much volume it was cheating in general.

wtf - this is so huge. thank you for spreading this knowledge and information :)

Thank you master for our daily bread.

You might gain more insight into R-Bass by looking at MaxxBass, which is the more elaborate version of the same idea. As I understand it, it is indeed low-passing the original signal at the crossover frequency you specify, and the "original bass" toggle switches that in and out. The rest of the signal is synthesized and controlled by the intensity, I assume. You can also look up US patent #US5930373A, "Method and system for enhancing quality of sound signal" which is Waves' patent for the process. I have never found anything to truly replace MaxxBass, personally.

Amazing!

Another nice lesson. Thanks!

Dan, I love your videos and was very excited when this one popped up. However, I fear you've missed a significant part of what RBass does. In my somewhat limited testing (couldn't figure out Waves vs Plugin Doctor) I noticed that it wasn't just harmonics being added. The frequency selected in the plugin seems to be synthesized, whether it's present in the original sound or not. Even when it's below the fundamental of the sound source. It might be a result of resonant filters on extraneous noise, but mostly, it seems to me that RBass' processing is somewhat more complicated than we think. BTW my freqency selection is fixed at 42. Mostly because Alan Meyerson recommended that, but I guess it really is the answer to life, the universe and everything.

you have to release this track Dan! sounds really good!

As always nice work Very Nice Work.

Hello Dan, can you analyse and review the waves nx series🙏 Would love to hear your thoughts on speaker/room emulation software

Since I'm this early: Dropping a huge THANK YOU for your amazing content Dan, please keep it coming!

I just started paying more attention to this channel and also purchased R Bass almost exactly 24 hours ago. For 2 seconds, I thought, "what is going on here" as if something magical happened.... or it did, I'm not sure.

Good stuff. Kinda already knew it all, but your approach gives me some fresh ideas. Thanks.

Very useful video, thanks!

insufficiently caffeinated 😄 best excuse I have heard for a long time, I'll put that one in the bank for later, and thanks for another great video!

Thank you Dan..

In this particular case, it make sense using lin eq on parallel tracks, imho. Reafir, for example.

I think you might have more luck tackling MaxxBass which is like the utility version of RBass that their algorithm was based off. I use it a lot, but only for a little amount of actual delta change. It's one waves plugin in my workflow I wish I knew how to replace but have no idea

Great stuff👍 Love the beat also.

Another classic. I actually preferred the native plugins.

Hi Dan, have you heard of "The God Particle"? It's a plug-in designed by Crave and Jaycen Joshua, generally a mix bus plugin I would say. It seems to be popular with pros who often say it replaces many or all of their usual mixbus plug-ins. It would be good to hear your opinion on it after an analysis.

idk about the parallel filter vibe. feels like you get more wow/sub but less excitement where it really matters. ditto for chorus/widener on bass. sometimes :)

I am using it since always, but learned to set it very low as it can feel great at first but usually ruin everything later. 😀

It's a cleaver and useful plugin, when used moderately

Thanks dan

Cool. I would love to see your analysis on Rvox. I keep ending up using it on vocals and it just sounds good. I never seem to be able to get the same sound with other compressors. Cheers

E bass relies on psychoacoustic effect of the low frequencies, I believe they have a pattent for this tech. regardless, I'd rather distort the frequency above 600 hz and keep the low end clean. because the overtones start very close to the original frequency it makes it more audible on phones but at the same time fattens it too much...

Sounds like the ancient RBass is holding its own in our current world.

Renaissance maxx is now available for $39 bucks. Just got it! Renaissance bass is too sick

These Dr Dan W videos repay revisits. I'm still finding stuff I either missed, or just didn't grok the first time round.

Damn Stock plugins versions, sounds the best imo.

Wow, R-Bass. Now that takes me back 🤣

rbass is godsend

I like it even in the master bus

the Gordon Ramsey of Audio Engineering...

Thanks.

R-Bass’s mystery is a feature, not a bug.

That’s probably the same thing the do with Rvox. 🤔 now I get to go play around with this technique and try it on different sounds in different ways.

This plugin helped me ruin so many mixes when I was starting out. I’ve since gone back to it on a handful of occasions but more often than not it gets turned off before all is said and done. Been loving the Waves shade lately, Dan! Thanks for another good one!

I will built an RBass inspired rack in KHS Snap Heap.

Hi! Have you analyzed Izotope Trash 2? I'm interested in your opinion on that plugin. Trash has EQ before and after 2 stages of distortion, so that parallel processing technique can be done with one, instead of three plugins. Also, convolve with some bass amp impulse response, after all processing, could get you closer to R bass, maybe. Peace :)

....yeah....after listening to what you said to do instead of RBass...I think I'm just gonna keep on using RBASS. PS...I think RBASS example could of sounded better if you cranked it up just a little more! I have never used it at the -24db distortion mark! I usually go into the positive range unless its already distorted...almost never into the negative -10 range!

one of the few plugin that actually uses black magic that acceptable among engineers.

Great and interesting videos! À weird request: could the audio be abit more dynamic, not so compressed? Somehow my ears got tired after watching this. Feel free to ignore this! All The best

Hi Dan, could you make a Maxx Bass video? You have a great understanding of audio and I would love to have your take on it.

I used to use MaxxBass a lot, until Waves pulled one on me by having me pay again for the plugins I had already bought... I bet MaxxBass had a similar trick up it sleeve like RBass does. Well, at least I know have a work-around. Thanks Dan!

Dan, have you tested the Tone Projects Basslane Pro? And btw, thanks a lot for your videos. Cheers