terrible tutorial, I was able to diagnose frequency the first time you played the track. you didn't even scoop out the correct frequency to get rid off the boomy sound, instead you got rid of the body of the bass and left in the boom.
I couldn't hear the kick drum in the full mix through my Shure studio headphones. I'm not sure if it's YT's audio quality, my lack of listening skill, the fact that I went to an indoor skateboarding park with 18 or so people without earplugs once, or what.
@@VeljkoMarinkovic RU-vid is full of people teaching where they are still learning how to mix themselves. Their marketing game is on though! They run an advertisement of every Music video I see!
This serial eq-ing is also seriously bad for exactly the reason this guy's saying he likes it. He may end up with the hollowest shittiest curve of all time, boost and cut undoing his moves but still smearing everything with filters, and he's not going to know because he's stacking eqs... The amount of solo work and the kids of cuts and boosts with digital eqs scream of noob to me...
i can hear the kick, it's just very subtle. also you should note that this song is not completely mixed whatsoever, he was simply focusing on the bass for this tutorial. the levels are off because of that lol, he's not gonna get the entire mix perfect to show you a bass tutorial. also, if you listen to the genre of music itself, and compare it to similar tracks, the kick is not the drive of these type of tracks. a lot of soft rock in general is just that, soft rock, it's not meant to have a hard ass trap kick pumping in the background lmao. generally speaking in these type of tracks the kicks are fairly soft. in this particular video, the kick is pushed further back into the mix, because... well.. the song isn't completely mixed in this video.
The bass is barely audible in the mix. The key frequencies of the bass are low mids and mids, which you clearly cutted and thats why its all weird boomy. Im going listen to other guys, yt channels Produce like a Pro or Attaway Audio are much better. Thank you. :-)
First off , that’s a horrible bass tone to begin with . Second , if these instruments are TRACKED properly to begin with , most of this wouldn’t even be necessary. By the time you go thru all of this , per song , you’ll be burned out and won’t even care
Another question, on a bass line that constantly moves, would it be better to use a dynamic eq on the low end rather than a static eq, which applies boosts or cuts at all times. A concern I have with statically boosting the lows on such bass is that it creates a greater tonal and amplitude difference between lows and high notes. With a low static EQ boost, as one plays a low E for example, the fundamental will be boosted compared to an E a couple of octaves up whereas low-end dynamic EQ compression would maintain a more constant low end. Having said that, I still prefer static EQ as the make tone shaper because it is simpler processing and introduces fewer artifacts than dynastic dynamic EQ. Also, most static EQs have zero-latency making them more appropriate for tracking. For unmasking the kick and bass guitar, I tend to prefer combining subtle static EQ adjustments (e.g., boost or cut 3db on a specific frequency) that don't negatively alter the tonality of each instrument with subtle frequency-dependent dynamic ducking so that one is only carving out additional frequency space largely only when it is needed rather than all the time. Also by using more than one method for unmasking, the interventions become less noticeable--too much ducking compression is noticeable as is too much static EQ cuts and boosts.
It's a good idea, if possible, to simply make different mixes for different sections of a bassline, so you can properly isolate and compress the lowest frequencies of the notes. It's not uncommon to have e.g. 4 tracks of bass, where 2 of them are all the notes within e.g. 4-6 semitones of the root note, and then another 2 tracks for the notes that are higher than that. For each set of tracks, you have one for the mid and high frequencies, and one for the lowest frequencies. Then just mix both as you would a bass with a smaller range of notes, as Warren Huart shows in this one: btsWALco8Xk
If you're going to talk about EQ-ing upright bass at least use a real upright bass video and not a stock cello video 😭 (coming from a professional upright bassist)
subtractive Eq need to be much more subtle, specially in a Bass guitar, and in context with the kick drum. Doing 7 points of corrections, what can i say? record the bass again!!
Narrator: “...or even upright bass” Editor: places clip of a cello 🤦♂️ Viewer: oh this is clearly the place to come for knowledge about music production!!
This is a great tutorial. I was aware of about 85% of these moves but the other 15% really helps me out. You are very talented in knowledge and most importantly in how you present this material. Thanks so much Dylan!
Guys .... this was very very blind aimless bad eqing, and i think you know it. This video deserves taking down because the sound was fuller and generally better before the eq job. This is not one of your better videos
I've never heard of bass mixing tutorial where the guy actually wants to focus on the high end sound rather the low end sound. Who cuts that much mids and lows from their bass?? And then there's all this arbitrary cutting and boosting again in the same spots. Very sloppy and overly complicated.
Don't be that way. The tip about cutting the low end and then applying makeup gain in order to reduce the ratio between the lows and the mids was worth the price of admission alone.
I clearly hear click artefacts with processing off. Could be encoding, but I don't hear much of that in other videos on YT. Also, I don't like that soloed sweeping technique, especially for tonal EQ. Instead I stop playback in mix and imagine what I want to affect, make the action and listen. Repeat if necessary.
Wish you hadn't slipped the compression part. You may have covered compression elsewhere, but it would have been helpful, at least to me, to see it used in context.
Having a large internal catalog of popular music from over several decades, some of which was mixed well and others not so well, is super important and this video is proof of that. Sometimes you DON'T need to hear everything, it is better to leave some things up to the listener's psycho-acoustic system to fill in. Many massive hits from the 1960s through the 1980s had beaters that were buried and bass that had to honk in order to compete with other mid-heavy elements. This concept of ''Everything must be right in your face'' is what is literally killing interest in music for music's sake for an entire generation, making most of it barely worthy of being background mood fodder. Most things don't NEED explained in detail, people who do that at the club or at dinner are annoying; we get it, we really get it, no need to stress and highlight every single detail. This is especially true when it comes to underground, alternative and indie pop as groups working in those genres do NOT align with the groups who are associated with precision, sculpted, highly clarified anything - whether that be sonics or social perspectives. If you leave no grating element to a song in a genre that is SUPPOSED TO BE GRATING all you've done is jazz-i-fy it. This video is a case study in kinda knowing what you are doing, technically, but totally not having a clue musically. I've known some really great engineers that can do all the maths, literally tear apart SSL consoles to re-flow cold solder joints and rebuild bias cards in Studer tape decks by hand while point-to-point verifying that each component is perfectly in spec, who couldn't mix worth sh t because they just don't get it, they believe that every nano sized element MUST BE PERFECT and they ruin every mix by jacking their inner Poindexter all over it. Our ears function because of comb filters, you do NOT have to do all of this mad scientist scalpel work for them, if you do you have ruined it. This mix might sound good to you in your room, with your monitors powered by you amps and in your specific atmospheric conditions but I guarantee you it will sound horrible 1,000 miles away with different power curves driving different speakers in a totally different atmosphere with bizarrely fluctuating resistance (electrical and physiological). No matter what anyone says Qs above 1.0 are not to be toyed with apart from hunting very specific distracting frequencies to cut/notch. Using multiple high order Qs, from 2.0 up to 16, to interleave bass and kick drum always leads to mixes that perform great ''here'' but horribly in a million other settings. You can try to tell yourself that only the peak matters but frequencies that land a few points off of the peak, ie on a steep slope, will be slammed with crazy phase issues. For every high order notched Q peak (+ or -) you introduce you are introducing 2x steep slopes that have within them phase distortion. This is just how filters work, look up any online RC filter calc and pay attention to the Bose phase plots - you can NOT boost or cut frequencies without introducing phase anomalies in neighboring frequencies and this goes for both the analog and digital domains.
I’ve got to agree with the idea you are bringing up here. The point of mixing is balancing and to bring out something in the mix that makes it sound alive, have more emotion. Surgically cutting something 10 times takes away from this. This is mixing with your mind, not with your ears. All the concepts that were mentioned were good, but using them all at the same time is overkill that sterilized the kick and bass. A lot of time simple volume rebalance and an eq move here or there will do the trick. Important to get a balance between instruments first, then make fine tuning adjustments….not perform a facelift. With that said I do appreciate the content and hope you keep on making videos. Cheers!
@@kensmechanicalaffair Boost or cut. Specifically, relative to this video, what he does from 14:43 on is a phasing facepalm. The notches he puts in at 62hz and 100hz on the kick and bass leave everything from 45hz up to 150hz with a 45 degree phase swing. He's NOT hearing more of the kick, there, as he states but since that region is now under powered for both the kick and the bass he's detecting their transient information up in the 1.5k-3.5k region more (because it's still in-phase with the low end AROUND the region he skewed, ie it's masking the phasing issues he introduced). My monitors are room corrected by a dbx 1231, when I kill everything over 200hz and rta the room pressure from 45-150hz is down -2db and the phasing is audible. There is no reason to do what he did here if you know how to use a sidechain. In the case that you don't, a single +2db boost on the kick at 80hz with a Q of 2 then a much more moderate -1db cut with a Q of 1.5 on the bass would have done the same trick with less power loss in the region. He got what he was after but he also got a muddy 45-150hz that every other power amplifier will translate as flat and nasty. A Perfectly in-phase signal is either 0 or 180 degrees, 45 degrees off, if 0 = 100w, is 75w as 45 is 25% of 180. Another way to look at it is he just lost 50% of the available power from 45-55hz and 125-150hz because 45 is 50% of 90 (90 degrees being 0, neither negative nor positive). Does that mean that his mix is down that amount overall? No, as there is more going on than a kick drum and a bass guitar and there are resonances happening but in terms of peak power he just fd himself. If all he cares about is getting enough thump that his ears say makes the mid range feel good then he's fine. However, in most mixes, and though it seems like nothing, 45-55hz and 125-150hz have a lot going on and even though 60-100hz sounds good to you - on YOUR system - they almost certainly won't on most others as low end amplifiers and subs just won't differentiate enough to compensate for the muddiness around such a small range, they'll just treat 60-100hz the same as they do 45-55hz and 125-150hz. It's like nuclear energy, sure, on a chalkboard it's all safe and make perfect sense - but out in reality after 20 levels of public employees and contractors have shaved $0.20 off of every bolt and yard of concrete and all the other materials a million times you're left with a thing that does NOT resemble what all the engineers pointed to on the chalkboard, years earlier, and called ''safe'' so that THEY could get paid. You gotta learn how to not be a bag holder in this world because there are millions actively trying to make you one in every endeavor.
The zero latency feature of fab filter doesn’t phase shift hardly at all. And of course if you didn’t want any phase shifting, you’d just switch to linear phase.
wow you talk so much might wanna eq that. "AND YOU MIGHT NEED SOMETHING AND HERE WE WILL DO THIS AND MY MOUSE IS AT THIS POSITION AND I CLICK ON OPTIONS"
Good video, but if you would turn down the resonance on your highest bass note (it's a D2) you could turn up the overall bass-volume and it would sound cleaner and more linear... Also not sure about the parallel saturation of the bass cause it took away from the guitars. To make the kick stand out more you can also look at the high frequencies and boost them to give it more punch and brilliance. Cheers mate!
this should not be and example of how a whole mix should sound, but the chain is pretty logical, clean > "sound design" > sit in the mix. Although this should not be done with eq, all of this should best be adressed in the sound design stage except cleaning...
nice ideas thanks...it opened my on stuffs I missed ...and recently after 20 years I forgot about a lot of those little things like to be patient again...and do the work properly.
Super helpful tutorial. Im using this to mix Griselda Type Beat with a real bass emulated by scarbee bass from Native Instruments and this chain actually gave the bass a lot more life. Video liked.
Hi there, ahh the old fabfilter plugin, definitely my first go to EQ. Nice idea about about layering the EQ's in multiple plugins instances, not something I have tried before, but will be utilising that in the future.
Many thanks for sharing. This video is very informative (for me, anyway). I don't understand the down votes - if they don't like it, they should either F OFF or say why it is no good. I know the mental attitude of "I don't have to explain myself!" but without the reason, it is like "Don't do drugs!" Again, thank you very much!
