@@joeseabreeze true...especially because he solved three months of me *starting to try to figure out where the input gain adjustment is and getting distracted before I find it*
Guess you're giving a speedy short lip reading course also at 12 minutes 🤪. Great stuff overall in a quick vid Joe, because I wanted to mix down some bass parts next few days.
Excellent video and advice as usual, brutha! I particularly like the part where you throw your voice so far out into space that it hasn't returned to our ears yet. That must be part of the VIP course. Hehe, hope you and yours are well!
After 20 years of doing this job I always have the same "problem", where is the line that separates too thin and too thick when it comes to low frequencies. There are many great mixes out there, some of them being really thin, others really thick so there is no general rule about this as it all depends of the context, that is why I do not like using a referent song while mixing, such a misleading strategy. The main issue is how to choose whether to turn the volume up for the low frequency instruments (kick and bass), or to add more low frequencies with the EQ, two very different approaches. Still searching for a sweet spot though. 😃
Hey Joe! Having mixed bass guitars countless times, I always loving clicking on videos like these to try and get out of my own tendencies and try new methods and thought processes. I can easily admit - sometimes it is so easy to get caught up in all of the minute details that I forget that mixing is supposed to be fun and expressive! Thanks for teaching throughout the years, and always subconsciously teaching to always enjoy what you do. It's helping at least one person out here.
Hi Joe, I hope you can find my message here after two years, thank you for this wonderful video and tutorial, I'm using Mooer GE-200 as my audio interface and after recording my guitar and bass, the waveform is different with other audio interface like Focusrite, ...., my waveform is fully occupied the track, is that because of GE-200?
Yeah you made it sound great. And that's a good bass track for this video too. 'Cause if the guy played a Precision instead of a Jazz you wouldn't've had to do all that, and then you wouldn't've had a video! (But be kind, don't let the bass player see my comment.)
recently I started using studio one 5,but I am not a musician,basically electronics and audio. my daughter is doing music with yamaha psr I455 ,and I am trying EQ of bass guitar,noiw I got the idea !
Now I'm confused...you have half the internet saying that just turning up the bass is not the way to do things and now you're saying that just turning the bass up is a good thing. Uhm....
broooo joe i love your fender amp behind you is that a champ? i got a tiny one just like yours except my sounds like it’s got a broken speaker (although i replaced it with a new one) lol
Hey joe grat advise! Wise too!!! What i do is play real hard with pick close to the bridge to get the full and controled wave and then compress the hell out of it while the mix is playing. Bass is the last instrument. First kick snare then gtrs vocals panning then bass. I use bass as the glue. Youll notice in motown records that gtrs vocals and violins etc may sound good but the queen of spades is always bassline clarity. Love joe!
I was thinking parallel compression / eq on a duplicated track would work well on this bass part...it's quite a one dimensional sound in a single track
@@SadhanaKhawas it may well do yes. Was just thinking the original bass line is so bass-light that something closer to its original frequency might be more in keeping with the kind of tune it is while also giving a bit more bottom end
Hi Joe, Nice video but I would be very interested in hearing what your bass player said in relation to the changes that you had made. Couple of things from my perspective, probably wrong. 1: when you bring up the 50 - 80 Hz bass you’re going to potentially clash with the bass drum, and two it would be interesting to know if he feels you’ve taken away his mid range, let me know?
awesome...iv been mixing bass this week.i can't make it comprressed in balance..bass like funky and slaps have high notes and low , soft and hard attacks..tonal balance plugin shows under compressed but ocassionally over compressed.i did automate..what am i missing?
Maybe you need a Dynamic EQ so you can compress certain frequencies only when those particular frequencies cross the threshold. That way everything outside of those particular frequencies won't be compressed.
You could also try going into a tape saturation plugin on a darker sounding tape format. Play with the input level until the bass transients start to saturate and you might find it rounds off the problem spikes just enough for a standard compressor to start making a better job of the rest. I would then parallel compress it - set a first compressor to deal with the average volume of the playing (the pops will overcompress) then set the mix to 50/50, now add a second compressor to deal with the pops (the average will undercompress) and set that to mix to 50/50 too. You have to dig deep with problem audio, there is rarely a magic plugin that will solve all your problems! Lots of small steps will sound better than one processor going bananas...
Joe, is Bass mixed in mono or its better stereo, I have a romantic track which is mainly piano, cello live , and bass played with midi and some deep electro beats as an ambient. Is it better to mix the bass in the default stereo mode or to change it to mono ??!!
Wow.... I was just talking to my brother about what I needed to add on a beat I am working on and he said it needed more bass.... Thats wild how this video came up without me even searching...... You just gained a subscriber....
My ex bass player is THE dude in Austin Tx! He played on my first self produced cd… couldn’t get him for the 2nd cd so I played bass! He heard it and is still supporting my efforts 🌝…due to current reality I’m at it again. The bass I used on the last cd was an ancient fender acoustic. It has a super gritty sound. Not the best for everything…. So I’m borrowing a bass to track. Please wish me luck since I’m engineering, performing and praying. Joe why is your bass track stereo? Merry Christmas y’all!
Is it me or the bass is clipping from the recording? Also, why to play a bass line with the bridge pickup, that provides a lot of wonderfull mid range and crispiness to finally take the mid range frcuencies in the mixing? All in all, I should have recorded the bass line again.
Hey Joe. I'm glad that you made the comment 13:00 about the bass sounding too loud. I'm watching this while listening thru studio headphones and the bass actually sounds good to me. I think the bass players should get to shine more too. So there's that. Also, for the 100th commented time,...did you or did you not say anything significant or profound between the 11:50 and 12:11 mark? LOL! I wasn't going to address it after all the previous clever comments about it; but you know we tend to hang on to follow you like that scene in Forrest Gump when he ran cross country and crowds of people ran with him.
Very helpful video. I'm mixing a song and about to mix the bass track when I discovered this. One (tangential) question: I don't see the input gain / polarity controls at the top of any of my channels. I've tried to figure out how to make them visible and can't. I've been messing with clip gain & clip gain envelopes to boost sound levels for a track. Using input gain might be a better method if I can find it. Thanks.
Hi Mr Joe, I'm so delighted to have subscribed to your channel, u r such a great teacher, your rules of compression is still ringing in my head More wins
Hey Joe! What did you mean when you said pushing the fader up changes the resolution of the track? I don't think I've ever heard anyone talk about that. Thanks!
He's referring to the resolution of the fader itself, not the track. It's easier to make small adjustments when the fader is positioned around the 0 mark.
Often when I record bass (And Synth Keys) one or two low notes are visibly louder. The low note is great and I am concerned that compression will shape that low note such that it loses it's timbre. How do you address that and make the other notes fatter?
try using a multiband compressor as opposed to a traditional compressor! This way, you can focus the compression on the low end and low mid freq bands independently, giving you the luxury of controlling how much low end, low mids, and/or whichever frequency band needs to be more (or less!!) present in the mix!
Sometimes bass notes resonate at certain frequencies, making them sound louder. I often notice this around 100hz. I put a dynamic EQ there to cut that frequency when it gets too loud, without affecting that harmonic on other notes.
I'd like Joe to address this as well because in my experience EQ often is applied before compression, to specifically avoid compressing (and possibly boosting into the mix) unwanted frequencies.
Ahh yes the old question: do I EQ before compression or compress before EQ 🤔 It’s purely up to the material - if you find the source is too uneven in dynamics there would be nothing wrong with levelling out the source first
As I have no doubt this has been reiterated a countless amount of times, but there's NO RULES to editing/mixing audio! There's practical reasons, and pros & cons inherent to every strategy of approaching audio production, but it will always come down to what SOUNDS GOOD! Always ask yourself, "What do my ears tell me??"
Loving these EQ videos, Joe. Yours somehow feel a little more applicable than many of the others I've seen recently. Was struggling with wether or not to give my bass a little shelf boost down there starting at about the in about the 60hx region. Now I know it's okay! i actually started the shelf a little too, high -Prolly like 300... Gonna have to fix that, now... Ha!