I watched a video about 5 years ago on J Dilla and how he would make his kick and bass work and the guys advice was if you have a super low 808 style kick then your bass needs to sit primarily above it and if your kick is more of a low mid knocking sort of sound your bass should be more subby and sit below the kick. That simple tip made all my productions sound so much better, plus it helps to narrow down your near infinite choices during the production phase. So simple, but such a brilliant tip!
Room treatment and monitoring is no.1. Our control room is very small, but there's almost a full meter of rockwool behind our speakers and due to the resonances in the small room, we have a tuned helmholtz resonator to compensate for that, and some skyline diffusers on the back wall. Now our room is flat within +-3db. After that we have Genelec's GLM system and on top of that Sonarworks to smooth out the rest. Everything is carefully calculated just so we have a single spot in the room where we can work on. It would be insane to put this much effort and money into all of this, unless it made a huge difference on how we mix and master.
I find that everyone seems to have trouble with their low end. Yes monitoring has a lot to do with "What You Are Hearing" Yes A whole lot' But, what I find most often in sub frequencies that just don't cut it is "Phasing issues" So let's have a deep conversation about TIME ALIGHNMENT, PHASE, AND PHASE CORRELATION
Monitoring, Monintoring, Monitoring! Great video!I would like to mention that Sidechained compression tends to mess up with phase alignment. For ducking purposes there is a plugin called Duck from Devious Machine that has a built-in crossover filter that allows you to precisely duck down those overlapping bass freqs.
This is why when people can't afford (time, money or space) to do the monitoring and sound treatments headphones and ear buds can "help." I had to buy sub-woofers for my Genelec monitors (It cost me $1600 20 years ago) because that was missing in my mix and got caught in a master shop. Also some visualization utility tools I started getting "old ears" and I have learned that I have to at the end look at my freq to make sure I didn't miss something or have someone else give a quick listening to.
That's true. If the problem is the room; Just remove the walls. Mix with your eyes. Also, you can use headphones and a SubPac. And A / B professional mixes. ( it takes time to know your room )
Been producing music for over a decade and have watched and read a million things on how to deal with the low end. AND GUESS WHAT HAS WORKED THE BEST? buying a sub!
The question of all questions .. seriously. People always complain about their Lowend because their room is untreated. And then they start to fiddle with EQ's and Compressor until they're desperate enough to lookup a RU-vid tutorial.
I have good acoustics but still use my ath m50x for bass very often since they really sound more like consumer headphones they give me a really good image of what my bass sounds like in a non-studio situation
Yeah but pretty much nobody in the world who is listening to music has a treated room. If your mix doesn't sound right in an untreated room, who cares if it sounds right in a treated room? You want to recreate the environments of the general listener first and foremost
The most important thing is a consistent listening environment. If you know what your fave mixes sound like in your environment then you are good to go
Freq analyzer is key, even in a good room...checking it at some point in the mix is like getting suggestions from a pair of golden ears. Just need to study what it looks like listening to a lot of reference tracks..then you'll have no surprises on any system you play it on.
Not all analysers are accurate in the low end though (FFT). So make sure IF you are relying on an analyser that it is accurate for the low end. Even then, sometimes what you see doesn't necessarily correlate, as you can get complex harmonic interactions. Sometimes a track that doesn't appear to be particularly bass heavy can sound very bass heavy in reality. I have a great room and speakers in my mastering room, but I would never trust a meter over my monitors, they don't always accurately represent the sound you will hear.
Problem with low EQing is that everywhere in the room the responce differend, move your head 1 feet and things are differend, and there goes the room EQ measurement and correction.
I struggled with getting a tight lowend in my mixes for years, always had a good ear on leveling the instruments and EQ'ing them to sit pretty well. The problem was usually the dynimacs jumping to an extent where it would either sound overwhelming or over compressed. Lately i've done staged Multiband compression on my master, and it solved all the problems i had in the past. Try it out!
@@NematicFifth Basically putting more than 1 multiband compressor in a row to only compress the top of the peeks multiple times instead of having 1 doing a lot of gain reduction.
There is a very affordable plug-in by wavesfactory called ‘trackspacer’, and it can be an easy solution in a lot of cases. But more importantly, the multiband compression sidechain trick can be done with it as well, and I guess it’s a lot cheaper than fabfilter. So it’s a handy plugin ‘for dummies’ if you will, but also a very affordable option if you don’t want the plug-in to think for you and take control instead. I bought it years ago when I couldn’t figure out stuff, and now I use it in a controlled way. Oh and I’m absolutely not affiliated or anything, just a tip for musicians on a budget!
i treated my room with rockwool, to the best of my knowledge and research, installed sonarworks software, tuned the room , i have 3 sets of monitors, one set with a subwoofer, yamaha hs8, mixcubes and headphones and check in the car, after several years of doing this im finally getting the bass right in the mix, getting used to my monitors helps
Generally, compression to control dynamic range & sidechain , eq out extreme lows (below 25 hz) and saturate for additional harmonics. You probably have the wrong sample to begin with if you have to do much more than this.
hello123457567 I’m with you, though there’s a possibility that if you A/B your carefully dialed-in effects on and off you’ll find you were crushing it into an impossible space.
Regarding room treatment etc, I think it's a good idea to use good headphones for that if you're on a budget or that stuff is out of reach otherwise. Sure, you won't get the full experience (that thump in your gut etc) but at least you have a better chance of hearing of what's going on. Listen to your fav music a lot on them. And then reference your fav music while mixing on your headphones.
Well to some extend this might help... but I am always skeptical about headphones... (especially if it is music that is more produced for beeing played at clubs or big PAs) because with a headphone.. you have the speaker directly at your ear... (realy direct,.. not like your are dancing close to the speaker but directly on it without any (or at least not much) space) ... this can change the response and percieved pressure quite alot in my opinion.. since your ear almost starts to react like a coupled second membrane... especially on bass with its long wavelengths and strong spl.. if you do headphone mixing.. it is very importend to listen to it on normal speakers too... and then we are at the monitoring situation again... but well yes better then nothing.. but also needs care
I am in a poor acoustic situation and do both. Can't truly hear sub on speakers. But mixing on speakers it all falls in place quite easily, except for bass a little bit. 1. Put the bass where it needs on headphones 2. Put bass where it needs on shitty (they are studio monitors) speakers. Generally where it works on both but not necessarily the ideal of both... Is where the actual ideal is. 3. Then listen with filters to take out the eq extremes, or just on something poor like earbuds or a car (a phone is too extreme, a good hifi not enough): needs to be heard there too, but NOT pushed too much to ideal. So on all 3 seems OK, if you actively find a compromise. Headphones i s usually too much bass. Speakers too little. And if there isn't a middle ground, then needs higher bass frequencies (like 80 not 40 in theory, or sometimes actual treble/exciter)
one great way to create awesome grade sound absorbers is get a canvas or a large frame and layer towels,in a giant expiriment layered towels are one of the most sound asborbing materials there is,. egg crates, Oillows, Bedding, sound proofing etc. Towels do Magic! serious In a normal frame you can fit like 8 layers 6, at least, and then you cancolor to your desire and they look pretty cool too
There is no substitute for practice, experimentations, and experience. Strictly talking about Bass only....the best advice for gear, is to have several monitoring speakers and a good sub that can hit at least 25Hz. Use reference tracks. For plugins...I use Metric AB and MCompare religiously. I mentioned this before but Bassroom plus Metric AB is a great combination.
loved this dude please keep doing these informative episodes! WE out here producing, mixing and mastering everyday. ALso keep the dance music tips coming. Your boi Strider
The problem with headphones is you don’t FEEL and that subtles changes can be hard to do. But yes its totally doable but you have to be ready to make go and reverse with speakers
i always end up turning up the sub too high when mixing with headphones. for anything below 100hz i'll rather compare with reference tracks at certain spots in my room where i get good response in the specific area. however i have a peak in my listening position at 150hz and here using headphones is a quick and easy solution.
Thanks man! Some people can learn everything, without taste they will do a good sound but not a great production, this is what's playing on the radios right now ;-)
I use Melda's MSpectralDynamics (side-chained to the kick) to duck the bass. Love it. Very frequency specific. Trackspacer is good too but not quite as frequency-specific as MSpectralDynamics.
For me there is some working rules : sub in mono , highpassing other instruments, bass layering, compression and monitoring on everything. Good content tho learned a lot. Thanks !
I don't have monitors or anything. I am planning to get them when I live on my own. Right now, I monitor everything through Senheizer earbuds. And their frequency response is very accurate everywhere except for the bass, which is caused by the bass not really having any room to resonate with or anything, it just straight up goes into my ears. They do produce frequencies up to 17hz. But I do have some tricks that I use for the low end. 1 of them is that I have a low pass filter set at 200hz on my monitoring fx. I enable that just to check what my low end sounds like, and I reference that with other tracks. I also like to use the VU trick: I open a VU meter on the mixbus as first plugin, then I solo the kick, and bring up the gain until it reaches halfway of the meter, then I solo the bass together with the kick, and increase the gain of the bass until the meter reaches 0. And that is going to be my starting point of the mix. Another monitoring trick I use, is I use a certain pair of Desktop speakers to monitor the amount of bass I have. It sounds crazy, but these desktop speakers are pretty shitty, and they do something very weird to the whole mix based on the bass. The more bass you have, the less you'll hear of the rest of your mix. And they also seem to distort very quickly when there's too much bass. Also I use the multiband compressor trick as well. But I set the band usually lower. I usually want to keep the fundamental of my bass intact, while I do want to make room for the kick. For example if my bass is around 80-100hz, and my kick is at 60-75hz, then I'll set the band in a way that it does reduce the 60-75 area (and below) when the kick hits, but it doesn't reduce the 80-100hz area.
A good tip in a case like this is to duplicate the bass track, separate the lows and high frequencies for each track and work on the lows with sidechain.
I like a ducker rather than sidechain comp. Comp will be more when the kick is louder, but there may be more problems when it's in a quieter section. So, it's just more consistent, using ducker+blend in dry or some ducker allow to be a fixed amount of reduction each time. Omnipressor has a kind of 'range' knob which kind of gets that result when you set a ridiculous amount of ratio, then dial down to like max 2db then it always reduces 2db consistently.
Heres a tip! If i think ive finished the mix but cant hear the bass because im on my laptop, I just speed the track up so it comes into audible range and check!
I've been using multi-band send, side-chaining since I first learned about side-chaining. I wanted the kick and snare to be loud but, I didn't want the sub-bass to blow out the track. So I cut out as much of the sub-bass line as I could while the heavy kick and snare sounds played. It's extreme but, I'm greatful for dubstep, drumb and bass and, electro-house for making those concept so accessible.
Great video. Another way to do it if you don't have a multi-band that you can side-chain, is to 1. Duplicate the bass track, 2. High pass one and low pass the other at the same frequency with a 6db octave filter, 3. Then you treat each separately. Side-chain compress just the low end of the bass to allow room for the kick while still maintaining the weight of the bass lows. 4. You can also eq the top end or add saturation to taste. This can work well in a sine wave situation as well, allowing the sine to do it's thing in the lows while adding definition via distortion in the mids and highs. I like it better with a slow release though around 400ms (song tempo dependent). I just find it to be smoother.
Make your control room about 2/3 the reverb time of your live room or you won't hear those tails. And for bass smear and for monitoring use sealed monitors, they require more power but you don't get that smear between the bass and the kick. Even Barefoot foot print monitors are great for this. Not my problem with bass is people saying "bass traps" which are a specific design that needs to be 1/4 the wave length and we are talking about 70-80 foot waves! Bass treatment on the other hand can be slat resonators, slot resonators, Helmholtz resonators and diaphragm absorbers. If you have the money, those active AVAA C20's from PSI are pretty sweet, like putting a 25 sq foot hole in your back wall. I love treating rooms, and the looks on someones face when they record in the same room but with great results.
This is why I gave up being able to completely control my environment. Instead, I use a combination of Tonal Balance from Izotope and various places to play my music. I can't afford the total cost to get an even remotely perfect environment. The results now however are coming about. I am older, lack the resources and hearing now, and technical solutions I CAN afford, and can fit in my room, do work :).
great to hear Tony !! totally understand the sentiment and although I hope one day soon to have a very well treated studio I too am somewhat limited presently. The few things I found that really made a difference in my current situation are: 1. LISTENING LOCATION find the best listening position of your room regardless of how poor the treatment is to begin with (look up 'Bass Hunter' technique 2. REFERENCE - a lot! use every tool and method at your disposal .i.e pencil notes, freq comparisons and referning plugins tools and do it once you static mix is ready otherwise will be much harder work later. Highly recommend Mastering the Mix 'Reference' and 'Levels' in conjunction with 'Tonal Balance'. Tweak using Reference and then check it in Tonal Balance (you'll find it'll automatically be very much around ballpark you desire) 3. HEADPHONES at low and higher volumes. 4.SONG ARRANGEMENT of your tracks (what instruments are placed where) and LAYERING i.e. SUB, MID, LOW and HIGH bass freqs - where do they sit? how are they competing with each other?
You can also help yourself with headphones, since with them it's easier to hear the low frequencies without spending as much as you would for very good monitors. Try and combine the use of headphones and monitors.
I would recommend also to people checking the Subpac S2. You just add a subtle volume on it and it's no need to boost your bass in your mix super loud to hear it or feel it.
There are two more things that you need to take care of before you can accurately work on the low frequencies: Monitoring and monitoring Nice video man
I have no option of doing any acoustic treatment arm so I'm mixing in headphones. I recently started taking mixing a lot more seriously than before, and what I gathered as most important for my low end is: reference tracks (a/b continuesly), spectrum analysis tools (I can recommend SPAN by Voxengo and The Seeker by Himiltungl Labs - both free. NuGen Visualizer by NuGen is awesome if you want to pay something), phase correlation meter (iZotope Imager, NuGen Visualizer again, Bx_meter) by brainworx. They all cost something I think). The thing that made the biggest difference for me was actually s(m)exoscope - a free oscilloscope from Smartelectronics. Makes you see how long your kicks sub is and how it interacts with you bassline.
For me, tonal balance control is the way to go. Ever since I started analyzing through this VST, my production sounds a lot better throughout all the devices.
IMHO Room modes are not also called comb filter. The room modes always exist, and are associated to the frequencies that build stationary waves (with static valleys and peaks in space). The target is to get this modes outside of the hearing spectrum or to make their effects very small. Comb filtering in this context I would say is what you get in asymmetrical setups with small timing differences between L and R.
Ur just being honest i like that. And its true i been to many studio all differnt kind. I can tell by the min i walk in if the sounds gonna sound rite by the way the studio layed out.
Thanks! Your absolutly correct! Monitors in a treated room! (Or you can spend the money on Kii or dutch&dutch speakers) , treating the room doesn’t have to be expensive, it’s possible to do it cheap. Search for ex: acoustic insider.
You can **mostly** mix bass if you just get to know your headphones and visual metering. Headphones "lie", but if you learn how exactly they lie, you'll be ok. Listen to reference mixes on headphones and then plug the same songs into your car speakers and you'll start to understand what well balanced songs sound like on your headphones. If you need things mastered, send it to a guy with years of experience.
Review the Lindell TE 100 and the Fuse Audio VCL 864U. The Lindell is supposed to model the Klein & Hummel UE-100 (super expensive 1960s German tube EQ). The Fuse is supposed to model the Federal AM 864 Compressor Limiter (old military broadcast equipment from the 1940s, I think).
To anyone who doesn't have a good room or speakers: Try out the Abbey Roads 3 plugin. It is calibrated to a dozen or so particular headphones (and can be calibrated to yours as well). The main idea of the plugin is that you put it on your master bus and it emulates the sound of studio monitors (near, mid, and far) and the room in the Abbey Road studio 3. Although it can't mimic the cross-talk between two monitors as well as it could, I've found that if my mix sounds great using the plugin, it *does* seem to translate well to other sound systems! Not sure how Waves did it, but they really created a great product for those of us who simply can't have a decent listening space or high-end speakers.
Even if you don’t have good room treatments (e.g. suffering from standing wave etc), the least you can do is insuring the mixer’s sweet spot (so for example putting the monitors some distance from the wall). Plus I think a bit of room treatment with some bass traps and early reflection absorbers does not have to cost a fortune. Would rather spent some on that, instead spending all your budget on a more expensive audio interface. A good pair of head phones, referencing other tracks, some frequency analyser tool and monitoring a lot will do the job (in a car, on your laptop.. yes even there you might wanna hear the 808 bass high frequencies). Indeed the song composition (speed, empty space) has a lot of influence too.
Thanks for this clear video, way better to me than your last reviews and snake oils. Good analyzers are span and manalyzer, both are free and very flexible. A comparison plugin like reference or mcompare are also very handy.
What do you think about the subpack combined with headphones, in a really small room instead of studio monitors? Also, do you think that an audio analyser can show you how much bass you need to add/take away, or only shows it partially?
I have a lot of respect for you!I'm a lot older then you but you know always where you are talking about!And make sure I know!Keep up the good work like always!
One solution i have as my room isn't perfect, is using a decent set of studio headphones for the bass. I have a set of Beyerdynamics dt 990's as an extra monitoring solution. Hasn't let me down so far.
Hey don't know whether you still read this, but the thing you said in the end (= sine base notes that differ in loudness can be evened out with an EQ), I always try to achieve with certain amount of compression. Do you have any tips or experience on that or do you see any downsides with this?
Awesome tutorial, thanks a lot! I'm a bit surprised you didn't mention headphones though. They are really helpful to get the low end under control and even great ones are a lot cheaper than monitors
For my sine bases I just put a limiter limiting like -0.1/-0.2 at the note that is the most quiet so the others are always at the same volume (and more limited). I don't know if it's the best solution but at least it stays at the same place instead of being moving front and back all the time
You mentioned EQ, sidechain and decay times for bass. In a whole video. Very awesome content. It is crucial in mixing to having an eye on metering but specially the dynamic range. For sound design to get a solid base is to mix in key, knowing the instrument well (as it becomes a diffrent character relative to the octave it is played on) and maybe playing not too low notes like avoiding low C anyway lol , changing it to mono, or panning just the high mids with a multiband tool, using transient designer to tame the room sound (the sustain part). Using pro q to look for masking frequency between kick and base. Looking at things from another perspective as for example kick is just a bass instrument. It should 'talk' to the bass or having that syncopation going on where the kick is the 'pick up' sound of the base. The bass is the response signal of the kick from the call and response cycle. It is not always desirable to play bass and drums together but when it is required that way i bet you need a proper glue compression that is because either one part is quiter or louder due to phase cancellation and a lot of similarity and correlation, even some EQ was applied. The masking stuff happens when kick and bass are played together but also when using aux effects like delays and reverbs because the tail of the sustained sound is going to collide with the next upcoming kick. Here sidechain compression is usually very obvious but may work we got automation also. For solid low end you shouldn't forget to take care for a filtered top end. The idea is to reserve headroom to other things, cutting bleed from high hats or overheads, other "leaky" Instrument parts which add up to a "boomy" or muddy mix. working on the sweetspot or in other terms the meat, the fundamentals. If the fundamentals of kick and bass are the same it adds up and becomes louder. The usual workflow is then either to cut out the lows of kick or bass, while saturating it at the same time so there are still more pleasing fundamentals in the upper register. Changing a bass to mono is maybe a very huge change but using mid side EQ cutting the lows on the side could make a better result. Some pros are using sound layering where they split lows and mids or even more complex, sinewaves are the simplest waveform and they are also the more stable ones, when it comes to low end. From the musical point of view some of the edits with EQ can change the tonality of the bass, here again it is important making only big changes to frequencies which are not affecting the final sound anyway like a broadband cut below 25 to 35 Hz. Knowing that at some point the speakers are not going to respond in that range Further optimizations could be to focus on key frequencies, looking for phase issues, width, splitting the sound to lows and mids, working on mids, leaving the lows as they are and so on. It is more like a compressor versus EQ kind of work. Just my few cents lol
Great vid! imvho Below 40hz...in a bad room...use SPAN....and Trackspacer does all the above in seconds. Like the WSS review :-) I have a farily flat shaker bolted into my chair...feeling it is very clear esp transients. Dan Worral has a great SPAN tut as well.
I would also suggest using good quality headphones to work on lowend. They are not the best for leveling a complete mix but they act like a "flat room".
Here is another one for the Wizard (you) how much should we care about MONO compatibility in 2022? 1960s with one speaker is pretty long time ago. Should I write ”in stereo” on my record?
Especially within the low frequencies super fast release (11:33) can introduce distortion, maybe it is better to be careful here and monitor that as well
