Posts Tagged ‘ Bass ’
This is about basslines, not (necessarily) the frequency range. The bassline is the harmonic foundation of a track. A solid mix often needs a solid bassline. So how do you get there? How do you stop your basslines from sounding weak or flabby? Here are some techniques to consider: EQ. This is the big one. [ READ MORE ]
Group busses are a versatile and useful mixing technique. They’re often used in a variety of different situations: Distorted guitar stacks. It’s quite common to layer or doubletrack (or tripletrack or quadrupletrack) distorted guitar parts in order to make them sound bigger. Sometimes the layers are all recorded with the same setup (same guitar, same [ READ MORE ]
Just a quickie today… Getting the right amount of bass in a mix seems to be a common problem that a lot of inexperienced mix engineers have. People often have too much or too little bass in their mix and don’t actually realise it until they get an outside perspective. If this is you, try [ READ MORE ]
Ever had trouble coming up with a bassline? Maybe you’ve got a beat going, or maybe you’re starting with a chord progression. Maybe you’ve already got the start of something going, but you’re not quite satisfied and you want to take it to the next level. Generally speaking, there are three main aspects to laying [ READ MORE ]
Masking is a little-understood concept that is important to composers and mix engineers. Essentially, masking is what happens when one sound makes it difficult to hear another sound. An obvious example of this is two instruments playing the same note, with one instrument sounding much louder than the other. This can happen with notes or [ READ MORE ]
So you’ve probably heard enough of that pumping effect by now. Yes, that pumping effect where the whole mix ducks to the kick. Or at least ducks in time with the music. Or at at least some instruments in the mix. Or something. If you still think it hasn’t gone out of fashion yet (or [ READ MORE ]
Strictly speaking, layering is not really a method for processing, but it’s a common approach to take when designing a bass sound. Layering is an additive approach to designing a sound, because you’re building it by adding different elements together. By contrast, a subtractive approach (such as subtractive synthesis) works by starting with a big [ READ MORE ]
So, we’ve addressed two important processing tools available to a mix engineer – EQ and compression. Next up is one of my favourites – saturation. How can saturation be useful for bass? Saturation can do a number of things simultaneously – it can reduce the headroom requirements of the track, it can make the bass [ READ MORE ]
Watch your levels! While EQing your bass, another thing to keep in mind is equal loudness contours. Put simply, we (as humans) are more sensitive to upper-mids (1kHz-5kHz) than to lower mids (100Hz-1kHz). We’re least sensitive to the extremes at each end (less than 100Hz and greater than 5kHz). When EQing bass, this means that [ READ MORE ]
I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve seen this exchange: “hwo do i maek my bass PHATTNESS pls halp” “Use a compressor” I can’t decide what’s funnier – the blatent (and sometimes obviously deliberate) spelling errors of the question, or the starkness of the response. While not as powerful as EQ, compression can [ READ MORE ]
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