My 4 Favourite Plug Ins For Heavy Low End

[Applause] [Music] hello ladies and gents i'm mark daniel nelson with make mine music doing a mix this week for a artist named zev song is called between and it made me think about a couple things how do you get massive low end if i can't get low end thick and big and right then it's not the right mix it's not working for me so i wanted to show you my favorite four plugins to get low end i'm known for having a little bit over the top low end to the point where i've always called mastering guys asking should i trim my low end down a bit and they always say now you're at this great point of danger and not so i always thought of it as a guy on a tight wire just barely keeping it together and how much lowering can you put into a mix the kick drum the bass the synth stuff like that how much before it becomes too much and i found that it's not necessarily the sub stuff it's more than the low mids that are making it sound too muddy or too boomy so here are my four number one waves r bass now this was a plug-in that i started using 15 years ago and probably used it wrong when i first started using it now i don't understand the philosophy behind it i've talked to many people including waves about what it actually is doing i've been told many different things from people saying that it's a harmonic generating sub frequency booster some are saying that it's like a phantom frequency where you make it sound like you're hearing low end but it's not necessarily boosting low frequencies regardless of what it's doing it does help me and it helps me in kick drum it helps me in sub bass helps me in guitars snares toms anything that i feel like was too thin and brittle it just seemed to always add that body and that low end what i have here is a drum set on this eve track that was played by the wonderful aaron sterling phenomenal drummer here in la and i wanted a little more body on the snare on the kick and some of the toms and such i want to show you the before and after of the kick in the snare [Music] what i'm hearing is really good thick low end on the kick a real fatness to the snare i took them off the toms i remember i'm still in the middle of this mix so i'm still kind of getting everything in place but i remember going that was too much because it's just just too much low and there's a lot of sub synthesizers in this there's a real bass guitar i feel like i needed to create some mid-range but still had the sub stuff on the floor on the floor and let's hear what it sounds like with and without on the kick now without now feels like the pocket is gone that's width now let me pull up a little bit it's subtle but it's doing enough to go okay that's without very simple very easy now let's listen to it on the snare as well the same spot i'll take it out the snare with the snare so now listen to the low end how it fattens it up if you put the snare on a frequency chart you probably see a little bit of boost bell around 110 to 200 that seems like that's like the really good sweet spot for a snare but adding the eq there seems to sometimes add a little too much woofiness to the mix so by putting the r base on the snare it only adds that kind of roundness that you needed out of that specific frequency so i'm hitting it at 119 i can pull it in and out up and down you can hear what it's really adding and that's pretty over the top it doesn't sound bad without it but what it's doing is adding this body to everything i'm not using a tape saturator to add the low end on the drums because what tape saturation does to drums they cut off all the transient they make it clean and fat but they lose a little bit of that punch from kind of the rounding of the transient by putting something like an r base on the kick and snare and the toms depending on the song you kind of create a little more thickness and retain the sharpness of the transient let's hear the drum set all the way through with everything as i put it in and out that's with our bass on the kick and snare and here's without [Music] back again it really fattens it up in a very tasteful way let's go up number two vitamin by waves i've had this plug-in for a long time but really didn't use it up until i was working on orchestra stuff because i needed some kind of character adjustment for doing mults on room mics for orchestras and someone referred me to this plug-in and it made me start using it on other songs that ended up being one of my fastest go-to plug-ins i've had specifically for low-end and what it does now what this guy does is it breaks it out into seems like five different areas the low low lows the low mids the mids the high meds in high frequency it has a spreading element as well but what i really use this for is a couple reasons one is to focus on the width of certain elements of the top band and the other element and what i'm going to talk to you today about is the low band and the low mid band and how you can enhance certain things in a very clean way without having to add compression and eq and what it does is adds this little extra magic spark that you can get some serious serious mojo on your low end i have it here on my master mix i'm going to play the whole section of the track with everything open and then i'm going to solo what actually it's doing so we can talk a little bit about it [Music] we hear kick drum we hear that snare the fatness of the snare from the r bass we hear a sub synthesizer in there we hear a guitar bass and it seems to all sit pretty good for now it's still in the middle like i said earlier this is still in the middle of the mix but i got to a place where i felt like this is a good comfortable way to demonstrate certain things for this plug-in on the master if i solo the low low frequency we're going to be able to hear the kick we'll hear the bass guitar we'll hear the synth bass and we can decide what it's really doing hear what it's really doing know that it's crossing over at 78 before it hits the next band and decide if we want to add some or take some away and let's just hear what the band sounds like you don't hear other elements other than what we just described and what this is letting me do is also hear okay i have clean low end [Music] it allows me to really really hyper focus into that now if i take it out let's take it out completely i'll bypass this low end thing and then i'll bring it in and you can hear what it's really doing [Music] that's without slowly bringing it [Music] too much and take it out again [Music] it's really just rounding things off it's cleaning everything correctly [Music] it almost sounds like there's a completely new speaker when you add it and that's what i feel like clean low end is really supposed to be there for it's not necessarily how much woofiness you get out of your base but how much clean low end extension you can get out of it where it almost feels like you just turned on another speaker just for that frequency it doesn't add distortion it doesn't really break up your speakers it just seems to make things bigger and have more headroom number three the ampex b15 by universal audio this guy lets me add super amount of low end almost to the point where it's just way too much i seem to always have to carve a little bit out but it does something so well on di electric bases i don't reamp the base anymore specifically because of this plug-in i can show you in and out and show you exactly what it's doing this ampec allows me to get a super clean super authentic replication of the original b15 that was one of my favorite bass amps growing into rock and roll and it allows me to go between the two channels the 66 and the 64. i like the 64 because it seems to be a little more fat and the 66 seems to be a little more high-fat i guess that's the best word i could use for it without [Music] now that's just the di [Music] for this guy i know that there were some notes that were a little bit over the top that i ended up just doing a multi-band on i took some low end after 30 underneath so the synth bass could kind of stick out and then i put a nice point around 1k that i usually do on the air eq because that does seem to really have a great mid-range other than that it's got a little bit of fur and a little bit of compression and that's the sound it really does work if you take it out it doesn't sound nearly as fast [Music] there it is [Music] [Applause] it is not necessarily more about getting the low end as it's about getting the clean low end and that's the hard thing with adding eq to low and you're getting all these added boominess you use a tape saturate does fatten things up you're losing transient and punch on not everything but specifically on drums you definitely lose a little bit and sometimes you call for that but with our base the vitamin plug-in the ua b15 plug-in they all seem to add this really clean sub information that i can get and then it just saves my tail every time even if i get a track that doesn't have great low end you can pop on an r base or a vitamin and pull it out of it it really comes out of it same as the b15 number four the haas effect this isn't necessarily a low end effect as much as it's a delay effect but i do want to use it on this top four plug-ins for low end blah blah blah because it helps make the low end way more massive sounding the haas effect goes way back is it you take one mono signal and then you time shift it with a hard pan hard right and what it it does is shift things enough where the center goes from mono to a stereo sounding image it's certainly just a mono signal still because it's the same signal it's just delayed just enough and what i use it for in low end is when i use a like a bass guitar and a synth bass at the same time and usually i choose one or the other for the center and the focus and since this one has a really cool bass riff i keep that in the center and then the synth bass goes into the haas effect which goes left and right i have it here on my synth chorus lead and if i take it in and out they're on both of these guys and you can see that i'm just doing a little bit of shift here and then a little bit of shift here they're both different and i'm using that just for a pan more than a delay it's just creating a width thing if i solo just the drums bass and the synth you'll be able to hear what that's doing i'm gonna take it out listen to the synthase fights it narrows it the low end is now all funky because you're getting the sub from the bass guitar and the synth bass and they're fighting each other trying to figure out what is what by adjusting it 559 samples on one side and a little bit on the other it's separating the direct signal just a little bit from the base and it's painting it hard left and right it allows me to keep my low end of the synth bass and the focus i know a lot of people teach that you know you don't want to touch your stereo spreading of the low bass down after 100 hertz but i feel like that is true i feel like with this kind of song you're getting all this excitement from left and right and how to handle that is stereo spread and using that as your advantage to create separation and punch so those are my four favorite low end plugins this isn't supposed to be any kind of like revelation of low end all it's supposed to be doing is let you know that if it sounds good it is good just enhance things just a little bit just goose things just a little bit and what you can do with the r bass the vitamin the mpeg the haas effect time delay is just enhanced low end you start adding these things and it really really does fatten up your mixes enjoy yourself thanks for watching guys [Music]

Channel: Produce Like A Pro

Views: 57,371

Keywords: Warren Huart, Produce Like A Pro, Home studio, Home recording, Recording Audio, Music Production, Record Producer, Recording Studio

Id: swWFqWuZ3lA

Length: 16min 18sec (978 seconds)

Published: Thu May 06 2021