MY TIPS for BETTER BASS!

so there are always a few audio technical questions that people keep on asking because I think they are very difficult to answer and today I'm going to do another shot at answering the question how to get bass under control how to work with sub frequencies like the whole bass question that everybody is asking so let's go so there are a lot of people that have problems with a mixing or mastering in the bass regions so let's say everything below 200 Hertz or something and I start to understand why that is because there are three very important things to take care of before you can accurately work on low frequencies and those three things are monitoring monitoring and monitoring I mean really and with monitoring I mean not only the speakers but also the acoustics of the room because if I'm looking at the people that are asking questions about getting sub frequencies under control the unifying thing with them all is that their monitoring solution is not performing the way it should be performing or is not performing on a quality level that is high enough now monitoring in general is very important I'm going to make a separate video about monitoring in a while maybe when these prototypes are finally finished but that can take up to two years before that is going to be installed in my studio and my studio needs kind of a rebuild for that but in general monitoring is super important and and one of the things that I start to distance myself from one of the quotes that I start to distance myself from is the quote you have to know how your monitor sounds this is of course true but we're using it in monitoring systems where we actually we don't have to know how they sound we have to compensate in our head for things that the monitoring system cannot do for instance if there's a cut of six seven DBS in a low frequency region like we have a cut on 60 Hertz we have to compensate for that in our heads but we can't we simply can't it's it's super difficult to compensate for that and you always need checking on different systems in order to know if you're doing the correct job so it's very important to have a linear well first of all frequency response in your low frequencies and with linear I mean like try to get the peaks and valleys within two decibels of each other that's already a huge deal to get it like that and of course there's more to it like phase response is also important the first focus on frequency response yourself and you can do that of course by getting good speakers and it's super important to not put too big of a speaker and too small of a room it has to be working together but even if you have a good speaker but your room has a lot of well he call it room modes or it's also called the comb filter and then you have dead spots on your sweet spot and you need base trapping so what I'm trying to say is that without those things you it is nearly impossible to manage your bass accurately it I don't like to say this because I know that these things that I'm talking about are for a lot of people out of reach and and I'm in a certain position where I have good monitoring and I have good good bass trapping and a good room to work in so it might sound a bit ignorant and arrogant but if I'm looking at the situation that is how it is few examples are that I get I get sometimes I get students in here I'm teaching four for two schools and I do individual lesson lessons with them and sometimes they bring their own production is and and and it's most of times it's like yeah I'm trying to master this but I can't and something wrong with the bass and whatever and then we plug in their laptop here on my speaker system or we do something that we can listen to it and and it's more than often that we get presented with so much bass that it's like oh if I just lower it then it's done like those issues and it's just because they can't hear it at home or at whatever so if you have this all managed what you will see then is that it gets super easy to do to to work on base frequencies low frequencies and interestingly enough it already starts at the music production so if it's like if it's an electronic production or an acoustic production doesn't even matter as much because it's it's it's a simple matter of okay if the kick and the bass are clashing in the production then it needs to be tackled over there we're not going to do like crazy small q-factor stuff in eq's if we can fix it in the production or we're not going to do Milt about compression in the mastering it's a problem lays in the production we have to fix it in a production so what I'm always asking my clients as soon as something comes up like that there's a clashing in the bass line or the kick baseline combination because that's where the clashing goes on most of the times I ask him to fix this one of the issues that comes up a lot in electronic productions the most is the tail of the kick and the length of the bass line when you have a long kick with a long tail you come it's better to use a more staccato bass line it's like a rule of thumb but I'm not saying this is the ultimate answer that you should do this but this works pretty well like long kick short baseline and also the other way around short kick long baseline works really really well now what else use that people produce a kick bass combination and that is still clashing although they're they're thinking that they're using a short kick and a long baseline but then I play it back on here and it turns out that the kick is like on 25 Hertz or something it's still very long tailed and and that brings us back again to point one monitoring monitoring monitoring like if you can't hear what you're doing you should work on that it's a it's the most important part of every studio making sure you can hear what you're doing so yeah then we move on to mixing I have a few tricks that I like to share with you guys in my door with a few plugins so you guys maybe get inspired to do something that you just make that bass combination stuff that that bass that gets uploaded stuff way better way more tight way more whatever so I got a pretty bass heavy song here and I have it stemmed out so that gives me an extra challenge but that's maybe interesting now the tips that I'm going to give I'm right now not here to achieve like the perfect sound on this on this track I'm here to inspire you guys for some techniques to get a better bass response so I'm showing you different tricks that you can use or maybe even combine to use here's the track that I'm talking about let's go to the bass heavy parts directly come here it's a pretty heavy part but the bass and kick already they are blending what makes it difficult is that it's just the bass line itself the production of the bass line almost an extra kick like like that makes it like a bit more Restless in the inner low frequencies and there's nothing you can do about it it's it's the track what you can do in order to make the kick and bass blend more in such a case is first thing you can do is sidechain it sidechain it now I'm working with a stem with percussion and so let's only use the low frequencies of the Prussian stem in the sidechain [Music] but there have problem when side-chaining a baseline in order to get a better low-frequency response your you are already hearing it for pushing away to hold the whole baseline while we are actually having like some kind of cool crunch on it which we want to maintain I mean it's only about the low frequency did the sub frequencies so side-chaining is cool and it's used creatively and both also to create some room in a production in a lot of cases but in this case I would rather prefer to instead of using a compressor to use a multiband compressor and I create a big low frequency band and then sidechain it from here so I think the side yeah side chain is already working I can put it on external side chain and I think it's only detecting here yeah that's true yeah so like this now it's it's again it's difficult to hear this when you're not having very good monitoring and I'm not sure what the youtube codec is doing but let's just show you how to blending so so now that the crunchiness of the bassline stays intact and only the low focus is being pushed back just when the kick is playing and it's also now filling up very nice in the in a place where the kick isn't playing scores very extremes I wouldn't do it this extreme in a mix this for the demo it's it's better to hear because it's it's difficult to hear yes so let's bypass it now I'm not almost cutting all the low-end away let's do it more settle do you hear how to get more room now now in order to me is of course not doing it on individual channels but doing it on a mouse abyss of course it has to it has to blend together already pretty well but if you're working on a master bus with for instance a multiband compressor with the low frequencies I mean the multipath is triggering to the full signal so also to the kick that is coming in so with this you can equal out the amount of low frequencies here track from a dynamic point of view way better so it's not going up and down in sideways again I like to do this with super fast attack and release time so look at full look ahead everything like this a bit extreme let's let's push it up so that's [Music] its difficulty rhinos don't get it gets way more glue together because it's it's not only a matter of having all the frequencies in there like swimming up and it's also about having the correct glue I most hope because when you're working with a limit or Mouse opposed to push everything up a bit it's good that your low-frequency are already compressed because a limiter does have trouble with low frequencies most limiters have not all but I like to push it up now another trick I showed this in my mastering tutorial as well of which I'm going to make more is using a frequency analyzer spectrum analyzer to look at where your base is so it's a good good thing to use a spectrum analyzer to analyze the amount of base that you're having now if you're looking at a spectrum analyzer like this it says nothing so you have to you have to know what you're looking at first of all the important part is the window that you're using or the block size or whatever it has to be big enough to accurately show you what you're doing in the low frequencies let me show you what happens when I make a smaller window like this now I don't know anything well if I make a bigger window here look now I know some things that are going up now I can see things still doesn't say anything we have to know the amount of low frequencies that is normal to have that is good to have and the way that I do this the way that I test this is I'm taking reference tracks listening to them like is this is this something that where I want to go is this is this what I like is this you know whatever and I'm going to determine where the low frequencies in those reference tracks are now first of all it's important when you're playing back those reference tracks that you're playing them back at peak volume of zero dB because we're looking at at mastered tracks now it's also important that you have to be mastering in order to know if your low frequencies are like if you have enough of them or not because if you don't like your mix we'll always be on a lower volume than the master of somebody else so it's a bit difficult to determine this and it takes some time and skill to really understand your analyzer but what I now know is for dance music I need to be at minus twenty four of my analyzer and it it depends on a lot of different things where that sweet spot will be for you not only on the reference tracks and on what you prefer but also really on how your analyzer works so what could be minus twenty four my analyzer with my settings with my routing and everything could be - well for you or - thirty six or somewhere in between or whatever so it really takes some time to determine the amount of sub frequencies that you want to achieve in your production and from that you can use an analyzer and on the analyse you can also really quickly see like if you have a monitoring system that cannot handle like twenty or thirty Hertz or whatever you can really quickly see if you are having problems in that area again given that your analyzers accurate enough in the low ends and it really needs a big RTA window size are really big what do they call it here Rock sighs whatever so this is really important you can but you can see when it's not accurate I just showed it to you guys there the last thing I cannot demo days because I do not have a track in here but I can quickly explain it is listen and look at the continuity of your bass line so this goes most of all with sine wave bass lines so if you have a sine wave bass line what can happen because sine waves sine waves are really bad when you're monitoring is not up to the maximum standards what can happen is what one node of the sine wave is way louder than the other node you can easily see this in like your analyzer in the fehb filter or something you can really see which ones are louder than the other ones and you can also hear it when you have there we go again good monitoring what you can do with those baselines this is because it's only a few notes that most baselines are playing when it's a sine wave it's not very difficult they're not playing super difficult parts but you can with a small Q factor filter you can you can filter out the notes that are - laughs you can lower them a bit with a cueing again it's fixing it in the mix but sometimes it works and I just wanted to give you guys that tip as well like use I like to use the fabfilter EQ because it's you can control everything on it and you can really really quickly see what you're doing so that's one of the things that I would advise you guys to do as well and that's actually it for my for my for my tips on bass lines for now I know that this might not be the answer that you're expecting of me maybe you were like expecting like some magical trick but I don't believe in magic I believe in theory I believe in facts and I believe in like audio theory and like professional audio and just doing a good job instead of trying to patch something up with some weird plugin because in the end we're not learning from it and that plugin might work on this track and then on the next track we have we're having a problem again and I like to know like what is that what is the basis what's the solid theory and a solid way of working so that I can attack this problem whenever it arises but that's for me how I how I think of these things so I hope you guys enjoyed this video I hope I didn't come across too rude about the monitoring solution but at least it's honest like you need good monitors anyway let's not talk about it anymore so thanks all for watching and let me know what you think in the comments below maybe you have some good tips for my viewers to other viewers as well leave them in the comments below if you want to share them of course some people are really secretive of their approach anyway if you want to support me and my videos at my studio then that's possible by pledging with two more patreon campaign I'm trying to give you guys some things in return so take a look at patron over here now in other ways support me is by watching more videos so I'll link one of them over here don't forget subscribe keep pushing and bye bye

Channel: White Sea Studio

Views: 78,909

Rating: 4.9302564 out of 5

Keywords: studio, audio engineering, mixing, mastering, recording, music production, white sea studio, wytse gerichhausen, mastering bass, mastering low end, mastering low frequencies, mixing kick and bass, mixing kick, mixing bass, mixing low frequencies, low frequencies audio, how to mix bass, better bass mixing

Id: VCQZg3ljz_Y

Length: 18min 4sec (1084 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 11 2020