bass recording/mixing; cleaning out the mud

[Spacebone1.02]

Hey so I've got a recording with some parallel 4th being played low on the a&d strings, which I want to make sound crisper, and I know that conventional wisdom is to apply a hpf starting at around 20hz, but my monitoring setup is far from ideal, and I don't want to lose much of the 'body-rumble/chest -thump' tones if I can help it. Any of you guys know about what spectrum those frequencies lie in, so I can apply the hpf thoroughly enough to clear out the mud, without castrating my bass tone?

[zachoff]

Depends wholly on the rig.  My two rigs are so incredibly different that applying a blanket "this is what you should do" is fallible, at best.  A lot of people will say cut lows and boost mids though... Might start there.  My EQ is almost totally flat on my Ampeg/810, with a +4 on the mids.  Mid shift at 800Hz.  My Orange/215 is totally different.  Lows are cut a bunch, mids are boosted a bit, and highs are boosted a bunch.  Just depends.

[Lumpy]

Might not be practical based on the song (?) but you could double the '4th' part and mix it in to taste.

[Submarine]

A few suggestions.
You might not need as much 20HZ as you think.  80hz-100hz can actually "feel" more impactful.

Are you playing a clean bass sound or a distorted bass sound?  If its clean try making a copy of the track.  On the duplicate track - super aggressively hi-pass like around 400hz and add a bit of distortion.  Combine the two tracks.

[Muffin Man]

Heres a plug to try. Im not affiliated with the link.

http://www.bozdigitallabs.com/product/bark-of-dog/

[Danny G]

Not that it necessarily helps, but some of the best recorded bass tone I've ever achieved has been my 15w Epiphone Valve Std chassis pushing a budget model Ampeg 4x10.

I don't know why, but it works. It really, really works.

Try getting creative with rigs and see if that helps.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

[Corey Y]

You don't even really hear OR feel 20 Hz through most speakers. If you ran a test tone at 20 Hz and started sweeping it up, you'd get an idea of how much volume you need to even hear anything below 50-80 Hz through good stereo speakers or recording monitors. If you're concerned about getting that low end rumble you want, I would start by running high and low pass filters on every track (I usually to 17k and 35 Hz), then raise and lower the values for individual tracks as appropriate to how you want them to sit in the mix and what's actually audible from them, then boost the low end EQ on them and sweep it around until you hear where it's most effective. Usually in the case of bass the actual punch you're trying to get is between 60-100 Hz, but the low end of the kick drum also typically resides in the 50-60 Hz range, so I usually low pass around or a little above the point I'm boosting on my kick and also use a little subtle ducking with a fast compressor sidechained off the kick track.

For reference, the big "low end" hump of an Ampeg 810 cab is around 100 Hz. Though a lot of bassists that are very into ported super cabs hold that up as an example of a not very "deep" cab and more a low mid heavy sound. A ported, well tuned cab can have it's first big low end bump be around 50 Hz, if it has A LOT of internal volume, but typically most are going still going to be a lot lower output than around the 100 Hz and up frequency range. Depending on the music and the tones, sometimes I boost bass around 90-100 Hz and have the low end of the guitar around 120-150.

[zachoff]

Besides, most car systems and headphones won't do much of anything for super lows.  IMO, your goal with a recording should be to sound good through cheap headphones and car stereos first and sound awesome through mid to high end audio equipment second.

[Lumpy]

Heres a plug to try. Im not affiliated with the link.

http://www.bozdigitallabs.com/product/bark-of-dog/

Hey, it's a free one. Thanks!

[Submarine]

Heres a plug to try. Im not affiliated with the link.

http://www.bozdigitallabs.com/product/bark-of-dog/

That Sasquatch plugin looks cool.  Might have to try that one. Thanks for posting this.

[Dylan Thomas]

Depends wholly on the rig.  My two rigs are so incredibly different that applying a blanket "this is what you should do" is fallible, at best.  A lot of people will say cut lows and boost mids though... Might start there.  My EQ is almost totally flat on my Ampeg/810, with a +4 on the mids.  Mid shift at 800Hz.  My Orange/215 is totally different.  Lows are cut a bunch, mids are boosted a bit, and highs are boosted a bunch.  Just depends.

This is excellent advice right here.

Basically all good advice in this thread.