Eight bass-balancing tips
FORGET THE FILTER
If your sub bass isn’t hitting hard enough, try removing any high-pass filtering. As most sub basses are synthesised from a pure sine wave, a filter is often unnecessary; and even with a gentle 20Hz roll-off, the filter curve will also affect the frequencies directly above the cutoff point, giving a more hollow sound. Try using a low EQ shelf to tame subs instead.
ADDING PRESENCE
Struggling to get the detail in a bass guitar recording to shine through a busy mix? Why not try adding a healthy slug of characterful EQ at around 1kHz? This’ll bring out the upper harmonics and help the listener’s ear decipher the bass more clearly. To accentuate the effect, try taking some broad 1-2dB EQ cuts at about 1kHz out of the guitars or drum overheads to give your bass EQ boost more room to breathe.
SYNTH SATURATION
Beefing up an overly clean synth bass with saturation is a widely used tactic for adding warmth and depth to ITB mixes, but a cleaner yet dense end result can be achieved by adding the saturation on an FX send instead of applying it over the whole sound. This lets you saturate the dry sound to taste in parallel, without excessively distorting the dry signal.
KEEP IT ROLLING
When mixing dance music tracks that are based on a drop, you can make the bass sound even more impressive by automating a subtle high-pass filter on your music, vocals and atmospherics to switchon when the full track drops in. This allows you to keep some low-frequency energy in the intro (to stop it sounding too thin) while still leaving room for bone-crushing bass on the drop!
ON THE SHELF
Complex, distorted bass synth patches such as the ones you hear in DnB or dubstep naturally contain a lot of upper harmonics in the mids and highs. These frequencies can easily clash with your percussion tracks and other instruments in the mix, so try taking a small 1-2dB high shelf dip out of your bass synth at 1kHz . Even if your mix doesn’t sound obviously noisy in the higher frequencies, you’ll be surprised by the added clarity this can provide.
INSIDE THE RIDE
If you’ve strapped a compressor over your bass to even the dynamics out, but the jump in volume between notes is still too noticeable or unwanted, try editing the notes manually using volume automation and ride levels before compression. This’ll typically give a more even, less obviously-compressed overall sound that feels gelled together without unwanted artefacts. Conversely, making certain bass notes louder can be a great creative effect if you want the bass to sound like it’s jumping out of the speakers at certain points. Listen in the context of the mix and decide for yourself.
PETER PAN
A neat trick to give the centre of your stereo mix some extra separation is to pan the bass out to one side by only a few degrees. This’ll slightly shift it from the centre of the mix, without imposing any serious phase cancellation penalties when the mix is heard in mono. This one’s not only a winner when mixing densely-layered rock music, but also well worth trying in electronic mixes.
SUB DRIVER
Sometimes, the weight of a bassline’s sub frequencies can overwork a compressor, leading to a distorted, ‘wooly’ bass that lacks punch. An easy solution to this common problem is to use a compressor with a highpass filter in its sidechain detection circuit: this way, the compressor won’t be triggered by any frequencies below the sidechain filter’s frequency. This is a great move for compressing live recordings of upright or electric bass that contain variable dynamics in the first, second and third harmonics.