Instant bass enhancement and focus with a resonant filter

Adding resonance to a high-pass filter is a time-honoured technique that many producers swear by. Here’s how to do it in your DAW easily

Little Labs’ Voice of God is an iconic bass-boosting hardware device (also available as a UAD-2 plugin) that’s found fame in countless studios thanks to its ability to impart chest-shuddering low end into even the wimpiest signals. As magic as it might seem, the Voice of God is essentially just a resonant high-pass filter under the hood, and can be replicated with any equivalent filter effect. You can use any filter or EQ as a bass-boosting device. First, apply a high-pass (or ‘low-cut’) filter over, say, a kick drum, then carefully set its cutoff value around the kick’s fundamental frequency – ie, its lowest, most powerful harmonic. Once you’ve tuned the cutoff, slowly increase the filter’s resonance amount to boost and enhance the filter’s peak amount around the kick’s fundamental. This carves away away sub frequencies below this point, and enhances the all-important fundamental. This kind of filtering can boost your signal’s peak level and cause clipping, so use a filter with an inbuilt limiting stage (or a separate limiter plugin) to reign in level increase. Better still, as per Andrew’s advice, use a nonlinear filter type with overdrive to add beef and weight.