Bass enhancement
Dialling in fat, tight bass that balances sub weight and sufficient midrange punch is a perennial issue when mixing, and something that any pro mix engineer must become adept at. Any time-saving tool, therefore, is a godsend.
The enhancement of bass content is nothing new, of course, with engineers originally using hardware units such as dbx’s 120A Subharmonic Synthesizer and Aphex’s Aural Exciter with Big Bottom. Of course there now exists a whole plethora of plugins – some long established, some new – that aim to achieve something similar: bass enhancement.
Many bass-enhancing insert effects will synthesise additional sub-bass frequency content which you then mix in alongside the original signal. Other plugins, such as the famous MaxBass by Waves, exploit the psychoacoustic ‘phantom bass’ phenomenon and create the illusion of more bass presence by adding in higher midrange harmonics that directly relate to the source signal’s fundamental frequency. Then you’ve got the bog-standard filter: by setting a high-pass filter’s frequency to a suitable bass region, then boosting that frequency with the filter’s resonance control, you can dial in a juicy bass boost that focuses around the cutoff and removes everything below – Universal Audio’s Little Labs Voice of God being one such example, designed to add the perfect amount of low-end ‘oomph’.
Many bass booster plugins combine the above. Voxengo’s LF Max Punch combines a simple subharmonic synthesiser and harmonicenhancing saturation, while bx_subsynth includes three adjustable subharmonic synths, saturation and an adjustable resonant high-pass filter. For now let’s explore a modern bassenhancement tool that can be triggered by your input signal: Boom Library’s Enforcer.