Sculpting the perfect bass mix
It’s no surprise that records with a well-crafted bass mix get our pulses racing; alongside the kick drum, basslines provide the foundations for our tracks and if a mix is built without a strong foundation, it’ll collapse. That said, the trick to mixing a great-sounding bassline isn’t rocket science or witchcraft; rather, it’s the ‘right’ blend of many of the same tools we rely on to mix any and all other elements within our tracks. However, as basslines often occupy a frequency zone which overlaps with the kick drum, we do need to be particularly careful that both sounds are greater than the sum of their parts, rather than sounding like two instruments locked in a battle which neither can win.
As you already know, frequency and pitch are the same thing, but whereas we ‘choose’ the bass notes we play, either by playing or drawing in specific note pitches of our choice, we often spend less time thinking about the ‘pitch’ (and therefore frequency content) of our kick drum. Like all sounds in our mix, there will be a footprint of harmonics generated by a kick drum which may well overlap with our basslines and, to an extent, that’s exactly what we want. The reason that related harmonic content between a kick drum and a bassline is a useful starting point is that, if you have this, your kick drum will be ‘in tune’ with your bass. If a different harmonic group is triggered by the kick, compared to the bassline, they’re effectively operating in different keys. If you’ve ever heard engineers talking about tuning the pieces of an acoustic drum kit, this is what they mean; a tuned kit forms a musical relationship with the rest of the track which an ‘out of tune’ kit simply doesn’t.
So why does it matter so much that we get clarity at the bottom-end of our mix by paying attention to any frequency content overload in this area particularly? The answer to this becomes apparent when you remember that the music we make is produced by speakers or headphones, which are physical devices which convert the frequency content of our mixes into sound via speaker cones.
The low frequency content in bass sounds contains a lot of energy with longer, more slowly evolving waveforms which, as you’ll see if you ever turn your speakers up and feed them a kick drum, results in a visible speaker cone ‘wobble’. Remember that the foundation of a mix is built on this low frequency content, so if the rest of our production is resting on a foundation which is causing a speaker cone to move wildly, it’s no surprise that the sound of that mix will be compromised.
If you want further proof of this, program a simple one-bar kick and bassline pattern. Make the kick a four-to-the-floor rhythm and then program a bassline which features some notes which arrive at the same time as the kick (on the beat) and some which arrive in the gaps between kicks (off-beat). Loop the bar and listen to it carefully. Hear how ‘clean’ both the kick and bassline sound when the two notes happen separately, and how different and slightly ‘conflated’ they sound when they happen at the same time? That’s because your monitor suddenly has an awful lot more bass content to manage when the two notes play together. Clearly, without intervention, it’s easy to imagine such bass overload causing problems for your mix.
The good news is that you have a variety of tools at your disposal aimed at fixing such issues. In the first of our walkthroughs, we’re going to look at how EQ can be used to draw the strengths out of kick and bass sounds, so that a relationship is formed between these crucial elements which will benefit not just the bottom-end of your mix but the upper frequencies too.
You’ll see we’ve used a range of different plug-in and synth tools throughout this feature. While – other than a few specialist synths and effects – there’s not really such thing as an essential set of ‘bass’ tools, experiment and you will find some instruments and effects work better with low frequencies than others. That said, there’s nothing that we’re doing across these pages that you can’t successfully achieve using the stock tools in most DAWs, so don’t let your tool kit put you off!