Bass end tips and tricks please
-
starratsmaccom
Bass end tips and tricks please
Got a couple of PMC nearfield monitors in my humble studio that sound great but have a slight kink in the low mid. Although good mons they do not have an extended low end so some times my mixes either have too much bass or it is nearly right but has something else wrong with it like too much energy in a particular frequency range or not enough as I am ear guessing. Top easy, bottom hard to get exactly right. I find that although Har-Bal gives ears to the eyes and is great at pointing to real trouble spots that need sorting out the bass end is still giving me a bit of trouble all the same as I don't really know what the bass is doing. My neighbors are already impressed with the results I have been getting with Har-Bal and say they do not think I need a sub speaker as they can hear my bass just fine at all hours of the day and night anyway. Just need to know how I can get the bass really really tight and powerful without muddying the track and without a sub. I find that you get a few peaks in the same area 50Hz-200Hz (I know that two octaves is a lot) and that no end of jigging and re-jigging them sorts it out. I just end up with different mixes each time rather than the right one. The top end sounds really cool in Har-Bal. Feel free to talk audio techie to me. Talk to me about zooming in on the bass end and how this can help me ;->
Bass end tips and tricks please
can attest to the same problem as my PC is not connected to my main speakers. My monitoring is done through Mission 73s bookshelfs which have a nice uniform output but not much below 80Hz, so if I base my judegements soley on those then I inevitably end up with too much bass.
In circumstances like this where you don't have access to monitors with extended LF output I'd suggest a useful and cheap alternative is to use a pair of good quality headphones to get a better idea about whether you are over-emphasising the bass. I've been castigated on some other forums before about this comment but the point is, provided you only use it for cross referencing, it is a good approach. Even if you can afford better monitors your monitoring problems won't necessarily be resolved until the room acoustics are controlled, and usually the bottom end is the most difficult to control. So, i'd suggest that you can use headphones to better judge the bottom end and use your existing nearfields to judge the rest.
On making adjustments on the LF end, as will the entire spectrum, you should NOT be trying to remove peaks and flatten them out completely. The fact that most of your tracks have peaks in the same area may well be because those peaks correpond to the natural resonsances of the intruments in question (ie. bass drum). For example, if you have a recording of a bass drum that shows a pronounced peak and you flatten it out, this would roughly correspond to you stuffing the drum with pillows! If this is what you want fine, but if you wish to preserve the character of the instruments all you should be doing is controlling peaks and not removing them altogether. If you haven't already done so please read through the tutorial in the help file.
On making the bass sound tight, the usual approach is to shelve the bottom end. Try starting from what you've got and gradually increase the knee point of your bass roll-off until you get the sound you're after. This will generally be somewhere between 50 and 80Hz. The higher the knee frequency the tighter the sound but the down side is that you lose some punch. Try experimenting with different shelving slopes too. You may be able to get tightness plus punch with a high knee but a gentler slope.
Regards,
Paavo.
In circumstances like this where you don't have access to monitors with extended LF output I'd suggest a useful and cheap alternative is to use a pair of good quality headphones to get a better idea about whether you are over-emphasising the bass. I've been castigated on some other forums before about this comment but the point is, provided you only use it for cross referencing, it is a good approach. Even if you can afford better monitors your monitoring problems won't necessarily be resolved until the room acoustics are controlled, and usually the bottom end is the most difficult to control. So, i'd suggest that you can use headphones to better judge the bottom end and use your existing nearfields to judge the rest.
On making adjustments on the LF end, as will the entire spectrum, you should NOT be trying to remove peaks and flatten them out completely. The fact that most of your tracks have peaks in the same area may well be because those peaks correpond to the natural resonsances of the intruments in question (ie. bass drum). For example, if you have a recording of a bass drum that shows a pronounced peak and you flatten it out, this would roughly correspond to you stuffing the drum with pillows! If this is what you want fine, but if you wish to preserve the character of the instruments all you should be doing is controlling peaks and not removing them altogether. If you haven't already done so please read through the tutorial in the help file.
On making the bass sound tight, the usual approach is to shelve the bottom end. Try starting from what you've got and gradually increase the knee point of your bass roll-off until you get the sound you're after. This will generally be somewhere between 50 and 80Hz. The higher the knee frequency the tighter the sound but the down side is that you lose some punch. Try experimenting with different shelving slopes too. You may be able to get tightness plus punch with a high knee but a gentler slope.
Regards,
Paavo.