Get That Pro Sound The Ultimate Guide to Bass First Edition Publication date: September 2013 Published by George Robinson Getthatprosound.com © Copyright George Robinson, All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted transmitted in any form or by any means, mechanical or electronic, including including photocopying and recording,, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without recording prior written permission from the publisher. While all attempts have been made to verify information provided in this publication, the Author does not assumes any responsibility for errors, omissions, or contrary interpretation of the subject matter herein. Of course, please let me know if you find any errors and I’ll correct them! The Purchaser or Reader of this publication assumes responsibility for the use of these materials and information. Neither the Author nor its dealers or distributors, will be held liable for any damages caused either directly or indirectly by the instructions contained in this book, or by the software or hardware products described herein.
Get That Pro Sound - The Ultimate Guide to Bass
Contents 1. Introduction........................................................................................ 4 Bass Is The Foundation
2. Why Is Bass Difficult To Deal With?.................................................. 5 Acoustic Treatment Solutions
3. Part 1: Getting A Bass Sound............................................................ 8 Initial Recording: Acoustic And Electric Bass Initial Synth Bass Sound Programming In 5 Steps
4. Part 2: Refining The Sound, And Fitting It Into The Mix................ 14 Mix Order: Bass, And The Rest Distortion For Additional Punch Bass Attack Bass Compression Bass EQ Harmonic Enhancers Bass Panning Bass And Effects
5. Part 3: Finishing, Testing And Mastering....................................... 21 Mastering Bass Judgement Day
6. Conclusion......................................................................................... 23
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Get That Pro Sound - The Ultimate Guide to Bass
Introduction Bass Is The Foundation Having a ght, punchy low end in your tracks is a prerequisite for a professional-sounding mix.
Parcularly today with the development of ‘bass music’, bass is taking centre stage like never before, oen taking on the roles of lead sound and providing the main musical hook as well as it’s convenonal funcon of oering low-frequency weight and support to the other instruments. But regardless of whether you make electronic music, rock, pop, folk or any other style or genre, get the low end component right and you have the perfect stable foundaon for the rest of the producon; get it wrong or laving it unrened and you’ll nd almost everything else you try will be something of an uphill struggle towards geng a consistent, powerful mix.
That’s where this guide comes in. We’ll examine the bass range all the way from recording or programming the ideal bass sound, to ng it into a full arrangement and grooving with the drums, to eects, processing, mixing and mastering.
Everything you’ll need to cra the perfect bass, and low end in general, for any type of producon.
Let’s get into it...
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Get That Pro Sound - The Ultimate Guide to Bass
Why Is Bass Difficult To Deal With? Room Modes, Acoustics and Solutions Very oen it’s clear that the bass elements of a mix are coming through too muddy, boxy, or apparently turn ‘acouscally invisible’ in the context of a full mix. Frustraon sets in, because what’s not clear is how to resolve these problems.
In principle, bass is simple: once you come to the mix there shouldn’t be a huge number of different elements whose primary frequency ranges are in the low frequencies, so we’re mostly talking here about, rst, keeping everything else out of the way frequency-wise with ltering and EQ, and then geng bass guitars or synth basslines and kick drums working together, supplying the low end groove and weight. But while the bass component of your tracks is made up of relavely few and simple elements, it can be surprisingly tricky to get them working together to opmum eect, without either over- or under-emphasizing the low frequencies. As you’ve no doubt discovered if you’ve been making music at home, it ’s trickier sll for small project studio producers with less-than-ideal listening environments and speaker systems. But why is this? The environment in which you mix or listen to your music has a huge bearing on the perceived level of the dierent frequencies. This is why top studios spend houndreds of thousands on acousc treatment, or simply design the space from the ground up with opmum acousc quality in mind (by ‘opmum’, we generally mean a room which ‘colours’ the sound as lile as possible, providing a ‘at’ response across all frequencies without emphasizing or reducing parcular ranges). In a typical home or project studio, we have relavely poor acousc condions for such ‘transparent’ reproducon of our music, and this problem is compounded if we use inappropriate (not necessarily ‘cheap’) monitor speakers, or posion our monitors in the room in such a way that their otherwise at frequency response is compromised (i.e. too close to walls or corners, or posioned to re across the shortest distance to the opposite wall rather than down the longest dimension the room oers). In small rooms it’s the bass frequencies that are most aected by poor acouscs and short distances between surfaces because bass frequencies. This is because with their longer wavelengths than higher frequencies, bass sounds are much more prone to phase cancellaon (somemes referred to as ‘standing waves’ or ‘room modes’ in the eld of acouscs). We don’t want to get too deep into acouscs and ‘sound 101’ here, but imagine that bass waves are literally larger rollers compared to higher frequency ‘choppy’ waves and ripples: there are fewer of them, but each one is more signicant to the overall sound. In a small room, if the wavelength
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Get That Pro Sound - The Ultimate Guide to Bass of a parcular frequency divides evenly into any of the distances between opposing walls or between the oor and ceiling, the reected waves will phase cancel each other as they bounce back and forth. What this means in eect is that sounds at exactly that frequency will disappear or at least signicantly reduce in perceived level. In some rooms you might experience reducons/’holes’ of up to 35dB at parcular intervals along the frequency spectrum. Clearly this is not so great when you’re trying to judge relave levels while mixing! Even though you won’t necessarily be aware of the uneven frequency response of your room while mixing, your mix results will show it like this: if sounds at 100Hz are being phase cancelled or otherwise eected by the acouscs of your room, they will appear quieter to you so you’ll naturally mix those frequencies a lile higher. Everything will sound great in there, unl you play the track outside your studio and on other listening systems, at which point the increased 100Hz component will be painfully apparent. Related to this problem, bass has the perceived tendency to ‘collect’ in the corners of a room, and this is most apparent in three-point corners, for example where two walls also meet the ceiling. In a typical small project studio, all the edges and corners are that much closer to the listening posion that would be ideal, so again these ‘bass enhancements’ are made more apparent.
Acoustic Treatment Solutions Before you give up any hope of ever mixing anything in any room though, here are the primary soluons to those acouscs problems: bass traps, broad-band acousc treatment, speaker selecon and proper speaker placement.
Bass traps are generally posioned in corners, and consist of foam triangles (either purpose-built acousc foam or homemade versions with ceiling insulaon wool will actually work equally well). The deeper the foam the more eecve the traps will be, both in terms of the dB amount they reduce bass frequencies and the range of frequencies they will work down to (i.e. the thicker the trap the deeper the frequency it will work to, the trade-o being the amount of space very thick traps and panels will take up in a small room!).
Broad-band acoustic treatment would typically consist of as many ridged foam panels as you can t onto the exposed walls and other large at surfaces. Not specifcally designed to deal with bass like the traps, some general taming of the mid and high frequencies is sll obviously desirable, and will indirectly eect how you mix the relave balance of bass with these other ranges.
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Get That Pro Sound - The Ultimate Guide to Bass
Appropriate speakers for your studio are essenally the best monitors you can aord that are designed to provide the correct power for the size of room you are working in . There’s lile point geng huge Genelecs with a separate sub-bass unit to put under the desk if you’re working in a cloakroom. You’ll be sing so close to them the majority of the me that the addional power will be wasted; it would be far beer to opt for ‘neareld’ monitors, callibrated for the purpose of accurate frequency response at close quarters and comfortable levels for extended use. Also, if you are going to use headphones to mix (not recommended, but in some situaons its unavoidable), don’t use them exclusively without also tesng your mixes on other systems. More on this later.
Proper speaker placement is simple to do and can completely change the sound you’re geng from them. Usually there are suggesons from the manufacturers in the manual that it would be wise to follow, but typically they’ll tell you things like:
→ Keep monitors a minimum distance from walls and avoid corners wherever possible → Place monitors along the shortest wall so that they’re ring down the longest dimension in the room (this minimizes the eect of reecons o the back wall to the listening posion)
→ Posion monitors upright (not on their sides) and with the tweeters at the same height as your ears when seated at the listening posion
→ Isolate them from stands and desks with foam pads (the Auralex ones are favourites) to minimize vibraons and keep the low frequency response as ght as possible. It’s also worth menoning here that with an amazing monitoring system and listening environment in place, it’s easy to forget that your music is likely to be listened to by other people on crappy phone speakers, in cars, on radio (hopefully) and ringy MP3-streamed from Youtube to nny laptops and headphones. None of these will give you the kind of deep bass response you get in your studio – in some of these cases they just can’t reproduce any real bass at all! - so we’ll be looking at the various tricks and ways to make your bass sound amazing on any system throughout the guide.
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Get That Pro Sound - The Ultimate Guide to Bass
Part 1: Getting A Bass Sound Bass Fit For Purpose As we just menoned, not everyone has a relavely prisne listening environment in which your bass sounds will be reproduced faithfully. If you’re making club music or anything that is specically designed to be played over a large soundsystem, the rules are slightly dierent about what you can get away with when creang huge sub-bass sounds, because a club system will be able to accurately depict very low frequencies. However, when playing music very loud and over large systems, the apparent freuqency response will change, so you’d sll be wise to test your club mixes as much as possible on real soundsystems before locking your project studio-produced mix. For everything else that needs to sound good over a wide range of dierent playback systems, or for club music that you sll want to sound good elsewhere, you’ll want to focus on enhancing the perceived level of certain bass frequencies and allow psychoacouscs to help our ears and brains ll in the sense of ‘power’. First of all, consider that even decent home hi-s don’t reproduce frequencies lower than 40Hz, and most domesc listening systems won’t do much below 80Hz. So begin your journey towards a good bass by making sure the bass sound is providing plenty of energy somewhere in the 70100Hz range. This will ensure the fundamental bass frequency won’t be lost on the vast majority of playback systems. (Where exactly the bass hits most will partly depend on where the kick drum sits as well, as you want the two working together. More on that below.)
Take Care From The Start: Take Time To Experiment, Trial And Error Try to avoid the ‘garbage in, garbage out’ syndrome by making sure you start with the very best, or at least most musically appropriate bass sound. Whether it ’s a sample, a real bass guitar or a synth bass patch, do as much as you can at source to get the bass sounding great. Yes, it does take some me to experiment and discover the right combinaon of source, addional processing and EQ etc. but it’s always me well spent, and me that you might otherwise use xing problems with the sound and how it ts at the mix stage later.
Initial Recording: Acoustic And Electric Bass We’ll start with looking at how to record ‘real’ bass instruments, both acousc or electric. Usually with bass guitar the best opon is to DI the signal directly from the guitar output (or possibly the last box in a hardware or stompbox eects chain) into your soundcard or audio interface.
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Get That Pro Sound - The Ultimate Guide to Bass However, if you have acousc bass instruments of you want to get more ambience into the inial recording, you’ll need to mic up either the instrument itself or the amplier. There are a few mics specically designed for recording bass instruments, so if you can get your hands on an AKG D12 or D112, Shure Beta 52A or Audix D6 you’ll have the tools opmized for the job. These mics are tailored for bass applicaons in their frequency response (with reduced mid-range and a slight peak in 3-4kHz to pick up the all-important aack ‘click’ for denion) and can withstand the kind of sound pressure levels generated by kick drums and other boom-heavy sources. Of course it’s denitely possible and wise to conisder more neutral general purpose mics as well, parcularly if you’re miking the amp and want to capture some nice room ambience. Here an FET condenser-type mic will be best such as the Neumann U87 and U47 or AKG C414. Just be careful not to overload and damage such relavely sensive mics by placing them too close to high-SPL sources, like acousc bass or bass amps! As ever, experiment with mic placement (taking into account the pickup/polar paern of your parcular mic) and distance as this will always have a signicant eect on the quality, presence and warmth of the recording. For a start, if you want a warmer and more ambient bass sound try poinng the mic further o-centre, away from the middle of the amp cabinet itself. Of course there’s nothing stopping you having the best of both worlds and combining both a recorded mic (or even mulple mics) and a DI signal. This will give you maximum exibility in the mix to add more or less character, warmth or ambience as the situaon requires – just be careful and check the phase alignment between your two bass sources, as one or other is likely to need slight adjusng to make sure they’re hing exactly together.
‘Worldized’ Bass Even if your bass originates from a synth or sample, you can sll ‘mic it up’ to imbue it with addional real-world ambience and vibe. This is a trick that comes most famously from the lm sound design world, where sound designers would take their fantasy and sci- sounds and play them back over a small speaker posioned and miked up in a real world locaon such as a subway staon or elevator sha. This would give the fabricated sounds a real reverb and character that can be quite dierent to what could be achieved with studio processing. Plus, it’s way more fun to record stu in unusual spaces, and you’re guaranteed to come with original sounds!
Initial Synth Bass Sound Programming In 5 Steps Unlike with a bass guitar part in a typical rock song, it’s not always very clear how a synth bass part ‘should’ sound in order to full it’s role in the complete mix. The opons are limitless with VSTi synth patches and presets, but it can be dicult to gure out from amongst all the possibilites what the track actually wants. Of course much of the quality of a given bass sound is purely arsc choice, and with many style of electronic its normal to base the enre track around the
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Get That Pro Sound - The Ultimate Guide to Bass character or mof of the bass sound. But whether the bass takes centre stage or not, it sll needs to hit certain technical marks in order for the enre mix to work. For example, you want it to provide wieght, but not so much that it unbalances the mix; you also want it to cut through the other elements and actually be audible, which is a challenge in itself for low frequency sounds in a busy mix. So with creave and technical consideraons in mind, here are some ps for the inial programming of your bass sound (or preset selecon for further tweaking as you progress to the mix):
1. Start With A Sound Or Waveform With Plenty Of Harmonics
Even if you’re aiming to create a ‘sub’ bass sound that will appear to be just a deep thudding boom, it’s a good idea to start with at least some other harmonically rich component layered over the basic sine wave: sine waves literally have no harmonics (hence the smoothness of the waveform), so any ltering you do on a sine wave will simply reduce its level, and anyway as you turn a deep sine wave up loud enough to hear, you’ll use up far more of your available headroom than is really necessary. Using addional saw or square waves will not only provide addional sonic character to tweak into your perfect bass sound, but these waves inherent upper harmonics will e nable the sound to literally cut through the mix and register at lower listening volumes and on smaller lsitening devices. Remember, harmonically rich sounds will always appear louder than pure tones. Old School Waves It’s worth nong that the classic Roland TB-303 bass synth, beloved by many dance producers, oered only saw and square wave opons – the lack of a pure sine wave didn’t stop it from producing killer, heavy bass sounds. If you ever wondered what the harmonic dierence is between the dierent wave types, saw waves contain all of the ‘integer harmonics’ (both odd and even), while square waves contain only the odd, integer harmonics. Triangle waves are much less harmonically rich than saws or squares, making them a poor choice for bass sounds in most circumstances, while sine waves have no harmonics at all.
In fact, many electronic producers literally construct their bass sound as two or three separate components, programming dierent sounds that occupy specic frequency ranges and that give the impression of a single frequency-spanning behemoth when played together. This allows the sub-bass to do it’s job of adding real weight, and the ‘mid-range bass’ parts adding sonic interest, character and ‘sizzle’. If you want to remove some or even most of the resulng harmonics you can sculpt them away with a low-pass lter – but you can’t sculpt or emphasize later what isn’t there to begin with, so start harmonically rich and rene down as necessary, as you go.
Layer Detuned Oscillators A favourite way of achieving instant harmonic
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Get That Pro Sound - The Ultimate Guide to Bass interest is to use two (usually idencal) oscillators pitched apart by a specic number of cents or notes. For example, one might be pitched an octave below the other; another opon is to pitch each oscillator either up or down by the same amount, for example one +7 cents and the other -7 cents. It’s important to keep the pitch change the same for each oscillator so that the combined pitch of the overall sound stays the same: if you pitch one oscillator at +7 and the other at -9 you end up with an unmusical sound (although this may be what you want in some situaons!). Once you have the oscillators set up, try adjust the amount of pitch dierence between them unl you get something that feels right with the best combinaon of depth and denion. Also try switching one or both of the oscillators to dierent wave types and see what works best, or adjust the lter envelope sengs to be slightly dierent for each oscillator – every situaon will have it’s own opmal sengs.
Layered Samples The same rules for detuning synth oscillators also apply to samples: try layering up two dierent bass samples and tuning one sample a few cents sharp and the other a few cents at, or alternately tuning them a whole octave apart.
2. Initial Envelope And Modulation Settings
Ideally while playing back your bass ri, or at least playing dierent notes up and down the keyboard, begin to shape the sound with amp and lter envelopes. You’ll almost certainly want a fast aack for helping each note audibly punch through the mix, and a reasonably fast release as you don’t want the tail of each bass note apping around uncontrolled aer you’ve let go of the key. Keep things ght and controlled at this stage, unless you have a creave reason not to. Decay and sustain will help create the character of your bass sound, making each note more plucky, for example, or longer and more pad-like. Generally, the longer each note is in your bassline, the more movement you can and should introduce into each of those notes. Try assigning an LFO to modulate pitch, lters or oscillator level. You could also assign velocity and even keyboard tracking to certain parameters so the notes sound dierent depending on how hard they are hit or how high up the keyboard register they are. Keep playing dierent notes and lile sequences to see what a dierent each tweak makes – don’t just repeat a single note over and over, as this won’t give a very useful impression of the sound in context. A neat trick for enhancing the aack of a bass sound is to route an envelope to the lter cuto and set it with very short aack and decay mes and zero sustain, so that it very briey opens the lter up a lile at the start of each note. This can help a struggling bass sound be heard.
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Get That Pro Sound - The Ultimate Guide to Bass
3. Bring The (Subtle) Noise
As well as your harmonically rich waveforms, most synths will allow you to add some form of creave distoron, whether it’s a white noise-generang oscillator or disnct distoron or ‘warmth’ eects secon. It’s a good idea to add some noise at this stage to bring out even a little grit and character in your sound – a completely clean and polite bass sound is generally one that will disappear in the mix context, so you’ll be surprised at rst how much noise and harmonics you can get away with on bass without it being perceived as a ‘distorted’ sound. And as before, you can always remove unwanted frequencies aerwards. Quite oen the best sounds are created from just one or two oscillators and maybe three envelopes modulang the lter, pitch and amplier secons of the patch. By all means experiment and parcularly try taking apart presets to see how they work, but for eecve bass programming for a track try not to overcomplicate maers by using all the oscillators and modulaon opons at your disposal.
4. Configure The Bass Part To Fit With The Kick The most ecient way to put together an eecve low end rhythm secon for an electronic track (and for any genre really) is to gure out prey early on how you want the bass elements to work with the kick drum, both in terms of their sonic characteriscs and their respecve musical paerns. For example, the classic template for dance music is to have the bassline playing a simple o-beat throb around the kick: not only does this keep a driving, syncopated but consistent intensity in the low frequency range to push the track along, but it also means there is no danger of the bass and kick sounds clashing or masking each other since they never play at exactly the same me. The upshot of this is that you can allow both the bass sound and the kick drum to be sonically larger, each occupying a slightly wider frequency range as as such each delivering more energy and more impact. Of course it’s perfectly acceptable to have bass notes and kick drums sounding at the same me, and this is where you’ll want to be that much more careful about the sonic makeup of each. For example, in Drum & Bass you’ll typically have a very deep sub bass sine-wave underpinning things in the 40-80Hz range; then you’ll have the kick, selected and/or EQ’d specically to slot it’s fundamental frequency in at around 100Hz; then higher above the kick you might have the distorted, ‘character’ part of the bassline, zzing with mid- and even high-frequency energy to really help dene and enlarge the perceived presence of the ‘bass’. What this all means is that you’ve built the track with carefully dened layers, making sure from the start that each component is hing it’s own fundamental frequency. Of course you can always use EQ at
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Get That Pro Sound - The Ultimate Guide to Bass the mix to carve holes in unwieldy sounds that are masking others, but when you begin with a clear strategy of what’s basically going where in the frequency spectrum, you give yourself the best possible chance of making a great track and focusing on the creave decisions, without the need for purely correcve mix surgery later.
5. Give it that extra touch
At some point during the inial sound design process (probably somewhere between the other steps menoned, but it will always depend on your approach and that parcular tracks needs) you’ll want to go that extra bit further to begin developing a unique character for your bass sound, or even simply to give it some movement that ts the specic needs of the sound of the part that it’s playing. The possibilies are endless, but here are some ideas and typical starng points for further exploraon:
→ Layer mulple sounds together, either the same synth sound with dierent amp envelope or lter sengs, or the sounds from two completely dierent patches or synths. This si a great way of coming up with unique and signature sounds, and allows you to combine hard digital with warm analogue, or sharp aack sounds with swelling pads for example, in such a way that they appear to be one complex and developing texture.
→ Nows the me to explore the many opons provided by LFOs (Low Frequency Oscillators) for modulaon and rhythmic movement tailored to your bass ri and sound style. For example, a triangle wave LFO modulang the lter cut-o on a bass sound is guaranteed to change things up and spark fresh ideas.
→ Once you’ve got your bass part, the ri or notes, gured out, re-appraise the inial transient of your sound to make sure it’s providing enough aack – or a smoother fade-in, if appropriate – to punch through the mix, work with the inherent groove of the part and keep the separaon between the notes clear and disnct. One trick here is to actually use the aack part of a completely dierent sound, such as a percussion hit, guitar pluck or even a snippet of pitched or ltered white noise: layered up to trigger with each bass note, it becomes part of the perceived bass sound itself, providing addional character and denion.
→ Related to the p above, if you’re using mulitple oscillators for your synth bass sound, try seng a pitch envelope to bend one of the oscillators down and the other up at the aack phase. As long as they’re the same amounts the tuning will remain in the right key, and you’ll have an interesng sound with plenty of movement.
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Get That Pro Sound - The Ultimate Guide to Bass
Part 2: Refining The Sound, And Fitting It Into The Mix Bass In The Mix With your bass part developed and recorded/sequenced into the tracks structure, you may think that the majority of the work is done. But if you really want to achieve a professionalsounding mix, this is just the beginning. Now it’s me to begin the real cra of mixing and producon: rening the sound and bedding it properly into the mix so that it gels with the other elements to form a cohesive whole. Remember that how the bass sounds, or any soloed part for that maer, can change quite dramacally when played in the context of a full mix, so don’t be put out if your amazing bass part needs a fair amount of tweaking as you go on – it ’s all par for the course.
Mix Order: Bass, And The Rest One factor that might determine how much work your bass sound needs in the mix is the order in which you introduce all the parts into the mix. You might be inclined to start with the lead part such as the vocal or main synth or guitar ri and mix around that, and this is valid of course if it works for you. But all other things being equal, the most popular and strategic mix process is to start with geng a rock-solid foundaon for the track with the bass, kick and snare drums: get these balanced and their grooves locked together and it’s dicult to mess up the rest. Bringing the bass in early also means you can can lter, EQ and balance the other instruments around it, pre-empng the scenario where you bring up the bass into an already busy mix and nd no maer how loud you turn it up it’s not being heard. Having the bass there from the start means you don’t have to carve holes at the end to slot it in: it’s been there all along. Doing things this way also means you’ll have a good indicaon of how much high-pass ltering you can get away with on all the other instruments (it’s advisable to high-pass everything to some degree apart from the bass and kick drum, keeping the bass range clear and ght) – you’ll be able to remove more than you would think if you were ltering the part in solo, as the bass will be doing it’s convenonal job of providing focused low-frequency support for everything happening in the higher ranges. Remember, don’t worry if things sound ‘worse’ in solo – if it sounds right for the complete mix, that’s all that counts in the end.
Use Distortion For Additional Punch Once you’re into the mix and have a few elements playing nicely together such as bass, drums and a melodic part such as guitar, you’ll quickly discover whether the bass has the necessary presence in the right frequencies to make itself felt and heard. The programmed harmonics or light creave distoron from the inial sound creaon or recording may have helped, but this is
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Get That Pro Sound - The Ultimate Guide to Bass the me to try out some more overt distoron eects, either from something like a guitar amp simulator or distoron eect plugin. Creave distoron adds the kind of harmonics that really contribute to an increase in perceived loudness, reshaping the structure of the waveform potenally quite radically. Guitar amp plugins are great for adding distoron to any instrument, not just guitars, as they typically oer so many ways to controll and shape the distorted sound. They are also a natural choice for distorng any sort of lead instrument because, with their speaker or ‘cabinet’ simulang component that follows the amplier secon itself modelled on the hardware in terms of smoothing or otherwise taming the unruly and less musical high frequencies. Another aspect of distoron which is somemes forgoen is that the added harmonics follow the signal dynamics, so the louder the signal the greater the eect. And as distoron usually involves some aspect of liming or even hard clipping the loudest parts, you’re eecvely geng compression on these louder parts. This is why distorng bass sounds in parcular is so eecve – you get added upper harmonics for a perceived louder sound overall, and a more even level that is less likely to disappear behind other instruments all in one process.
Give Your Bass Sound An Attack That Helps It Cut Through The Mix So you’ve got a nice and loud bass sound that doesn’t get lost behind the rest of the mix. But once you bring in the combinaon of drum hits and sustained melodic sounds such as guitars and synths, you might nd that the denion of each note start is now somewhat imprecise. An this can be problemac because we get most of our psychological percepon of the mbre and character of a sound from it’s inial aack. Here are some xes for sharpening the aack of your bass sound to really cut through any mix:
→ If you’re using a synth bass, revisit your synth patch and program in either an addional oscillator with a parcularly hard or higher-pitched aack sound, or program a fast lter change to sweep very quickly through the exisng sounds aack phase at the start of every note. For example, you can set the lter with an envelope to be fully closed at the start of each note and on ‘note on’ open parally or fully as quickly as it possibly can. Addionally, have the lter then close right down again: the resulng percussive ‘thlip’ will sound familiar from many electronic records.
→ The p above provides a clue for another technique: rather than programming a lter sweep into the source synth sound, simply add a completely separate addional percussive hit to the start of each bass note. You want something prey short and ght, although you may need to both lengthen the aack poron of the hit to make it less obviously ‘drum-like’ and pitch the hit up or down to get it sing in the frequency where it feels like it belongs to your complete bass sound and contributes the bite to each note that we’re looking for.
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Get That Pro Sound - The Ultimate Guide to Bass
→ Also try the above trick but with a sample of white noise: extend, chop and pitch to taste for a parcularly sharp aack noise to add to your bass.
→ We’ll cover bass compression below, but if your sound at this point uses any compression (some synths like the brilliant z3ta+ have a compressor module built in, for example), make sure that the compressor is set with an appropriately long Aack seng to allow the inial transient of the bass notes through unsquashed.
Bass Compression If you’re working with a bass guitar performance or any samples of acousc bass instruments that are not as apparently malleable as the synth patches we’ve been discussing so far, you’ll be relieved to hear that compressors can be used to similarly transform the dynamics of any sound source you choose to feed them. Compression can be used to turn a fairly limp bass guitar recording into a breathing, growling monster, or bring up the detail of mbre and recording arfacts that give the part (and potenally the whole track) a sense of character and uniqueness.
The Kick Drum Most of the ps we’ve discussed so far for creang and sculpng ulmate bass sounds apply equally to kick drums as well. Layering electronic or sub kick samples with higher-frequency acousc ones can provide with a desirable combinaon of character and punch; and of course, compression, liming and distoron are your best friends when it comes to drum processing too.
→ Consider that compressor models have dierent characteriscs and can sound quite dierent to each other, parcularly when pushed to relavely extreme sengs. For compressing bass instruments (and most other things as well), two of the most iconic compressors are the Teletronix LA-2A, Urei 1176 and Empirical Labs Distressor, and there are now plenty of compressor plugins modelled on these original hardware designs such as the Waves CLA2A and CLA-76 and the Universal Audio ocially licensed emulaons. Why are they oen considered to be head and shoulders above the rest? Apart from the intuive controls, it’s specically for their saturaon characteriscs when driven hard with loud source signals. They can imbue sounds with nice and smooth ‘distoron’ or extra grit (parcularly useful for rock, metal and dubstep).
→ One trick used by many rock producers is to subgroup the drums and bass together and ap-
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Get That Pro Sound - The Ultimate Guide to Bass ply compression to the group. This will help further ‘glue’ the bass and percussion elements into a cohesive groove.
→ Taking the ‘bass and drums compression’ idea to an extreme in a sense leads to sidechain compression. I’ve discussed this in much more detail i n the GTPS Ulmate Guide to Compression, but essenally you’re compressing the bass every me the kick drum sounds, which both ensures the two are adequately separated and also contributes to the cool dynamic ‘breathing’ eect found in most modern dance and electronic music.
→ You can usually get away with far heavier and more aggressive compression on bass than other sounds and parts. With this in mind, also try the classic processor chain of a compressor/limiter combinaon:
Use A Compressor And Limiter In Combination For Maximum Power One of the main reasons to compress the bass sound will be to enable a signicant increase in its overall level: we squash the peaks and bringing the average signal level up. Ironing out the peaks also of course makes the sound more consistent in level, which is doubly important for the ‘track foundaon’ role of basslines and sounds. However, compression can be only part of the soluon to processing the bass sound for maximum punch and loudness. One of the signicant characteriscs of compression is that it works opmally over periods of at least tens of milliseconds: If you try to make a compressor respond faster than this by using very short aack and release mes (in an aempt to capture the inial transient hit of the bass note), the compressor begins to respond to individual waveform cycles rather than the greater overall shape of the signal, and you start geng distorted lower frequencies – denitely not a desirable side-aect for bass processing! The answer can be to use a compressor together with a limiter, in series. Limiters work in microseconds, which can make all the dierence, and the nice ‘so clipping’ type of harmonic distoron generated by valve designs (and valve-emulang plugins) rounds rather than hard clips the peaks – which conveniently increases perceived loudness. A limiter will only introduce so clipping on high-level signals, so the idea is that by using a compressor followed by a limiter, you can allow each of them to play to their me-based and amplitude strengths. The compressor evens out the overall level of the signal, not clipping the peaks but bringing them to a more uniform level (you don’t have to worry about compressing the peaks anyway, as any that do spill through will be reined in by the limiter that’s next in the signal chain). This is then just the sort of ‘raw-but-opmized’ audio a limiter likes – it simply has more signal to work it’s so clipping magic on, for achieving maximum overall ‘loudness’ gains without unwanted compression artefacts.
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Get That Pro Sound - The Ultimate Guide to Bass
Bass EQ With a suitably loud and consistent bass sound playing back in your mix, the next step will naturally be to rene the way it slots into the frequency spectrum under and around the other instruments. This is the primary role of EQ, and while it’s dicult to oer universal rules for EQing any sound – every situaon will have its own problems and soluons – there are a few bass-specic EQ ps that are always worth bearing in mind:
→ When selecng and seng up an EQ plugin for bass, it ’s generally beer to start with shelving EQ rather than introducing bell-shaped EQ curves. This is because it’s very easy to start boosng or dropping parcular frequencies that will make individual notes sck our or disappear – undoing the work of your compression processing to keep things nice and even. Shelving EQ will keep any boosts you add suitably broad and non-‘lumpy’.
→ For specic frequency ranges to boost, try starng at 300Hz or 400Hz for added low-mid presence that will allow the bass to come through on smaller speakers and to make it feel more smooth and warm; and around 700Hz to bring out any aggressive bite inherent in the bass sound. To really make the bass sound poke out, you can boost a lile at around 3kHz.
→ It’s generally a good idea to cut high frequencies on any instrument above their parcular or characterising ranges: this applies equally to bass. You might be surprised to nd just how much relavely inaudible ‘stu’ is going on in the mid and high frequencies of your bass sound, and by cung these away with EQ or a low-pass lter you can free up this space for the instruments that actually sit primarily in those ranges. However, be careful not to overdo the ltering: somemes, there are odd bits of pluck noise, string squeak or almost unnoceable zz or vibe in the higher frequencies of a bass track that you don’t want to necessarily lose completely. Try starng with a low-pass lter at 10kHz, sweep it up and down the frequency range a lile as you listen back to the mix, and check it’s not ‘boxing in’ the bass sound in any way. If you have a good spread of higher-frequency instruments playing with the bass, this should add a lile extra clarity.
→ It’s a good idea to pay parcular aenon to the evolving relaonship between the kick and bass parts as you go through the stages of processing, EQing and sculpng. Each change you make you want to be strengthening the way the two work together: if you nd that a signicant change to one hurts the way it interacts with the other, it’s probably beer to rethink the new change than potenally be undoing the interacon you’ve created so far. Always think of any mix change in the context of the full mix – this is the only way anyone else is going to hear it, aer all.
EQ & Compression: Which First? As menoned in the Ulmate Guides to Compression and EQ, there are decisions to be made about the order in which you apply processing and EQ to your bass sound. There are several
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Get That Pro Sound - The Ultimate Guide to Bass opons and it can seem confusing at rst whether to EQ or compress sounds rst. The key thing is to remember exactly what eect you’re having on the sound at each stage: Compression will naturally tend to emphasise the stringest tones of the source material, so it does make sense to place an EQ before the compressor in order to shape the sound that you actually want to emphasise. But you could also use EQ aer compression if the situaon calls for it: this post-compression EQ can be used more to further sculpt the sound into the context of the complete mix.
Bass Mix Trick: An Alternative To EQ Somemes you’ll nd that no maer how much EQ tweaking and adjustment you make, the bass just won’t cut through the mix like you want. In these cases, a very simple but eecve trick is to just duplicate the bass track and have it playing back on two idencal tracks. Here you’ll simply get more gain to play with and avoid the scenario of pushing a single tracks fader dangerously into the red. And of course from here, you’re also ready to process the two tracks either idencally or dierently, with EQ, compression and distoron. This parallel processing provides you with yet more exibility and opportunies to sculpt and ‘scale up’ the bass sound as big as you need it in the mix.
Harmonic Enhancers Once you’ve created, distorted, compressed and EQ’d your bass sound into the mix, you might very well sll nd that with all the sculpng, not to menon the processing on the other parts in the mix, the bass is not cung through just as much as you want. Parcularly if you’re using a relavely clean or smooth bass sound, you might be missing some of the vital upper harmonics we discussed earlier that give the bass that extra presence. An harmonic enhancer plugin here can be more eecve than EQ at this point for increasing the clarity and perceived level of the bass sound in the mix. What these processors do is read the incoming material and generate new harmonic content from it. What’s more, they allow you to adjust the balance between the fundamental frequency or root note and these new harmonics (even as far as removing the fundamental frequency completely). This works because the way our brains naturally interpret sounds and harmonics means they tend to ‘hear’ any missing fundamental if the upper harmonics are present – so the processor essenally creates an illusion of more bass while actually potenally reducing the level of the lowest bass frequencies. This is parcularly useful for geng your mixes to sound full and bassy even when played on systems with no actual bass response, such as radio or headphones. There are enhancers designed specically for bass, such as Maxx Bass and Renaissance Bass from Waves.
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Get That Pro Sound - The Ultimate Guide to Bass
Subharmonic Synths/Generators These work in a similar way to harmonic enhancers, but here you’re adding lower frequency harmonics rather than higher. This can be used to add extra weight and sub-bass frequencies that just weren’t present in the original sound. Some producers also use pitch shiers at this stage for similar eect, pitching a copy of the bass part (and oen kick drum too) down by an octave and mixing this with the original. In a sense, this works in the same way as layering dierent components for the ulmate bass sound that we discussed in Secon 1.
Bass Panning It’s generally accepted that the main bass and kick drum parts should always be kept panned to the centre, for a couple of reasons. First is that this shares the high-level bass energy equally between the two stereo speakers, so you maintain maximum impact overall. Another reason is that it maximizes the chances that listeners will always be able to hear the bass properly, even when they’re not posioned directly between the two speakers (moving around or sing to one side of a large room, for example). However, remember that if you’re building your bass sound from mulple layers at different frequencies, and you’re working in a genre where the bass is a key melodic or hook feature of the track, consider using separate panning and eects treatments on the layers that don’t occupy the lowest frequency regions. For example, you’ll want to keep sub-bass and any deep layers central, but any mid- or higher-frequency elements of the bass sound – some zzy distoron or lter ‘swooshes’ on a Dubstep sound, for example – could be panned progressively wider the higher in
frequency they get. This is one technique to help create a really big, epic-sounding synth bass that sll keeps the fundamental bass energy front and centre.
Bass & Effects Related to the above trick, it’s best to leave the primary, low frequencies of your bass sound clean and powerful, but with the higher layers or frequencies addional eects processing can bring movement and variaon to the sound. Therefore, the best sorts of eects for bass, apart from the now familiar distoron, are those that incorporate some kind of sweep or modulaon eect: angers, phasers, and any of the new breed of auto-lters and LFO-shaper plugins are worth a try. Typically bass and delay or reverb are a tricky combinaon to make work: these eects easily mask and obscure the original sound with their washes of extra sound, which is usually the opposite to what we want when working to create a punchy bass sound. However, there are mes when a whole-note delay line could be used to create a sort of arpeggiated variaon on your original bass ri, or a bit of pre-delay (and short or non-existent decay me) from a slapback-style reverb can help place the bass in a characterful ‘space’. Whichever eects you end up using on your bass sound, be sure to set up a lter aer the eect to lter out all the low-frequency return, parcularly from a delay or reverb. This way you’ll get to keep the ght low end of the original untreated bass in place.
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Get That Pro Sound - The Ultimate Guide to Bass
Part 3: Finishing, Testing And Mastering Mastering Bass Mastering is the stage at which, tradionally, a nal mix is taken to a dedicated studio with a very experienced engineer who tweaks the frequency balance, EQ , compression and overall level so that the mix is in its most opmized form for mass reproducon and distribuon. These days many aspiring producers undergo this process themselves, parcularly because the equipment required to do mastering is now much more available in plugin form. However, decent mastering depends at least as much on the highly controlled mastering room and the know-how and experience of the engineer as it does on access to the nest EQs and compressors. With that in mind, if you sll want to master yourself, tread carefully – but there is sll a lot you can do to further ghten your ‘nished’ mix, especially in the low frequencies. Geng the best results will probably be a maer of trial and error at rst. Some tools to get familiar with are mul-band compressors, dynamic EQ and enhancers, if you aren’t already. These will enable you to select and treat frequency ranges independently from the others, which is of course paramount when you’re dealing with a complete mix. One more thing on mastering: it’s generally beer to go into mastering a track with slightly too much bass present than too lile: it ’s a lot easier to sculpt, lter and reduce excessive levels and bass frequencies than it is to introduce something that wasn’t there to begin with. And nally, if you don’t’ have the budget for professional mastering, your best bet is to just make sure, through trial and error if necessary, that your mix sounds great on as many dierent systems as possible.
Judgment Day: Accurate Monitoring & Referencing On Different Systems Is Crucial Here, at the end of the producon process, you’ll want to come back to the queson of what kind of listening environment you’re primarily catering for. Is your music desned for radio play, or are you mainly interested in making club bangers that are opmized for a large and powerful soundsystem? These choices have big implicaons for the bass element of your mixes: for radio and home listening, for example, it’s almost pointless creang a monster sub-bass whose fundamental frequency at 50Hz will just disappear on a small speaker system. Here you might want to use an
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Get That Pro Sound - The Ultimate Guide to Bass enhancer to give the illusion of bigger bass through mid-range harmonics. On the other hand, your perfectly-craed studio mix might sound quite small and boxy when played over a massive club system if you haven’t ever tested how it’s sounding outside your bedroom. This is usually because of the psychoacousc eect of listening level: we perceive extreme low frequencies and high frequencies as being quieter than the mid-range at low playback levels, and it’s only when hearing things at an overall much greater level that the perceived frequency balance is ‘at’. So although it’s preferable to work and mix at generally very low levels, try and crank things up – ideally on a variety of dierent systems – as you progress towards the nal mix. If producing for the club, try and build in some test listening sessions (or if you DJ, incorporate a work-in-progress mix into your next set) before you get to the nishing and mastering stages.
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Get That Pro Sound - The Ultimate Guide to Bass
Conclusion
Throughout this guide we’ve covered everything from sourcing and shaping your initial raw bass sounds, to fitting them into full mixes, to applying the full gamut of mix tricks, techniques, processing and effects to make the bass component deliver exactly what you want in the context of your own music productions. You might nd that having worked your way through the dierent secons, once you get to the nal part about mastering and tesng your parcular tracks, you’ll have a beer understanding of the importance of the discussion at the very beginning: the idea that you can know all the producon techniques and have decent equipment, but the boom line is that you must be able to hear accurately what you’re doing - or at least what is going on down in the low frequencies - in order to make bass work well for you.
In this sense, don’t worry if your bass doesn’t come up to scratch on inial tesng on dierent systems as menoned: just return to the earlier pages and see if there are any acousc treatment ps or sound-shaping techniques that you can apply to solve the problem. Most of all, I hope this ebook will be helpful in your next sonic adventures - let me know how you get on at george@gehatprosound.com , and don’t forget to check out the GetThatProSound blog regularly for new posts, more ps and more ebooks coming soon.. Best of luck, George Robinson Get That Pro Sound
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