Category: Bass

These ‘PROTIPS’ have appeared across our socials over the last few months. We thought it might be helpful to have them collated into a single digestible article – so here’s part one, which consists of the first five. We’ll be continuing to release these regularly, providing tips, tricks, and valuable advice across a range of production, workflow, creative, mindset, and mix-related questions.

Whilst hi-hats add a lot of energy and groove, if proper consideration isn’t given to de-essing and minimising resonant frequencies, they will end up sounding overly harsh when your record is played at high volumes and/or mastered. You can solve this problem in various ways:

1. Apply some generous subtractive EQ to remove un-needed high and low frequencies. Tape saturation also does a great job of smoothing the high end.

2. Play with the envelope of your hi-hats to create a tighter, more precise sound. Sometimes a transient shaper can be useful here, too. You don’t need as ‘much’ hi-hat as you think you do, especially on club systems.

3. Use a de-esser plugin, or preferably a specialist tool like Oeksound’s Soothe to control & dynamically suppress harsh, fatiguing resonances. Your mastering engineer, and your ears, will thank you. 

It’s a problem that’s been around virtually as long as we’ve been mixing audio: how to get that coherent, pleasant-sounding low-end with a kick and bass that ‘sit’ together nicely. Here’s our advice:

1. It might sound obvious, but choosing the right sounds to begin with is going to make your life a lot easier. If you have a kick drum that’s got the sub-heavy, low-end characteristics of an 808, then you’re going to struggle to get a coherent, pleasant balance with almost any other kind of bass sound that plays at the same time. You can navigate this by a) not having a bassline and making the kick even heavier (common in a lot of techno productions) or b) programming/playing the bass to be in spaces where the kick isn’t. However, keep in kind that offbeat basslines which are too busy or too sparse may not best suit the genre you’re making.

2. If you’re happy that you’ve got the best possible sounds, the next step is to tidy up what you have. Be diligent with your EQ, being sure to make a low-cut as high as you can go on every instrument and then on every bus channel too. It’s not uncommon in specific genres to go as high as 30/40/50hz with the kick drum to leave room for the bass. You should also remove any ‘flabbiness’ from both the kick and bass using the envelopes or a transient shaper to tighten up the notes and create space. Using something like a Subpac can help you to measure the interaction between the kick and bass, and also alert you to any other instruments which have rumbles that your ears can’t pick up.

3. Lastly, some good old-fashioned classic side-chaining may actually be all you need. We’ve placed it last as a recommendation because it shouldn’t take precedence over choosing the right sounds and tidying up your low-end elements – you should be doing those things anyway. Still, it’s a helpful method which not only can improve your mixes but also works as a stylistic sound design tool that you can apply to vocals, pads, textures or anything else to add a dimension of rhythm and movement. Productions by artists like Kaytranada and Disclosure are great examples of this.

Making records as an electronic artist or dance music producer is very often a solo pursuit, and after the initial burst of creativity and ‘fun’, we can spend many hours ‘in a loop’ feeling frustrated, doubting ourselves, and procrastinating over the arrangement and anything that we find tedious. Collaborating with somebody else can really help you in this situation because the other person is very likely to approach the music or stems that you send them in a refreshed way. They won’t be fatigued by repetition and they will be able to hear things that you’ve missed – both good and bad. 

Finishing music is absolutely crucial but it’s also one of the processes that requires the most discipline. Try reaching out to someone you’re friends with, or on the same label, or perhaps have worked with before, and propose that you swap stems and finish each other’s ideas. This way, if all goes well, you’ll end up with 2 finished tracks which you can send to labels and you will have minimised the tedious bits that usually lead to time being wasted. 

There are sure to be times when you’re not feeling quite as creative. Maybe you’re tired, or perhaps you don’t have the time on a particular day to get into making a full track. On these occasions, it’s important to remember that no session in the studio ever needs to be wasted. If, for instance, you’ve only got 2 hours to spare, you could use it to export stems and loops from existing projects, organise your sample folders, and save channel strips & synth patches. This makes sense on several levels – it’s likely that you’ve already spent a reasonable amount of time getting those sounds exactly how you want them, so why not call upon them again when you’re making that next record in the same style? They should slot in nicely with whatever you’re working on in terms of tone and processing, and reusing them also has the added benefit of helping to establish your ‘sound’ through repetition of certain signature elements or motifs. You can effectively think of this as your own ‘in-house’ sample library, which you can chop, flip and resample. If you’re diligent about it, it can really pay dividends in the future. 

Another recommendation is to move your most inspiring samples into a dedicated folder so that when you need something with a bit of magic, you can simply heato the ‘inspiration’ folder to find it. 

Finally, Save precious hard drive space (and your sanity) by deleting sounds you’ve had for years, but never used. We all have those sample graveyards that (even with the best of intentions) never get visited. It’s highly unlikely you’ll miss them if you delete them, and it’ll make finding those hidden gems that bit easier. Just because there’s an endless palette of drum sounds out in the world, it doesn’t mean that you should waste your time trying to acquire them all. 

It might initially seem counterintuitive, but too many options can be stifling. It’s what’s commonly known as ‘analysis paralysis’. Before we had the computer processing power, choices and (almost endless) distractions we do today, the specific ways in which most hardware and software worked arguably helped us to focus far better. Limitations included: available memory, sampling time, mixing desk channels or just a general lack of equipment. Very often, there might only be single compressor / delay / reverb along with possibly 1 hardware synth or some type, a drum machine, and perhaps an 8-track recorder, in a smaller home or project studio. As a result, producers and musicians had to find creative workarounds to bring their ideas to life. 

You can apply these principles to your own music by setting boundaries. Why not try and make a record with only 5 elements, but make those elements evolve by continuously automating them to keep things interesting? Or if you usually use live instruments like Rhodes, guitars, and bass, try writing a track with entirely synthesised elements. These self-imposed restrictions should speed up your decision making.

Another fun approach, if you’re able to, is to use a standalone groovebox like an MPC or Maschine to construct a track. In the heyday of house and hip hop, many beats would have been composed entirely on an MPC or SP1200, and the ‘on-the-fly’ performance recorded to a 4-track or DAT or tape machine, including breakdowns, effects, and main sections. You could then choose the best parts and edit a 12 minute recording down to 6 or 7 minutes. Many producers still employ this method today.

 

In this article, we’re going to look further at improving the sound of the low end in your productions. In particular, we are going to delve into EQ, one of the most important tools available to the producer, and look at basic mixing using parametric EQ. We recommend reading part 1 first if you haven’t yet done so – you can find it here.

EQ is the abbreviation of Equalisation and comes from the early 20th century when the tone of the human voice over a telegraph or telephone needed to be ‘equalised’. Now it refers to a control to change the tone of audio: specifically, it’s a filter that is able to cut or boost a particular section or frequency range of the audio spectrum. The bass and treble controls on a car stereo are a basic EQ (called a ‘shelving EQ) which allows you to boost at fixed frequencies either the ‘low end’ of the musical spectrum – the bass, or the ‘top end’ – the treble. The EQ available to producers, however, splits the audio spectrum up into much smaller sections than simply bass and treble and allows for far more precision and control than simply boosting.

The full human auditory spectrum, from the very lowest sounds that you can only really ‘feel’ rather than hear and up to the highest sounds that a human can perceive, is in the range of around 20Hz up to around 20kHz. All the sounds and samples you’ll be using in your productions will sit somewhere within this spectrum. The producer’s job is to get all the sounds to work as they want it to – to either cut through the mix, or sit quietly in the background, and to work with all the other sounds. EQ will be one of the main tools in this job, and you will grow to love your trusty EQs once you learn what they can do.

Two Golden Rules

There are a number of different types of EQ but when you’re working in a DAW, it’s likely that you’ll be using a parametric EQ. Parametric EQ allows you to select the frequency, bandwidth and gain. It’s the producer’s go-to tool to fix all sorts of production challenges. Need a little more slap from the congas? Too much sizzle on the hi-hats? A bit too much boom but not enough thud in the kick drum? These are all things that can be tackled using your EQ. But! …there are two golden rules to remember: 

  • Always try to fix the problem at the source first – EQ is a wonderful tool, but before you reach for the gain control,  it’s worth checking to see if you’ve chosen an appropriate sound. 
  • If you’re happy with the sound choice then it’s almost always preferable, at least in the first instance, to cut the EQ rather than boost.

You can think of creating a well-mixed track like creating a sonic jigsaw. Each sound – a beat, a loop, a bass line, a sample or a vocal – needs to fit neatly with all the others to create the whole. Putting a mix together can involve sculpting out spaces in the frequency spectrum for each part to sit in, depending on the complexity of the track in question, and your sound sources, amongst other things.  You can ‘sculpt’ this space by using EQ to remove parts of the audio spectrum that are un-needed, and that are getting in the way of other parts or bussed groups of parts. It’s way too easy to give a few little boosts to some parts in isolation and suddenly find yourself with an overcooked, bright or harsh sounding mix which will also eat away at your precious headroom. Far better to begin your mixdown by making cuts, cleaning up and decluttering. 

For example, you might want to make your bassline really cut through the mix. Instead of just using the EQ to add extra bass, it would make more sense to check other parts in the track and experiment with making EQ cuts at low and lower-mid frequencies to declutter the sonic space in which the bass is sitting. The trick is to work out what are the essential/fundamental parts of the sonic spectrum that the bassline ‘lives in’ – what frequency makes it sing – and then to check the other individual non-bass parts of your mix and see if you can cut some or all of this particular frequency area away from them without affecting them adversely.

Finding the ‘Sweet Spot’

To do this, you need to find the ‘sweet spot’ – the point in the frequency spectrum where the ‘heart’ of a sound is, the part which gives it its own personal character.  The standard method is to solo the part, in this example, we’re talking about a bassline, and use a Parametric EQ with a narrow bandwidth (or ‘Q’) setting and turn the boost right up. Then sweep the EQ all the way along the frequency spectrum and back again, until you find the part that you like and that contains the main character, the ‘sweet spot’, or the essence of that particular sound. Depending on our audio material, we might find that a boost at 100Hz gives our bassline some really nice fatness. So we then take the parametric EQ off the bass and listen to the other parts in the mix to see if any of them contain extraneous low-end information, particularly around 100Hz that you can cut without affecting their overall sound in the mix.

Instruments like pads and drones, and percussion, like toms, can contain lots of bass information that you can remove without it affecting the sound and impact of these parts in the mix. This then clears out a nice big space for your bassline to sit in. But even sounds that you perceive as being in the top frequencies (such as tambourines and shakers ) will likely have extra un-needed bass information too.

Once you’ve done this process, you may find that you don’t even need to ‘boost’ the bass at all. However, if you still feel you want more from your bassline, you can start to boost instead of cut. A boost at the sweet spot might work well. You might also find that a little boost in the lower mid area, perhaps between 800Hz and 2kHz might bring out some of the other harmonics in the bassline and give it a little punch and clarity. As we mentioned in part one, using overdrive or saturation is a fantastic way to add harmonics, helping the bass to be ‘heard’ on smaller playback systems (phones, laptops, computer speakers) as well as felt.

Knowing the ranges that instruments and voices occupy in the frequency spectrum is essential, and which frequencies you choose to boost or cut will be at least partly down to personal taste and of course, every track is different. Whether you boost or cut will be down to the particular sounds that you’re working with, and if these are samples whether they’ve had any prior processing, what source they were sampled from, and so on. So whilst there are no hard and fast rules, as the excellent chart above from Sweetwater shows there are some boost/cut points that tend to produce pleasing results.

  • 50Hz – Increase to add fullness to the lowest instruments or sounds in your mix like kick drums and basslines. Decrease in reduce ‘boominess’ in your basslines or kicks
  • 100Hz – Increase to add more ‘punch’ or ‘hardness’ to bass sounds. Reduce to increase clarity.
  • 200Hz – Increase to add fullness to snares, guitars, mid-range synths etc., reduce to decrease ‘muddiness’ in vocals or other mid-range sounds. 
  • 400Hz – A boost at 400Hz might add clarity to basslines, particularly at low volumes. A cut can reduce ‘boxiness’ of low-end sounds. 
  • 800Hz – Again, a boost around 800Hz can increase the clarity and punch of bass sounds. 

So that’s our introduction to using EQ on your bass sounds to deal with certain problems. In summary, we would always recommend that you try to fix any issue at the source first – choosing the right sounds can save you hours of frustration and work, and when you do use EQ, always try cutting some frequencies to deal with a problem before you boost.