bass mud-tone & equalization

crosstudio

crosstudio

New member
my mix sounds fine without the bass. with the bass it's a bit muddy. how can i get the mud out without losing the bottom. where's the mud tone? and how wide of a cut do i need?
 
I have found that I have to keep the bass almost nonexistant in the mix to keep the mud out... Good thing I dont have a bass player or he would be pissed!!!
 
unfortunatly for me, my music style is bass laden, so it's got to be present. i record with a 4-string ibanez sdgr (left-handed BTW) a tech21 sans amp DI box, and an audio logic compressor into a mackie 1604 that goes into a frontier designs wavecenter/tango24 HD setup. i'm using cakewalk's directX EQ.

i'm figuring maybe somewhere between 200-400hz is where the mud is?
 
You'd be amazed by how much a decent bass actually makes a difference... A Lot!

On another note:
My bass player is the most pickiest about his tone than any other bass player I've met go far. He's the oldest in our band (35), and he's the most babyist when it comes to his tone (listen to Rush albums and that's pretty close).

When we recorded our first album over two years ago, he insisted that we had to mic his cab. "A DI just introduces mud." He had a Factor bass and an SWR Goliath II 4x12 w/bullet cab and SWR an head. We used three different bass tracks (miced cab close, far away, a direct (a Stewart) from the bass). When we mixed, about 95% of the overall bass guitar in the mix was the direct.

Now, we're getting ready to start recording another album. He says he wants to just go direct this time (I can't believe that after 12 years of playing guitar and 8 years of playing bass, he's converting)! So to drill it into his head even more, before we start recording, I'm going to buy a Ridge Farm Gas Cooker Valve DI to track the bass with. If we need some of that bass cab sound, we can just run the bass signal out to the amp and cab in the iso booth and mic that with a Neumann TLM-103 during mixdown.
 
I am not familiar with Cakewalk... When you are EQ'ing the track, can you listen to it with the rest of the mix, or do you only get to hear it solo? I'm using Cool Edit Pro and you have to evaluate the EQ without hearing the entire mix which makes it next to impossible to nail.
I've been thinking that I can run the track I want to EQ out to an external EQ and hear the track with the rest of the mix as I EQ it, but I havent tried it yet.
 
S8-N, Not sure about Calkwalk, but with Cubase, EQ is realtime with all the other tracks. This is with a DirectX plug-in and CEP? If not, would a DirectX plug-in work for you?
 
hey layth, thanks for the compliment on the web page. i'm a software engineer by day, and a music enthusiast at night.

you can audition your EQ change in cakewalk, but it's solo. of course once you implement the EQ modification, you can undo it.

once i cut some of the deep bottom on the guitar track, and vocals the bass isn't so muddy. i guess i just needed to make a little more room for it in the mix. i'm new to the mix/mastering end of things.
 
Mud freq is between 200 and around 400 Hz. If you've got a parametric, or sweepable eq with variable "q" set the "q" around 1-1.5 octaves bandwidth and cut about 3db at 250. Sweep around if this seems to help. If you cut much more than 3db, you'll probably kill of the character of the bass. If you find a center frequency that works well, narrow the bandwidth until the mud returns.

I posted a table from a "Modern Recording Techniques" a few weeks ago in the mixing techniques forum here.
 
In CEP you can only apply DirectX plug-ins while in the waveform editor mode which only plays back the waveform you are working on. Yes, that blows... EQ'ing is now guesswork and trial and error.
I have had an idea which I haven't tried yet. I can run the playback line out of said channel out into an external mixer and back into a new track, that way I can hear the entire recording. I don't see why it wouldn't work...
 
That is the thing I hate about Plug-in FX, especially on Cakewalk. I prefer to have knobs, sliders and buttons to control my EQ and FX, and to do it real time while listening to the whole mix.
 
Mute your bass line and listen to the other elements of your mix...is there an instrumet(s) that seem to have more bass freqs than necessary? Try hipassing those a bit and unmute the bass to see whether that helps...u could also try reducing about 500hz from the bass. Is it a syth bass or real bass?
 
Mute your bass line and listen to the other elements of your mix...is there an instrumet(s) that seem to have more bass freqs than necessary? Try hipassing those a bit and unmute the bass to see whether that helps...u could also try reducing about 500hz from the bass. Is it a syth bass or real bass?
 
Mute your bass line and listen to the other elements of your mix...is there an instrumet(s) that seem to have more bass freqs than necessary? Try hipassing those a bit and unmute the bass to see whether that helps...u could also try reducing about 500hz from the bass. Is it a syth bass or real bass?
 
Fishmed and S8-N, re EQ not being real time, its one of the reasons Im waiting for Digi 001 to come out for the PC. With Pro-tools ALL effects were real time, at least at the demo I attended. Pretty impressive especially if they can duplicate it on PC. The limit is 24 tracks though.
 
i thought it was only when i'm recording live bass, but now that i've gone back and listened to some other tracks, i can hear it there too. just not as much; however, the live bass is much more funky and has more oomph than the analog bass type sounds i get from my roland sc880 or my ensoniq asr-x pro.
 
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