Hi, sorry to have so many posts at once, I just needed some help with my sub bass. when listening to alot of pro cd's on headphones I notice they have that nice wieghty sound of what i think is about 50hz to them and then when I play them on my stereo with a pretty good bass response they sound nice and the speakers don't rattle. However when I try to get a similar sound to my mix/kick/bass it sounds right on headphones but then rattles the hell out of the speakers and to get it to not rattle I have to take out a massisive amount of bass 0-100hz which then sound too light when back on the phones, I've got a lo-cut on the mix as i thought this might help at 90hz (I think its a pretty un steep curve) which helped a bit. Is it normal to take loads of bass out of sampled 909 kicks? Also i've tried experimenting adding sub bass with sine waves an octave down then cutting this frequency out of the kick which seems to help a bit (not sure why), any tips would be greatly appreciated, thanks.
Sub Bass Rattle
- Thread starter benage
- Start date
MessianicDreams
New member
Have a tried a fairly steep roll-off around 40hz-ish? I think that in trying to get that nice "weighty" low-end that you described, you may have added in some really low stuff which is making your speakers rattle.
Seafroggys
Well-known member
you'd be surprised, a fairly high hi-pass filter will get rid of rumble while keeping bass. I put a high-pass at 65-70 hz for a bass guitar and it still has power in the 40-50 range.
Rather than a low frequency boost, a lot bass on pro cds has been augmented with higher-order harmonic content. You can try the same thing yourself with a maximizer plugin. The extra harmonics fool the brain into thinking the music is bassier than it actually is, hence less speaker rattle
SouthSIDE Glen
independentrecording.net
Unless you have really high end headphones, I wouldn't count on them giving anything near accuracy down at 50Hz, which leads me to believe your estimation on the numbers is misleading.
This is typical; using phones for bass references is about as reliable as like hiring the Three Stooges as your security firm. Get it to sound right on your loudspeakers first.
You're probably throwing the baby out with the bathwater by low cutting the entire range. What you probably need to do is keep the right frequencies and dump the wrong ones; i.e. take a more targeted approach. Sweep through the range on that kick track and see if there's a frequency or two that honks out at you or sounds more offensive than the rest, then notch those out with a parametric set to narrow Q.
This is a very good point. After cleaning out the crap, figure out the best-sounding dominant frequency(s) of what's left, and augment those with some higher-order harmonics.
G.
Thanks for your help everyone. I noticed on the mp3's I was listening to the kick seemed to be mainly these lower frequencies and not much else so I tried pitching down the kick and turning It down a bit in the mix and this seems to have worked. I think it was the absense of the slightly higher frequencies that let the sub bass area shine while still keepng it queiter in the mix. thanks again
starbuck26
New member
Wouldn't a speaker rattle be a result of a natural frequency resonance? And wouldn't it change from system to system?
My desk, for example, vibrates when I hit a Bb on my bass guitar. I know this, because I have a lot of crap on my desk. Is this the same thing?
MessianicDreams
New member
I'll try and explain this with a music analogy:
A kick drum will have a fundamental pitch/frequency (say, 50hz) - think of this as your root note. It will also contain a bunch of harmonics, higher up in pitch/frequency. What you want to do is boost these harmonics - you'll easily locate one by doubling the frequency of the fundamental - in other words, locate the octave on the root note (if your fundamental is 50hz, then the octave will be 100hz).
You can trick the ear in to thinking that the 50hz fundamental is quite powerful simply by boosting some of the other harmonics - you can get away with diminishing the fundamental, even sometimes to the point of totally getting rid of it.
SouthSIDE Glen
independentrecording.net
Same thing, different source...kind of
.We're both talking about wanting to get rid of unwanted resonances. You're talking about resonances in the playback system/environment, I'm talking about potential resonances in the recorded source material. "Speaker rattle" can sometimes simply be caused by overdriving the element, and that overdriving can be caused by one or two particular runaway frequencies in the source. If the runaways also happen to be in an area that the speaker has problems with anyway, that'll compound things even further.
Of course, source problems also depend a lot on playback volume and mix volume. If one has quality monitors, it should take a lot of both for honkers in the source to get them to rattle. (Versus playback resonances which should be there regardless of volume.) In this case it sounds like he did indeed have the bass too hot in the mix.
G.
starbuck26
New member
Same thing, different source...kind of
We're both talking about wanting to get rid of unwanted resonances. You're talking about resonances in the playback system/environment, I'm talking about potential resonances in the recorded source material. "Speaker rattle" can sometimes simply be caused by overdriving the element, and that overdriving can be caused by one or two particular runaway frequencies in the source. If the runaways also happen to be in an area that the speaker has problems with anyway, that'll compound things even further.
Of course, source problems also depend a lot on playback volume and mix volume. If one has quality monitors, it should take a lot of both for honkers in the source to get them to rattle. (Versus playback resonances which should be there regardless of volume.) In this case it sounds like he did indeed have the bass too hot in the mix.
G.
I see. So, in a home recording environment, you're likely compounding these problems because the same crappy room with runaway frequencies is the crappy room you mix in with the same runaway frequencies?
SouthSIDE Glen
independentrecording.net
Only if those freqs are the same. But that's not necessarily a common occurrence. "Honkers" on a recording can and do occur all over the spectrum for a wide variety of reasons. The chances of one just happening to occur right at the resonant frequency of your desk is not very large. But it does happen on rare occasions (if one is lucky enough).
G.