clashing bass and vox frequencies

[mharr552000]

When I solo my bass and vocal tracks they sound fine. No distortion at all, but when I run them together they distort in spots. It is usually one word that gets distorted.
I have them both panned straight up the middle. If I crank one off center the distortion lessens in proportion to how far apart they get. I can also lessen the distortion by knocking the bass fader down for the duration of the offending passage.
At what frequencies do a bass guitar and male voice overlap that would cause this? I'm already knocking down a very narrow bandwidth at 7kHz by 15db to take the harshness out of the vocal track.

 

[pingu]

This sounds like a case of the mix buss over loading.

Create a master fader and take a look at the levels as you hear the ditortion.

The distortions mean you are approaching/reached the limit of the mix buss.

Cutting certain frequencies will help a little.

If you are trying to increase the volume you will need to apply compression and limiting
to prevent clipping.

 

[SouthSIDE Glen]

Based upon your description thus far, I'm not sure that it's necessarily a frequency issue so much as a general levels issue. It sounds like perhaps when summing the signals together that there may be a point where your clipping because the combined signal of the two tracks is simply too hot. You might want to check that; perhaps just trimming down each track by a dB or two might solve your problem.

There is not a whole lot of overlap between the human voice and bass guitar frequencies. What overlap there may be is typically somewhere around the 250-400Hz range, but this the the low end of the vocal range usually hit by baratones more than anyone else, and is also at the upper, muddy end and first harmonic range of the typical bass instrument.

G.

 

[mharr552000]

Yeah, I'm running pretty hot. Dumping the bass by about 6 db during the distorted parts pretty much clears it up and there isn't noticable dropping out of the bass either.
Thanks for the replies.