Where should the bass sit

[ManInMotion711]

When EQing bass into a mix, where should it sit? Iv'e heard boosting the EQ around 250-500 is a good spot, is this reliable information? Iv'e been told this by 3 people, im just curious what works for other people

 

[Mo Facta]

Forget everything you've been told about EQing and processing to get the bass to "sit right". It's impossible to give you balancing and processing advice without hearing the bass in the context of the mix. If you post an example, you may get some more specific advice.

This is the fact of the matter.

If you have a well treated monitoring environment you'll find that getting the balance is easy. If you can trust your monitoring chain and the room you mix in, the balance that sounds right there will be right on other systems. This is the number one golden rule of recording and mixing: If your monitoring chain/environment is lying to you, you'll always be guessing.

Processing the bass for tonal and dynamic reasons is a different story. If there are note dropouts sometimes it's very difficult to tell whether it's your room or the actual bass. Monitoring environment comes into play here again and so does the guessing game. Headphones can help you here. If it's the bass itself (which can be due to recording room nodes or an inferior neck), compression can help smooth out the notes. EQing should be treated on a case-by-case basis because every song requires a different tone. Eg, jazz is usually a round sound while rock is generally more of an overdriven, nasally sound. This is best captured at the source but there's nothing wrong with adding a bit of bite or a bit more lower mid, providing the mix won't suffer.

I was at the famous Bop Studios a little while ago where they have some of the most acoustically perfect control rooms in the world designed by Tom Hidley and Thomas Rast, installed with insanely high end Kinoshita monitors with the Infra-Sonic system (they extend down to 9Hz at 110dB!). When I walked into the control room for the first time and listened to what my colleague Dave was in the middle of recording, I honestly thought I was listening to the NS10s on the meter bridge because the sound felt like was in the near field. Turns out I was actually hearing the soffit mounted Kinoshitas and the reason why I perceived them as an upfront point source is because the monitoring environment is perfectly tuned so that the listening position receives nothing but direct sound from the monitors while the peripheral reflections are dampened and redirected to the anechoic pit in front of the console and to the traps in the back wall due to splayed ceilings and side walls. There was NO DOUBT that what we were hearing was what we got. When we were done tracking a few songs and heard the results outside of the studio, it was EXACTLY how we heard it in the control room.

The moral of this story was that if your monitoring environment is up to scratch you know the decisions you make in the studio are going to be reflected in the outside world verbatim. This is the situation that home recordists (and even myself in my own imperfect studio) have to deal with and why so many of us get lost in obscurity and suffer from option anxiety. IMO, of course.

Hope that helps.

Cheers

 

[Greg_L]

When EQing bass into a mix, where should it sit? Iv'e heard boosting the EQ around 250-500 is a good spot, is this reliable information? Iv'e been told this by 3 people, im just curious what works for other people

It depends on the style of music and dialing it in right from the get-go. There simply are no rules. Different mixes require different bass tones and different ways to "sit" in the mix. Some people swear by stuff like "I gotta notch out this to make room for this and boost this and then notch this". Totally unnecessary if you track the right kinds of sounds to begin with. So basically what I'm saying is to use an appropriate sound to begin with. And if you don't, then you do whatever you need to do to make what you have work. No one can tell you to boost or cut in any frequency range without hearing it first.

 

[moresound]

Where should the bass sit

Right outside the studio till everything is done.

 

[witzendoz]

Right outside the studio till everything is done.

Right up front to cover up any guitar or drum problems

Alan.

 

[mixsit]

I can't imagine three people saying 'boots 250-500. I don't get it.
There has to be a) a context, and b) A need.
500-seven or eight hundred is a range fairly common to get some speak' in the mids

 

[witzendoz]

If the bass was recorded right in the first place you don't need much eq at all maybe just a little cleaning up of low mud. I usually record bass with both a DI and Mic (on the amp), then I blend the 2 to get the desired sound. If needed depending on the sound required, I use a send from both channels to a compressor and bring that back through a 3rd channel then mix the 3 together.

Alan.

 

[Armistice]

+3 db @ 751.5, Q of 0.18.

Every time. Trust me*...









































*like i totly have no idea, rilly....

 

[Mo Facta]

Um, no.

I hope that was sarcasm.

 

[Farview]

Here is the way I think about it:
50Hz: sub frequencies to make it sound deep
80-120Hz: solid, classic low end
250-400Hz: low mid growl
700-1khz: articulation
3khz and up: brightness and sparkle.

Now its up to you to listen and decide what the bass sound needs or doesn't need in the context of the mix. Compression is your friend as well. I will tend to compress after eq with bass, but there are exceptions to everything.

 

[mixsit]

Here is the way I think about it:
50Hz: sub frequencies to make it sound deep
80-120Hz: solid, classic low end
250-400Hz: low mid growl
700-1khz: articulation...

And/or 120-400 that mud and boxy' tone area tracks tend to pile up in.

 

[grimtraveller]

Where should the bass sit ?
When EQing bass into a mix, where should it sit?

For this question, I can't get beyond

It depends on the style of music and dialing it in right from the get-go. There simply are no rules. Different mixes require different bass tones and different ways to "sit" in the mix. Some people swear by stuff like "I gotta notch out this to make room for this and boost this and then notch this". Totally unnecessary if you track the right kinds of sounds to begin with. So basically what I'm saying is to use an appropriate sound to begin with. And if you don't, then you do whatever you need to do to make what you have work. No one can tell you to boost or cut in any frequency range without hearing it first.

and

Forget everything you've been told about EQing and processing to get the bass to "sit right". It's impossible to give you balancing and processing advice without hearing the bass in the context of the mix. This is best captured at the source but there's nothing wrong with adding a bit of bite or a bit more lower mid, providing the mix won't suffer.

Personally, I'm hopeless when it comes to Hz, KHz, mids and all the rest. I know what the dials do to the bass by tweaking them and listening. Ultimately, you'll either like the sound or you won't.
Experimentus is your flexible friend here. Then you'll be at the point where you have an instinctive idea backed with knowledge and experience of where to go each time.

 

[rayc]

I know what to do as a starting point for my DI'd bass.
I know what to do as a starting point for my mic'd bass.
I'm relearning what to do to blend them as I'd stopped doing that for a while but have come back again.
I read about & tried the Motown bass trick - it works pretty often
I also know which Khz to add a peak to for proggy growl on my bass.
BUT all of the above works for my gear & my "sound" over my monitors.
My ears aren't good enough to get it right on the way in like Greg can & does. I wish I could.

 

[Mr Clean]

It depends on the style of music and dialing it in right from the get-go. There simply are no rules. Different mixes require different bass tones and different ways to "sit" in the mix. Some people swear by stuff like "I gotta notch out this to make room for this and boost this and then notch this". Totally unnecessary if you track the right kinds of sounds to begin with. So basically what I'm saying is to use an appropriate sound to begin with. And if you don't, then you do whatever you need to do to make what you have work. No one can tell you to boost or cut in any frequency range without hearing it first.

^^^THIS^^^

.....and absolutely this!

 

[Nakatira]

You should definitly look at the dynamics before EQ, try running it through a limiter pretty heavily, see if sits better, once you get there ease up on the limiter until it sounds normal.

 

[mixsit]

You should definitly look at the dynamics before EQ, try running it through a limiter pretty heavily, see if sits better, once you get there ease up on the limiter until it sounds normal.

You may have a point there. While a well played bass ought to be fairly level in tone at least, on some of our stand up bass tracks I'd been chasing with narrow eq's to even them out.
Well this last time out I got to looking at the strengths of the notes, and sure enough the holes (or hot spots) where showing as amplitude (and duration but that's a different angle in this subject.

Acoustic bass might tend to be harder for a given level of player to be consistent and thus this may be more a worse case example than is typical for electric-? But I had some good interesting result with the limiter in the UAD 33609'. Had to go 'fully sensitive (they call 'internal headroom) and gain the track up some to get it to engage, release on the 50ms fast setting (sometimes a notch or two slower but going after single notes here) Attack 'fast ("2ms") for just good plain control. 'Slow (4ms I think) lets the pluck through a bit - still controlled, but let it lets it sit more forward in the mix.

So, a case where I was back to only general eq shaping need -rather than 'eq to fix a dynamics/performance issue.

 

[Farview]

Some basses will have dead spots, where the note just isn't as loud as the other ones, compression will help that.

I tend to compress after the eq, so the compressor doesn't react to things that I fixed with the eq. But there are plenty of exceptions to that. It is just my starting point, if it doesn't work, i do something else.