@Phillip: What do you mean by "manually compress both kick and bass tracks"? Do you mean just separate comps on each track set manually or is something else involved?

I am a bit against quoting frequencies and Q settings for any situation. Because every situation can be a little different. One should use your ears and let you evaluate from that what you need to do. Start with great kick (or any) sounds, don't try and turn an average one into a good one. Won't happen no matter what you do. You can improve it for sure and get some of the way there but nothing compared to getting the source just SO right.

For example placing a HPF set at 80Hz may or may not be a good idea. Firstly what about the slope of the HPF in question. Big difference between 6 dB/Oct and say 24 dB /Oct. If a bass recording was a little boomy at say 40 Hz then placing a HPF set at 80 Hz with a slope of 6 dB /Oct may be just the ticket to bring the bass sound back to normal. It means the filter is 6 dB down at 40Hz which is our lowest note remember. Do you really want to be carving our valuable 40 Hz information from the bass sound. But park a 24 dB/Oct HPF set at 80- Hz means there will be no bass left and it will all sound a little thin you see.

I have found doing a lot of mastering lately one can get over concerned with HPF on everything which is NOT great advice at all. (at track level that is, it is sort of OK advice but be careful putting HPF over everything. How much low end are you taking out as well , you have to check that!) Because the EQ stage in the first mastering process can often bring about amazing correction of the low end (of the whole mix) and one can get it all sorted in one go before the sounds hits the compressor. Once again with this last mastering job I have just done (hip hop) way too much bass as usual. After fixing the bass EQ the tracks just sounded way better and quite different after the bass was reigned in.  Biggest problem I have by far mastering is too much bass on nearly every mix I come across. Are you people all deaf to bass or something! Get real with the bottom end and learn to keep it in perspective.

The other issue I get with a lot of mixes is also they are way too bright! What are people thinking? Top end like you would not believe. Think of highs as being like bright starts in a dark sky. If everything is bright then nothing is bright. eg a million bright starts makes it hard to see just one. But when the top end on most tracks is nice and in perspective also then only a few things actually need to be bright. eg a few bright stars in the dark sky surrounded by a lot of medium or duller stars. That is the more ideal situation. When you mix for long periods your perspective on top end goes out the window and is severely degraded remember that.

(one ultimate album for top end is David Gilmour's 'On and Island')

Well, new people need a framework so you have to give them something. A rough outline of the game will help them utilize their bat and ball, metaphorically speaking.  

Jeff Evans

Do you really want to be carving our valuable 40 Hz information from the bass sound. But park a 24 dB/Oct HPF set at 80- Hz means there will be no bass left and it will all sound a little thin you see.

It's not actually that cut and dry. Bass has huge amounts of overtones. Rolling off pretty steeply below 80Hz may not be that obvious in a lot of cases, because the overtones are huge and sound lower than they really are. And it also depends on the part. There may not be any notes even used down low on the fourth string to worry about.
 
Another trick is to use a not terribly steep low shelf around 100Hz or so, and bring it down quite a bit, like maybe 9dB or so, then push up around 250'ish with a fairly wide Q to emphasize the 160 to 320 octave. It'll sound a lot lower than it really is. You do need to play closer to the bridge though to insure a complex overtoned sort of sound. If you play up near the neck and are getting really pure tones, then that trick won't work very well. It'll almost disappear. All those fake bass booster are effectively creating overtones for the same reason. They sound lower than they really are. Our ears seem to fill in the lower notes.
 
I think that lots of recorded music in the past didn't have much first octave content. Today everyone has huge bass and massive high end. But it used to be more about getting all the stuff in between those extremes right, since that's what everyone was going to hear anyway. And it's still what most everyone is going to hear, maybe even more so since the death of serious music listening in a controlled environment by so many people these days. And some folks, like JJP, still argue for getting the middle right, and I think it's a good strategy generally, though not for all genres obviously.
 

Good point Middleman as I do tend to talk from a more experienced perspective at times. But even as a sound engineering teacher when we do get to that point of getting our students to start recording we talk about getting things right at the source first.

Get the drums sounding great in the room, tune them up. Get the guitar sounds happening before you mike them. etc etc Get the vocalist to sing properly first! And if you are someone that creates music from samples and virtual instruments, same applies here too. Choose the right kick sound or bass sound etc. And learn how to program the instruments in question so one can easily go in there and edit something which is often all it takes to get the sound really happening from the source.

Once your initial tracks are sounding good then one can look at using eq to make things sound a little different or better. 

Be careful about specific advice regarding cutting or boosting. As I said it may not work. eg Dean's advice above as quoted. eg Another trick is to use a not terribly steep low shelf around 100Hz or so, and bring it down quite a bit, like maybe 9dB or so, then push up around 250'ish with a fairly wide Q to emphasize the 160 to 320 octave. This could excellent on some bass players sound for sure but what happens when a guy comes in with an Alembic bass sound that is the bass sound from hell and literally perfect as I have heard numerous times before. . That eq setup that Dean is suggesting may be very bad and totally trash that guys sound. See what I mean. Listen first and decide what may or may not need to be done. When one starts saying you have to boost this or cut that they are implying everyone's sound is the same and it is far from that. Sure there are things that do well consistently but others need a very individual approach.

Jeff Evans


getting things right at the source first. 

get the sound really happening from the source.

Once your initial tracks are sounding good then one can look at using eq to make things sound a little different or better.

Totally agree. I spent years trying to make bad sounds good and until I started working on EQ from the source with mics, placement and distance, as well as room, I was not moving in the right direction.

Have a specific reason why you are doing something..


You'd be surprised how different your mixes come out, when you use the, "I'm a about to say something stupid," filter in your brain, but apply it to mixing..

You know the filter I'm talking about?  Like when your wife/kid/brother/boyfriend/best friend...   needs a $100 for beer or a haircut... 

You need to mix your music with the same filter...

mattplaysguitar


I've got to ask... What is so special about exactly 79Hz....?

Does it have something to do with the E2 being 82Hz and the D# being 78Hz? If so, this would really only apply to songs written in E, would it not?

+1  Hahahahaha :):):)
 
You're absolutely right, Matt
 
(so is Jeff about mal-quoting freqs and Qs) ... and/or assuming the bass guitar stays near that freq. 
 
I don't know why 79Hz works so well for me, TBH.  I suppose bass guitar harmonics play a great part or something.
... originally I rolled off a lot lower (even 30hz!!!!) and had serious low energy rumble + conflicts with the kick.  But using 79 Hz has saved me a lot of headache, low energy headroom for the kick, etc.
 
Yeah, its like the bass is not even a sub instrument anymore (if that makes sense)
 
But what seems to work quite well for me won't necessarily work for others.  And like Jeff and others alluded, things aren't always that formulaic and dogmatic.
 
@Jimbo: Glad you asked.  This may be my greatest pearl to date:  You might already do this!
 
1) The kick drum gets isolated to its own kick track and bounced to a 24-bit clip ... however ...
I make certain all kick effects (comps, sub-enhancements, limiters, tape, EQ, HPFs, etc.) are bounced ... so the clip is wet ... and not a boring-dry kick.
2) Apply a gain envelope to the wet clip.
3) Manually automate that gain envelope differently at every kick spike.  
 
Also, I then manually slice and dice the kick clips as necessary ... i.e., to duck the kick to precede the bass attack transients by an arbitrary 10 msecs or such.  But usually the bass attack is slow enough that the kick drum can fit OK ... without ducking, IMHO.
 
Repeat 1-3 for the bass clip to "manually comp" the bass clip(s)
Repeat 1-3 for the snare clip to "manually comp" the snare clip(s)
 
Actually, I manually comp everything ... Because I'm neurotically compulsive, I don't mind the time it takes.
 
'Manually compressing' the kick and bass has other benefits, iirc:
 
- The song feels more lively
- The center of the panorama becomes more robust and meaty
- The left and right channels get more balanced as these weighty energies become more dominant in the phantom center
- The ME has less manual comping to do
- The song can be made much louder in the mids and highs
 
Of course, please forgive my grammar, loopiness, mistakes, etc.

I guess it depends a lot of weather of not you're going to have the bass at the bottom, or the kick at the bottom. With a high HPF like that (79Hz ish area), you know the kick is going to be sitting under it. And maybe that works best for your music.

I personally use an octaver on my bass which adds a sub harmonic to the sound. I actually like it not for the deep bass it creates, but for the higher harmonics. You can add this octaver, put on a HPF and it still sounds really deep because of the additional harmonics on the octave below copy. It creates this cool audible flutter power type sound which I like. I don't use it on all my songs or all the time though. Often if I switch to playing up higher on the bass I'll kick the octaver in to stop the dreaded bass cut. I like the sound it brings when I kick it in for a chorus too. But then other times, the sound of a nice, natural deep note sounds better. All depends on the song. I'm using it with flat wound strings which I really like the sound of too. I feel it provides a much smoother bass sound and the bright twang from standard new bass strings doesn't suit my music. Both I think are not overly used bass sounds (flat wounds and an octaver in particular) so I think it helps a little in creating my own sound.

I obviously wasn't suggesting that someone do exactly the frequencies I indicated every time no matter what. Of course you should adapt to the circumstances. It also assumes that you aren't the person who is recording it. If you are, you can do more to get it like that in the process of tracking it.

But it's definitely not the case that a bass part always has to have lots of low, low end in order to have impact and provide the foundation. And the more articulate and active the bass part, the less it wants generally. The really heavy low end is more of what seems a modern thing to me, where the mix is effectively super-scooped because the low end and the high end are pushed so much. It's probably also related to the loudness wars, since boosting the lows and highs is effectively what 'loudness' buttons don on boom boxes. Our ears are more sensitive to lows/highs relative to mids and the volume goes up. So boosting them is a form of simulated loudness enhancement.
 
Anyhoo, there is that completely other way of looking it, of concentrating on the middle and not having nearly so much low-low and super-crispy high. And it will likely sound better on more systems as well, since the meat of it is in the area that most systems can reproduce more easily.