gimme yer sub bass

[swett]

I've spent YEARS people, Years, trying to tame the good old sub bass patch. The kind that you layer under some brighter bass for extra juice and body. I've kind of hit it occationally, but more often than not, it either disappears when outside my studio monitors or it threatens to blow any speakers that are less than pro.
I want to know if anyone has the heart to share their well constructed and balanced sub bass patches or ableton instrument racks, or gimme some good advice on how to master the dark art of the low low end.

woooomp.

B.

[timothyallan]

What's your room/monitoring setup like?

Tip 1. Don't use a sine wave, use a filtered square.


Also be on the lookout this week for my upcoming video series which focuses on Bass and Synths

[jamief]

Try using 3- 4 diferent types of compresor and alimiter on you bass patches perhaps some eq and small reverb amount mix and match

best

[4.33]

i agree with tim - apparently you cant hear your low end properly that's all.

most nearfield monitors hafe a roll-off below 60 Hz and that's your sub area exactly. also, if you are mixing in an untreated room you are faced with phase cancellation and freq boost issues.

one solution might be to get proper headphones and always check the low end on them. and of course, check your mix on a variety of consumer systems. and in a car

[Goran@Irrupt]

i hear ya swett. my music pretty much relies on sub bass and although, i have decent monitors (Adam A7) and semi-treated room, i have trouble to fit the bass nicely in the mix. i always have to "guess" if it's all right. and then i listen to it at home or at friends place and then i see it's not. i know how to make sub, but i'm not sure how to compress it, as it's not that audible. anyone care to share the tips for compressing bass? attack, release wise...
my advice to you would be to, first, play the bass in the audible range. try not to go too low. you know the trick with 808 kick? find the bassy 808 sample. put it in simpler. make a small loop range right after the kick's attack. snap it to zero and put a saturator and compressor right after the simpler. be modest with saturation. and woala, old school sub bass!

[SubFunk]

i think (i assume!) you guys are making the most common mistake in the production of dance music, you are all to obsessed with bass and you concentrate to much on it. focus on a BALANCED mix, don't try to make tracks particular bass heavy.

your monitor system (and it doesn't matter in this case if it rolls of at 60hz or if you have a sub that goes down to 20hz) is at least it is supposed to be flat and and will reveal your frequency spectrum equally. a club soundsystem is the total opposite, they always emphasise the bass like crazy.

therefor you will always get much, much more bass impression when you are listening in venues or as well cars for that matter. (and that is the culprit, you try to emphasise the bass already in a good mix and the PA or car system does also emphasise like mad, leading essentially to less or a total mud / disaster in the bass area)
a well balanced mix has automatically a lot and all the bass you need, any monitor system that is halfway decent and rolls of at around 60hz is capable of revealing and mixing a super bass heavy production. (mind you that most club soundsystems are cut of around 60hz some even 70-80hz in extremes maybe at 40hz never ever deeper (that is already hardly the case, 40hz, because a PA playing that deep sounds like shit), because you just get a hell lot of mud down there in any case)

forget about your bass obsession and try to make a mix that is simply BALANCED in what you hear... playing it then in a club will emphasise the bass like crazy anyways. a good example, HiEnergy from this forum uses tiny little 8020s and makes productions where the bass pulls off your pants.

try it, just try to get away from that obsession and concentrate on the whole BALANCED PICTURE and everything will fall into place.

p.s. loads of producers, even dub / DnB / Dubstep / etc., are cutting of already at 40hz to avoid the mess.

[stutter]

(mind you that most club soundsystems are cut of around 60hz some even 70-80hz in extremes maybe at 40hz never ever deeper (that is already hardly the case, 40hz, because a PA playing that deep sounds like shit), because you just get a hell lot of mud down there in any case)

...

p.s. loads of producers, even dub / DnB / Dubstep / etc., cutting of already at 40hz to avoid the mess.

I think I remember Trigger putting on a night (a Birmingham breaks night aimed squarely at low frequency lovers), and Cursor miner and someone else (Si Begg maybe?) mentioning that they would be re-mixing their tracks for the show since they would actually be able to hit 40hz properly. That was enough to stop me worrying about the 30-50hz region very much.

I don't think I have a sub patch for swett that I can say has been tested to be a winner everywhere. Sorry.

[davepermen]

i think (i assume!) you guys are making the most common mistake in the production of dance music, you are all to obsessed with bass and you concentrate to much on it. focus on a BALANCED mix, don't try to make tracks particular bass heavy.

your monitor system (and it doesn't matter in this case if it rolls of at 60hz or if you have a sub that goes down to 20hz) is at least it is supposed to be flat and and will reveal your frequency spectrum equally. a club soundsystem is the total opposite, they always emphasise the bass like crazy.

to get an idea about the difference, one can listen to a bass-heavy track one likes in the club, and take it to your home system to check how it sounds there. took me a while to start really hearing the stuff that matters in a club clearly at home.

[SubFunk]

(mind you that most club soundsystems are cut of around 60hz some even 70-80hz in extremes maybe at 40hz never ever deeper (that is already hardly the case, 40hz, because a PA playing that deep sounds like shit), because you just get a hell lot of mud down there in any case)

...

p.s. loads of producers, even dub / DnB / Dubstep / etc., cutting of already at 40hz to avoid the mess.

I think I remember Trigger putting on a night (a Birmingham breaks night aimed squarely at low frequency lovers), and Cursor miner and someone else (Si Begg maybe?) mentioning that they would be re-mixing their tracks for the show since they would actually be able to hit 40hz properly. That was enough to stop me worrying about the 30-50hz region very much.

I don't think I have a sub patch for swett that I can say has been tested to be a winner everywhere. Sorry.

well, in 90% to 95% of all cases under 60hz is not really from any interest, it usually doesn't add anything real good (exceptions apply),
it is a problem particular with dance music, if you go out clubbing a lot of the bass you feel and experience as pleasant is actually not in the music, but it's rather the resonance of the room and soundsystem, etc. and has pretty little to do with the mixdown.

and many people mix that up, respectively want to re-create that 'feeling' in the studio... WRONG.

the studio is a place to create a BALANCED MIX.

[SubFunk]

i think (i assume!) you guys are making the most common mistake in the production of dance music, you are all to obsessed with bass and you concentrate to much on it. focus on a BALANCED mix, don't try to make tracks particular bass heavy.

your monitor system (and it doesn't matter in this case if it rolls of at 60hz or if you have a sub that goes down to 20hz) is at least it is supposed to be flat and and will reveal your frequency spectrum equally. a club soundsystem is the total opposite, they always emphasise the bass like crazy.

to get an idea about the difference, one can listen to a bass-heavy track one likes in the club, and take it to your home system to check how it sounds there. took me a while to start really hearing the stuff that matters in a club clearly at home.

yep, that sounds like a good method, start to listen (analyse with your ears) what is actually happening in a good balanced mix...

[davepermen]

indeed. helps to get over the "lets take it to the car, the club, the ipod" etc, and be shocked everywhere how wrong it sounds.

once you determined what sounds how, where, you can start to apply it to your studio setup and listen for those details that matter in the other environments.

one of the most awesome things for me is to play my stuff straight from my tiny crappy mono laptop speaker.

no sub bass there at all, lots of stuff lacks there. but "bass heavy tracks" still sound great on it. so it looks like most of the time, it's NOT the low frequencies of a bass heavy track that really matter that much.

[SubFunk]

no sub bass there at all, lots of stuff lacks there. but "bass heavy tracks" still sound great on it. so it looks like most of the time, it's NOT the low frequencies of a bass heavy track that really matter that much.

precisely, the overall balance brings everything to life... including the bass, though.

[swett]

I could help if I had an example of what you're talking about, there's a lot of ways this can go wrong

Great thought everyone. I've always set the roll off around 35 hz, and I guess i could go a bit higher with that. A patch that I've been using a bit is called "Fat sub sine" and it's on the 'keys' folder of the Operator presets. I used it on this track (comes in on second verse):

http://soundcloud.com/flying_kites/mistakes

And I think that this is one of those times when I was fairly successful at it, and it works as an example of what I'm talking 'bout.

Cheers,

B

[Bagatell]

Don't any of you guys take subharmonics into account?

[SubFunk]

Don't any of you guys take subharmonics into account?

yes totally, but not in the nonsense region under around 40hz. or are you mixing for whales?

again most systems start to totally cut of at between 60hz and 80hz, a PA that runs 'deeper' is more then difficult to set up properly and usually just creates a muffle shuffle shit bass. (it hardly ever exists in reality, and definitely not in clubs / concert houses, believe me i have set up PAs for half of my life)

any good solid bass we love so much is not coming from pushing 30hz to death, i can't say that often enough...

and the experience many of us like to recreate we have in a club is coming usually from resonances and shaking of the room and distortion of utterly overdriven PAs, and especially overdriven subs.

and has nothing to do with playing a good balanced / mixed track. respectively with producing and mixing a good mixed track.

the OPs question was how to create solid bass heavy music and for that you do not need a sub that goes down to 20hz...

again you need a well balanced mix, and a mixer that 'nows' when and where to cut extremes off that only leads to a muffle.

and also again any club / concert system is usually totally emphasised in the bass region already. so don't compare that with your mix / production environment.