Bass is too loud, tips???

[supamonsta]

- drop a commercial track you find well balanced, and do your mix with A/B comparison

- or find better studio monitors

- wipe out the low frequencies on all your other sounds that do not need bass in it (meaning, make room for your bass)

- use sidechain compression

- lower your individual tracks

- no compression or "mastering" stuff on your master

- less is better

- work hard

cheers

[tw1nstates]

Seriously?

Bass is overpowering and no one says the most bloody obvious thing (apart from in jest).

Turn it down.

You never need compression and limiting if it's itb. you'll get a far better sound by adjusting the source.

There's a massive amount of myth on forums about compression and limiting.

It makes your music sound small and tiny, not big and fat.

It squashes stuff together so it's good for getting a bassline that's been played by a bass guitarist to sound smaller so that some notes dont over power the others but for electronic itb stuff.

I'll give you a great tip. go and get a program called harbal, find some good mixes you like, analyse em with Harbal and then buil your mix so it;s got a similar frequency spectrum. It'll take a while to get it right and it's a slow process but worthwhile. You will be amazed how much you can do wit out even eq-ing if you have good program material, just shifting levels a bit...

Oh and make sure the bass and kick aren't hitting the same fundamental - pitch one a couple of scale steps down / up in relation to theother. Or a 5th, that's nice (or whatever is prevalent in the harmony)

[supamonsta]

we DID say that

maybe turn it down?

lower your individual tracks

but you're welcome saying it again, as indeed and you're absolutely right :

less is better

You will be amazed how much you can do wit out even eq-ing if you have good program material, just shifting levels a bit...

Oh and make sure the bass and kick aren't hitting the same fundamental - pitch one a couple of scale steps down / up in relation to theother. Or a 5th, that's nice (or whatever is prevalent in the harmony)

nice advices too


cheers

[psyfi]

If you can control the fundamental harmonic and almost match it in level to the first harmonic the that will help you get back a great deal of head room. Also high passing almost everything else save for the bass and kick should help clean up the low end so you wont need your bass up as load to hear the definition in the low end. try and scoop out a nice wide area in the mids and approach each sound in the mix thinking about where in the spectrum it will be living. If your bass has lots of mid and tops in it then its rather a wide band noise and wont leave much room for anything else and in these cases the arrangement will also play a big part in what gets heard and when but when sounds are playing together they need to have their own space and not fight each other for room and this space is best created from the synthesis stage and refined with EQ rather than using EQ as a means to crowbar sounds in to place.

How are you making the bass is it one synth or are you layering sounds?

[abletonfan777]

compression, and lowering the bass to about 40hz seems to have helped immensely for me, but I`ll be back again real soon lol cause trying to make everything flow (kicks, pads, bass, etc) is quite the headscratcher.

[Tarekith]

If it sounds good in your studio but is too loud everywhere else, then you have monitoring issues. Either the monitors you use are not accurate enough on the low end, or you have some room acoustic issues that are altering your perception of the bass level.

The good news is that this is probably the number one issue most people have when it comes to monitoring in their home studios. The bad news is that aside from getting new monitors and putting up some acoustic treatment like bass traps, there's really not a quick solution.

You'll have to spend the time "learning your room", which means listening to your song on as many other playback systems as possible, and learning to compensate when you're in your studio. IE, you have to learn to stop making it sound perfect in the studio, and learn how it should sound if it's going to work in other places.

Best way to do this is to take a mixdown you're working on, and burn it to CD to listen to other place. Bring a notebook, and make notes about what instruments seem out of place, or by how much. Then go back to the studio, make some corrections to those parts, and relisten to it again in other places. keep doing this until it sounds the best in as many places as possible. At this point (well, after doing it wtih other songs too), you'll know what you need to make it sound like in your studio so that you don't have this issue.

[southsounder]

It's hard to really know what's going on without hearing an example, but you've already gotten some solid advice covering the usual issues. If you're still struggling here are two somewhat left field tips which might help in your situation.

First, a trick I use often when mixing a track with overpowering bass is to run that particular track through a hardware compressor. At least with the one I use (a 1st gen ART VLA pro) it seems to act somewhat like a high pass filter. I've no idea whether it's actually filtering the bottom octave or if there's a bit of frequency dependent compression happening, but it really does clean up the bottom end on bass tracks. Note that I also avoid this compressor for the same reason when I want super deep bass, but in many instances it's the perfect thing to get a bass track to fit into the mix. This is completely independent of the actual compression settings - as long as the comp is on it seems to do this.

Second, depending on what your other tracks are and how you've already processed them, try sub-mixing them and adding bus compression to the sub-mix. Depending on the frequency content of the other tracks this in essence acts like multi-band compression, but with a bit more control. You might find it pulls the quieter ambient parts back up in the mix, and tames the beat boxing and such enough that you can also ride the over-all level higher. You could of course accomplish something similar with individual track compression, but I've been finding that sub-mix bus compression gives a different vibe and works better in many cases.

Good luck!

[XPM]

Did you create the bass sound yourself or is it a preset?
Lots of presets are designed to show off the capabilities of a synth without any other sounds around it (how often do you demo a synth either in a shop or from a demo download with other sounds?). This means that many presets are far to 'large' and harmonically complex to actually fit in a mix. The same stands if you've created a synth patch without actually listening to it with the rest of the track as you create it. It might be worth starting with a new bass sound from scratch and building it up as you let the track loop, the resulting sound might not sound so impressive on it's own, but could actually result in a better track overall.

That might not work, but it's probably worth a little bit of experimentation.

[abletonfan777]

Oh and make sure the bass and kick aren't hitting the same fundamental - pitch one a couple of scale steps down / up in relation to theother. Or a 5th, that's nice (or whatever is prevalent in the harmony)

VERY nice tip.