Make the bass in a bass track more "even"

[Christian_R]

Hi!

I don't know the technical term for this, so I will try to explain as best as I can:

I have a simple bass track (A, G, E, F) on a song, and I notice that the bass sound is a little uneven on the different notes (I think E was a little more "woofier"), especially when played with other tracks. I have also noticed this on other songs.

Is there a good way to make the bass sound more "even", so to speak? I have tried a little bit of compression, but I'm not sure if that's the right way.

I hope this was understandable, and that someone as a good tip

[[jur]]

Multiband compression, or better: dynamic Eq.
But take into account that your room as a lot of influence on bass.

[Fanu]

Multiband compression, or better: dynamic Eq.
But take into account that your room as a lot of influence on bass.

This.
You're getting resonances on certain frequencies, and that's why it sounds uneven.
The resonance is either on the sound/instrument or in your room.
Try listening to it with headphones, too, and see if it still sounds uneven.
If it does, dynamic EQ helps here. Try a great free one: Nova by Tokyo Dawn Labs.

If you have a resonant room and you don't want to fix its acoustic treatment, Sonarworks calibration can work absolute wonders on those resonances.

[Christian_R]

Thank you both for the tips!

It sounds a bit wierd on my headphones too, but I will look into Multiband compression and Dynamic EQ

[oratowsky]

Use the "OTT" preset on Mulitband Dynamics

Not so secret weapon

[jlgrimes]

Multiband compression, or better: dynamic Eq.
But take into account that your room as a lot of influence on bass.

This.
You're getting resonances on certain frequencies, and that's why it sounds uneven.
The resonance is either on the sound/instrument or in your room.
Try listening to it with headphones, too, and see if it still sounds uneven.
If it does, dynamic EQ helps here. Try a great free one: Nova by Tokyo Dawn Labs.

If you have a resonant room and you don't want to fix its acoustic treatment, Sonarworks calibration can work absolute wonders on those resonances.

Speaking of Room resonances, I love Ableton's CPU use tone generator for getting an idea of where your room is falling short.

I turn the frequency down to 40 hz and sweep up to about 300 hz. Any perceived level changes as you sweep the freq up are your resonant frequencies. You can also try headphones to hear the contrast.

This is why so many people invest in Bass Traps or designing a room with minimal resonances from the start.

[jestermgee]

Also, depending on how comfortable you are with interpreting the visuals of what you hear, check your level and a spectrum. If you note that the power level doesn't change but your perception of the level does then that could be as mentioned, a resonance issue which could be a range of problems from your monitors to the room to the content itself.

Try create a test project using just the bassline and move around in your room while it plays. You may hear that it sounds "boomier" in some parts of the room and flatter/weaker in other parts.

Headphones can be tricky to listen in on bass lines but a different set of speakers somewhere completely different could give you some insight. It could be that you have a few frequencies in the range too and at certain frequencies they start to cancel eachother out so try a render without some of the other instruments to see if it sounds any better.

Sometimes the bass signal can be too "clean" such as a sine wave and at certain frequencies it can cause some cancellation of the woofers cone as it vibrates the sound out into the room. Adding some dirtiness or odd harmonics can sometimes help this effect.

Sounds like it's time to do some experiments and tests.