Ableton Forum

I just wrote a house track with a nice low subby tribal sounding bass. The track sounds amazing in my car and my monitors but of course the bass is all but completely lost on laptop speakers. Ive tried using distortion, saturation, EQ, filters, second bass with higher frequencies to add some higher frequencies however these techniques all either sounded lousy or compromised the vibe of the song. Any new ideas or different angles on the techniques I already tried? Thanks!

dunno why you would. you might make it sound good on a laptop but it would sound like crap in your car and monitors. laptops aren't designed to sound good, they're designed to run business applications and go on the web. have you EVER heard good bass from your laptop?

as for a real answer, you probably need to put in a high pass filter set to a low frequency like 75-200Hz, somewhere in there depending on your laptop. it can't handle low frequencies, so cut them out.

hth

i always test my tracks on laptop speakers, because i know A LOT of people are too lazy to learn how to walk over and plug the laptop into their stereo. even the nice mac laptop speakers ignore all deep bass.

making bass apparent on a wide range of systems is a pretty tough problem. you're on the right track with distortion and EQ.

another approach would be to make the track groove even without hearing the deep bass; add some higher stuff here and there that accents the main points of the bassline, but don't completely double it. then when they actually do plug their laptop in, they're in for a special treat.

definitely don't make the track sound worse just to cater to laptop speakers, though.

do not worry about laptop speakers.

you're making music for a club, not a laptop.

unless you're into that kinda thing.

I agree that you should listen to your music on a variety of pseakers when you mix down but laptop speakers are a step to far.....

Buy a cheap boom box and try your tracks out on that, if you can get a good sound out of one of those then you're laughing.

If you want to attempt to hear sub from small speakers You can try a psycho acoustic low frequency exciter that actually adds low frequency harmonics without actually boosting frequency. Waves max bass or Rbass are excellent for this. There's also Voxengo LF max punch or logic's built in "sub bass" plugin.

Its not possible to get low bass from laptop speakers.
When mixing use the laptop speakers to here how the high end sounds.

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mixing bass for laptop speakers is pointless

Adding harmonic enhancer treatment plugins to bass so you can attempt to hear it on a wide variety of systems (including laptop shit-box speakers) is NOT pointless. The name of the game is getting you track to sound the same on a all systems. And obviously if listening thru small speakers that cannot physically produce low frequency content you still can at least attempt to 'Trick' your ears into being able to hear it by using any of the plugins that I mentioned in my previous post. :/

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Yea I agree. And if anyone actually read my 1st post on this subject (now 6 posts back) you'll have noticed that I already suggested waves maxbass among others.
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audiovoid wrote:If you want to attempt to hear sub from small speakers You can try a psycho acoustic low frequency exciter that actually adds low frequency harmonics without actually boosting frequency. Waves max bass or Rbass are excellent for this. There's also Voxengo LF max punch or logic's built in "sub bass" plugin.

audiovoid wrote:Adding harmonic enhancer treatment plugins to bass so you can attempt to hear it on a wide variety of systems (including laptop shit-box speakers) is NOT pointless. The name of the game is getting you track to sound the same on a all systems. And obviously if listening thru small speakers that cannot physically produce low frequency content you still can at least attempt to 'Trick' your ears into being able to hear it by using any of the plugins that I mentioned in my previous post. :/

sorry but mixing sub bass for laptop speakers is pointless
obviously we should try to mix as well as possible for normal speaker setups... club, hifi, car, ipod speaker systems etc
but mixing low/sub bass for pathetic built in laptop speakers is just ludicrous

all you can do for laptop speakers is have a more midrange audible bass playing with the sub

emef wrote:

audiovoid wrote:Adding harmonic enhancer treatment plugins to bass so you can attempt to hear it on a wide variety of systems (including laptop shit-box speakers) is NOT pointless. The name of the game is getting you track to sound the same on a all systems. And obviously if listening thru small speakers that cannot physically produce low frequency content you still can at least attempt to 'Trick' your ears into being able to hear it by using any of the plugins that I mentioned in my previous post. :/

sorry but mixing sub bass for laptop speakers is pointless
obviously we should try to mix as well as possible for normal speaker setups... club, hifi, car, ipod speaker systems etc
but mixing low/sub bass for pathetic built in laptop speakers is just ludicrous

all you can do for laptop speakers is have a more midrange audible bass playing with the sub

If you have a bass tone in your track and it's innaudible on small pairs of speakers and then you add a plugin like Maxbass or similar then sometimes it becomes audible. Just barely usually if at all. You think it's pointless and that's your opinion. But the fact is that what the poster of this thread is asking can (kind of) be done. The output may be subtle at best but this is exactly what harmonic bass enhancer plugins are designed for. To add harmonics to the low end making it appear bigger and to attempt to make it audible on small pairs of speakers.
done.

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