sub bass trouble

H

headknockah

Member
Joined
Oct 15, 2004
ok im workin on a new tune with a deep sub bass

when my beat drops i hear the first sub hit nicely...the hits after that do not have the same feel...they dont seem as loud..

if i raise the vol anymore on certin hits ..it clips

why is this doing this and how cna i fix it
 
yeah post a clip, you should be able to add it as an attachment, but probably because other sounds are getting overpowered by the bass. solo the things that are getting made quiter and the bass , and eq them so they dont clash .usually something like that , someone else'll know better though.
 
yea i started going through every sound in the track earlier doing equing...tedious...but its working....sub coming through nicely now
 
subbass is always one of the things that pisses me off, read some interesting things that Fresh mentions in the latest Knowledge about making good subbass, but I think that that method, while obviously effective, surely isn't the most efficient way of doing it... Still searching for _the_ perfect bass generator, I use TBL a lot because its interface and faily simple layout appeals to me, but it's hiding some power in them there dials when combined with a few choice effects.


Anybody got any favourite plugins that they use for subbass?
 
You might have interference between your bass and the drums. That's a very common problem. The trick is to separate tracks both in terms of physical space and frequency space. Try a low-pass filter on the drums and a high-pass filter on the bass so there's less interference, or separate them physically (e.g., by hard-panning the bass left and right, and leaving the drums right in the middle).
 
Giganova said:
You might have interference between your bass and the drums. That's a very common problem. The trick is to separate tracks both in terms of physical space and frequency space. Try a low-pass filter on the drums and a high-pass filter on the bass so there's less interference, or separate them physically (e.g., by hard-panning the bass left and right, and leaving the drums right in the middle).
Click to expand...

That doesn't work

Hard left and right = center

Lowpassing the drums and high passing the bass will muffle the drums and remove any impact from the bassline so that won't work either.
 
headknockah said:
ok im workin on a new tune with a deep sub bass

when my beat drops i hear the first sub hit nicely...the hits after that do not have the same feel...they dont seem as loud..

if i raise the vol anymore on certin hits ..it clips

why is this doing this and how cna i fix it
Click to expand...
May be the frequency response of your speakers. speakers will boom out at a certain frequency making other sounds quiet.
Could be that
 
Serum said:
That doesn't work
Hard left and right = center
Click to expand...
What I meant is you make two copies of the bass, put them into two tracks and hard-pan them left and right (which is NOT the same as middle). Alternatively, just use a "stereo spreader" plugin. The drums should be dead center. That hepls a lot coz now the bass & drums don't occupy the same (physical) space.

Serum said:
Lowpassing the drums and high passing the bass will muffle the drums and remove any impact from the bassline so that won't work either.
Click to expand...
What I mean to say is the following: you attenuate the highs on the bass, and the lows at the drums. You basically make sure that the frequencies don't overlap (maybe I mixed up "high-pass" and "low-pass" in what I've said earlier). This will not muffle the drums (they will sound a bit thinner instead), and the bass will be pumping low.
 
Generally speaking your drums work well with a roll off at about 100Hz, with the kick drum centering at about 120Hz. It can sound like it's lacking punch when you play it on its own but along with the bassline it'll sound nice...

What often works well for me with bass is to get the sub around 40Hz - 80Hz, then leave a gap up to about 500Hz before i start adding more layers on the bass. (usually a distorted screechy thing)

Another thing that might be worth a try is to only trigger your sub sample in time with the kick drum - ie layer the sub bass with the kick drum. This is a very common technique in hip hop and garage and really helps define the bass...
 
ok these basslines are fucking killing me....sometimes the sub hits verry nice...even when there are other sounds in the same region as the bass hit..be it snares...hi hats...fx sounds...whatever...other times when there is nothing in the same area as the sub hit..its quieter...i dont get it...is it just going to be that way or what?ive tried some of the things some of you have mentioned...some of those things work in some spots...in others they dont and it makes no sense to me

am i maybe just being too picky?
 
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Giganova said:
What I meant is you make two copies of the bass, put them into two tracks and hard-pan them left and right (which is NOT the same as middle). Alternatively, just use a "stereo spreader" plugin. The drums should be dead center. That hepls a lot coz now the bass & drums don't occupy the same (physical) space.
Click to expand...
It is the same tho
You have 2 speakers, one left and one right
to pan left you reduce the volume on the right side, to pan right you reduce the volume on the left side. In the middle the volume is the same on both sides.
It'd work if you had 3 speakers, one left one right and one central but that's not how stereo is.
You're confusing the way speakers work with how it would sound if the instruments were at different points in a room

Stereo width is another matter. A stereo expander creates a delay between one side and the other simulating 3 dimensional distance by letting one ear hear the sound before the other ear.

Also if you use panning on bass you can't press it to vinyl cos the needle will skip.

Posting tips that will ruin a track don't help!
 
headknockah said:
ok these basslines are fucking killing me....sometimes the sub hits verry nice...even when there are other sounds in the same region as the bass hit..be it snares...hi hats...fx sounds...whatever...other times when there is nothing in the same area as the sub hit..its quieter...i dont get it...is it just going to be that way or what?ive tried some of the things some of you have mentioned...some of those things work in some spots...in others they dont and it makes no sense to me

am i maybe just being too picky?
Click to expand...




Remember also that the acoustics of the room that you're in affect the effectiveness of bass. Finding a good room setup is CRUCIAL - make sure your speakers aren't positioned too close to the walls, as this stifles bass, and you can have problems with reverberations and echoes if your room is fairly bare - also rooms sometimes respond differently to different frequencies.

If you can, play your track on more than one system - try a NICE pair of headphones too, ones with neodymium magnets have much better bass, like the Sony fontopia range for example - if your tracks sound good on different systems and headphones, and sound shite in particular areas on your system that you use for production, then you can either learn to understand how a track sounds in that particular room, on that particular system, and know how to compensate and recognise that the track isn't actually bad, it's the room that's doing it.

I prefer to do mixes and mastering on headphones and then listen on speakers afterwards, I feel that headphones offer me a more rounded, overall sound, as opposed to my subwoofer kit, which seems to just lose bass on some notes - but I know for a fact this is due to the weird positioning of my system, as my PC is positioned in a corner of a fairly small room with lots of clutter about (my bedroom!), and the sub is stuck in a corner so the sound's going to be a bit baffled.



Read Fresh's article on production and room acoustics in this month's Knowledge mag, he talks about just this subject.
 
When you've got some bass notes hitting louder then other bass notes it's most likely due to an acoustics problem known as a "standing wave", whereby the wavelength is exactly the same (or a multiple thereof) as the width or length of your room, so the bass bounces off the wall at a weird angle and ends up amplifying itself, or canceling itself out. The best thing to do in this case is buy some bass traps and stick them in the corners of the room - regular sound proofing foam will not work on low frequencies (unless its rediculously thick & expensive).

If i may provide a relevent link...... http://www.acoustics101.com
 
... And the master that is the Affliction sums it up more succintly than I could do, at least for the moment (until I learn about it properly in Music Tech, I have a sometimes-sketchy knowledge of why things happen, but I understand the basics).

N1 dude.
 
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