If you are struggling to mix bass without compromising the rest of your mix, take it from a mixing engineer, there are a plenty of tips and tricks you can try.
When I first started out as a mixing engineer, bass was something I always struggled with. Much like Meghan Trainor, I “was all ‘bout that bass”, but I just couldn’t get it to sit right in my mixes.
WHY MIXING BASS IS DIFFICULT
Bass is a difficult beast for a few reasons. One of the main reasons is that bass frequencies are high energy, which means they have the ability to easily overpower other elements in a mix. In the digital audio world, this translates to eating up all your headroom (headroom being how loud things can be before you start overloading the system and peaking the master buss – going into the red).
This high energy also makes monitoring bass difficult. Unless you have a perfectly tuned room, how bass sounds in your mixing space can severely impact your final mix. If you have a build up of bass frequencies, you may compensate by turning the bass down more than you need to. Likewise, if the bass is cancelling out, you may turn it up too loud.
A lot of modern day music is quite heavy on bass. Artists like Post Malone use sub bass as a staple in their production, so the temptation is to really pump it up to get a nice fat mix. The truth however, is that you can use certain techniques to give the impression of a huge, rumbling bass, without pushing the fader up to +12.
DISTORTION AND SATURATION
Don’t be afraid to mess with the bass sound. As a mixing engineer, you are allowed to get creative! Much of the time, in order to get the bass to cut through in a mix, you will need to add some distortion or saturation. This has a few benefits:
- The distortion adds harmonics higher in the frequency spectrum that can trick the ear into hearing the lower sub bass better. This means that you don’t need to have the bass up super high in your mix eating up all your headroom, to have it as a centrepiece.
- It adds energy to the track. Bass can sound flabby if not treated well, which can lead to an overall flat mix. Here is a great tutorial by Grammy Award winning mixing engineer Tony Maserati demonstrating this:
USE PARALLEL PROCESSING
I will almost always set up bass distortion on parallel busses – that is, as a send. I might have the original bass sound sending to 3 different types of distortion, which I then blend together to create an overall bass sound. The type of distortion and how much I apply will depend on the individual song.
Tip: Always decide on this blend with the other elements of the song playing as well. It doesn’t matter what the bass sounds like on its own.
The theory here is similar to that of using a DI signal and a bass amp in traditional bass guitar recording and mixing techniques. It is perhaps even more important when dealing with modern electronic instruments such as sub basses to use distortion, as they not only have more potential to destroy your headroom (given the sheer amount of bass information they can produce), but also they lack the higher harmonic information of an acoustic bass instrument that can help them cut through.
In an interview with Universal Audio, mixing engineer and producer Louis Bell summed this up perfectly when talking about his bass sound on the latest Post Malone album:
“It’s funny, if you soloed the bass on a lot of my tracks, you might think it sounded distorted and over saturated, but in the mix, those are the exact things that allow the bass to cut through. People sometimes imagine the bass should sound all nice on its own, but you need that lion roar to make it cut through all the other instruments.” – Louis Bell
You can also make use of tools such as Waves Renaissance Bass. This plugin works by adding in harmonics above the bass “fundamental” – the main note – and tricks the ear into hearing that low note, even if it isn’t actually playing. This can be great for ensuring your mix will translate on smaller speakers that can’t physically reproduce super low frequencies.
All in all, it’s about trying out some different things and not being afraid to get creative. If you’ve got any questions about getting the bass right in your production or mixes, drop me a line and I’d be happy to help out!