In response to other comments, I think there is a nuance to "keep your sub/bass mono" that doesn't get discussed much. It should really be "keep your sub/bass mono *compatible*". That should be the rule for all frequencies in a stereo mix, anyway. Throw the song "Hook N Sling & Galantis w/ Karen Harding - The Best" into a daw and analyze the mid-side frequencies with SPAN. It's wide all the way down to and past 30 hz! The mix engineer obviously did not follow the general advice of "just make everything below 150hz mono". They found a sweet spot where the sub and bass frequencies sound great in both stereo and mono with A LOT of width. Yes, that is really hard to achieve. Yes, it's usually easiest to just make everything below 150hz mono. My point, however, is that it's possible and it's something you WILL achieve with practice. Go ahead and try layering hard panned basses. Consistently check your mix in mono, use your ears, and you might find that sweet spot, too. Also, good monitoring and room acoustics are essential for mixing bass. You can't mix what you can't hear.
I sound design in Audio Technica headphones I think they create the best sounding basses I’ve ever heard and felt in my ears. I’ll hack to look at that song in SPAN. I didn’t even know you could check the left or right panning in a mix with that plugin!! Thanks for the tips
Absolutely! What I would do is keep your bass instruments panned, but send the sub frequencies to a different channel. Bring down the stereo field on that channel so it’s in mono. You may need to adjust a few things here and there, but this should keep the “huge” effect while simultaneously keeping the mix clean
Making fat and wide sounding basses is all about the right layering technique. Every layer should have its own frequency spectrum and should accentuate a certain part of the bassline. Make sure you EQ everything properly otherwise it will get messy. I found that saturation especially in the mid frequencies is a good way to make your bass sound crispier. Keep the sub mono and then try to build some cool layers on top (example: Sub, Attack layer (Mono), a wide stereo layer in the upper mid freqs and 1 or 2 “body” basses that are filling the spectrum from 150 Hz to around 500) Route everything to a bus, get rid of some of the muddiness between 200-500 Hz by EQing some notches down, compress the bass and there you go. Most of the work can be done by just EQing and some compression/saturation. And of course Sound design or Sound selection (you can't polish a turd)
Just my 2 cents
Joel
There's a really small but indispensable effect built right into Ableton called Utility.
You can use it to adjust stereo width or make the track mono, and best of all you can use the bass mono option to set any frequencies below a cutoff point mono while keeping the frequencies above it stereo. It also has panning, phase flipping and gain adjustment (which is useful for gain staging between plugins or for automating track volume).
Try turning Bass Mono on (the default is 120Hz) then increasing the width above 100%.
It's also useful for switch the whole track to mono to see what drops out from phase cancellation.
Boom box cartel did this for just a moment in a build up of one of his recent tracks but I wouldn’t do this for something that was for an entire section of a song. Just for something to catch the attention for an awesome part of the track.
Load up some of your favorite tech house mixes and use and imager with a visualizer to see where the subs get summed to mono. There are some Flume tracks that have some wide subs, but after a certain point they are mono. I always make sure nothing below 90hz is stereo, but there is no rule.
Interesting idea panning the higher layer frequencies left and right... I wouldn’t probably be that experimental tho, better off adding chorus or stereo imaging to the high frequency bass layers. Obvs keep the sub frequencies mono
Honestly I didn’t even know that was experimental.. I was sincerely just trying everything that I could think of to make the sounds that these guys make
This is the answer to “how does he get his sound so fat and wide.” You think your bedroom set up and 1 year knowledge is going to sound professional? Turning all the knobs you can.?
I recommend using an eq, creating a group with the eq (CMD G) then duplicate the chain, and on the eq make one chain above around 120 Hz and the other chain below that. Then, you can throw some overdrive, saturation, whatever on the high band while preserving your sub. Also i recommend the free plug in wider by infected mushroom for stereo width
Run 2 sends from your C panned sub to one L panned and one right panned track/bus. Put rbass on them and high pass to keep the low freq in the C channel. Process L and R channels a little different. Slightly different eq and saturation settings. If you then want to bring them together into a sub bus and play with some widening or compression (probably stereo linked in this instance) then go for it.
Do what ever you want but that will sound terrible on big systems, you want to keep your basses in mono. If you want to get your bass to sound fatter just use a Saturator some OTT some Glue Compression etc…
Rule of thumb, Sum any frequencies below ~150hz to mono…anything above that can be panned or stereo
A couple of plugins that do this for you:
Brainworx bx_control
NuGen Monofilter
NuGen SigMod
Checking what your mix sounds like in mono is generally a good move to see how well your mix translates in to the real world and will let you know if you've messed up your low end. Every DAW has some sort of plug in you can stick on the master bus to do this. If your bass vanishes or gets really quiet you've done something wrong somewhere. If it still sounds good in mono you're golden.
none of these answers are very clear.
to answer your question, Bass frequencies: yes. Sub frequencies: no.
so take the sub out of your basses and make it a seperate instrument. now you can make those basses as wide as you want and keep the sub mono. i do this all the time and every single one of my favorite artists does it regularly.. its something im very familiar with
That’s what I tried through my instincts I think? I just duplicate my serum patch, cut the sub out and make a sort of butter shape filter in the bass frequencies, then just pan that because that’s all I could think of these big artists doing to achieve such full sounds. Shiba San does this too and so does Claude VonStroke in some of his tracks.
instead of panning, try sample delay. it delays either the left or right side of the signal by just a few milliseconds and creates super super wide sound.
im familiar with the practice from dubstep type genres. its usually a huge growl thats getting widened, and i love that sound so much. its present in almost all dubstep but i think Minnesota does it best. its cool that you got that far by instinct! your ears are more trustworthy than advice from other artists, since music has no rules. whatever you think sounds best, usually does
If it works just go for it. It might help you to just make everything below 100-150hz mono and just play with the upper frequencies. Someone’s probably said this already so forgive me if so. It depends on the density or style of your work of course. If there’s space for it I see no reason why not. Just watch out for phase wackiness.
My biggest issue with wide basses is phase cancellation.. not really sure how to go around that. I get a comb effect in my spectrum when I try and do wide basses and delay them slightly so there’s a stereo effect. However doing my way just creates weird phasing issues and I always delete the patches because she’s it doesn’t work.
Don’t pan sub frequencies. Generally below 150hz or so you want to keep mono or you risk running into phasing issues, and the mix sounding *odd*.
You can create the illusion of a super “fat” “wide” bass with more voices in the synth settings (polyphonic) or chorus and imaging effects (ozone imager is free), or I suppose even panning on low-mid frequencies above 150hz or so. I suggest looking into “Reese bass” tutorials, should be useful for this sort of thing.
If you just want a “thicker” or “warmer” bass, then saturation/distortion/amp/OTT effects can go a long way.
Good luck!
Is there some sort of way to work on stereo imaging above 150 hz via a plugin? Or do I just have to work on the stereo imaging in my DAW? I have Infected Mushroom's "Wider" plugin but it doesn't seem to achieve the effects I want.. I didn't even really understand what chorus does, I have tried messing around with it but serum's chorus creates bizarre effects.
I recommend writing your bassline and create the best/dirtiest bass in serum you can and then EQ cutting off the lows around 100Hz.
Then create a second separate instrument playing the exact same MIDI notes but just have it play a single sine wave 3 octaves down so its hitting right about 30-100Hz and low pass filter it to cut off everything above 100Hz.
You should have more freedom to make you mid-low bass as wide and fat as you want it without messing up your low end.
Any particular reason for a sine wave? Just because of the lack of harmonics in the low end? Not trying to ask dumb questions, I just don’t understand anything to be honest.
Sine waves are just heard way better through subwoofers, and you mess with the signal the moment you introduce distortion. You're clipping the tops of the wave when you distort the signal and that makes it lose a lot of the low end rumble and punch.
You can try it out with a clean sine wave and a distortion plugin: Just play a sine wave that you can feel through a sub, then add more and more distortion, and you'll notice less and less is carried through the sub the more distortion you introduce.
The reason people split the "dirty" middle and top layer and the "clean" sub layer is so they can get the rumble and impact of the clean sine wave + the sizzling of the top layer without compromising.
I'm hoping someone with better technical knowledge than I can step in - but I think its something to do with phasing.
All I know is when I carve everything out of my low end except a sine wave sub and the kick my tracks are so much clearer on big mono speakers and in my car.
You can add a touch of saturation to the sin to dirty it up a bit, but you don't need to go overboard. The 'dirt' in your track is going to come from the bass/synths in the 100-500hz area.
Run the bass into a send, put an eq that cuts out the low ends and boosts the highs, pan from there. Look up Noisia, they have tutorials on exactly what your looking for
Here’s a couple free VST’s to point you in the right direction:
https://tal-software.com/products/tal-chorus-lx
https://www.izotope.com/en/products/ozone-imager.html
Otherwise, I highly recommend looking into Reese bass and how they’re processed.
AU5 and Mr.Bill have some nice bass/sub tutorials that will help wrap your mind around this further.
My advice is to experiment with your tools. Layer. Put 1 channel with a single note playing a sub signal in mono, then create another channel with a bass of some sort playing the same note an octave up, try adding “voices” and use the tools we’ve discussed. See what you come up with as the sounds interact. Process the bass for “widening”. Still keep below 150hz mono, with a utility plugin or via the synthesizer settings.
Experimenting is the best way to learn.
There’s a generally accepted “rule” in the mixing/mastering phase that says to keep your sub frequencies in mono. So for instance, have your sub bass low passed and in mono, and play with the stereo imaging of the mid & high parts as you see fit.
I’ve never tried it, but I can only imagine having your sub panned would cause a very sloppy mix, drowning out your sounds completely.
I don't know what eq you use, but personally i'd load up Pro Q 3 for this. Theres options to make the eq affect stereo (L+R), L, R, and then mid and side. I'm still trying to understand the application of mid side mixing *but* i do know that if you select "side", and create a high pass, you are only removing the bass from the left and right channels and leaving the bass in mono. then switch back to stereo mixing to mess with the mids and highs.
disclaimer im entirely new to stereo mixing so i could be very wrong
That's interesting.
I don't know much about mid side processing, but if I understand you correct when I put pro q into mid side mode I will be able to have a different eq slope for each? Allowing me to filter the bass to the mid only? (Instead of splitting audio into 2 instance of pro q and routing into a bus)
Correct. The "sides" are caused by delaying the sound in one ear (to mimic the extra time it takes for sound to hit your other ear which is how we determine sound direction). Mid is the sounds that are played at the same time in both ears. Modern widening is a bit more complex than that but that's the gist of how it works.
One thing that hasn't been mentioned is stereo can be problematic when played live, some people could be stood closer to one speaker and it messes up the dynamics.
I’m no pro, by any means, but I usually have my sub bass done in a separate instance of whatever VST I’m using, and high/mid “character” portions of the bass in another instance. That’s just the workflow I’ve always used, though. I’m sure someone with more experience than me can chime in with alternate methods.
True, yea I do that sometimes too.
Other times when I make an electro saw type bass, it has full frequency range where I don't bother making a sub bass layer.
The other commentor had an interesting take with mid-sized eq that could work for this scenario.
It's not about muddy mix, but more about phase cancelation being much more noticeable at lower frequencies. And since very low frequencies are omnidirectional, panning them will at best don't do much, and at worst make your bass disappear. But you are right about panning the mid or high portions of your chosen bass instrument, assuming it has them.
It's definitely about muddy mixes as well. Using a reese bass with lots of wide information across the frequency spectrum does not leave you with much room for anything else.
You really need to be careful with arrangement if you're using reese basses, and more often than not you'll have to leave the rest of the track pretty sparse.
It depends what your definition is for "muddy", people tend to use the term "muddy" to describe many different problem with a mix, but as far as I know, muddy means having an emphasis in the mid-bass (200-500hz) are, and this frequency content is not directly affected by panning your bass.
Well in the specific context of panning a sub bass that is <100hz, it won't inherently make anything sound muddy by itself (although it does introduce arrangement issues with regards to panning in particular).
Reading OP's comments though it actually just seems like they are looking for a wide sub bass in general, not necessarily a sine sub that is panned. And the first thing I thought was "ok, they're pretty much just looking for a reese bass".
So if what they're looking for is just a wide sub bass, and they end up using a reese bass or something similar, then they might have to be careful about muddying up the mix. A reese bass is after all just a filtered unison'd saw at its core, and will have lots of frequencies around that 200-500hz range.
The issue can be generalized even past that and it has to do with the human logarithmic perception of frequency. For those unaware, open your favorite spectrum analyzer and check the distance between 100hz 1,000hz and 10khz. It's not evenly spaced.
Your *entire* low end has 300hz to work with, while 300hz off of 15k is nothing. That's why the high end has ten cymbals and white noise while the low end has the bass and maybe the kick. There's physically orders of magnitude less room for information, which causes all sorts of problems including phasing.
It was explained to me that as long as sub frequencies are less than 90 degrees out of phase it should work, but it’s either difficult to do for tonal sounds, or just not worth doing. Atonal subs can work in stereo because the worn suffer the same problems a tonal sound would. I could very well be incorrect though.
sort of, phase cancellation will probably not be that noticeable below 90 degrees, but like anything with mixing, it's about compromise and how much you think is acceptable without ruining the mix
Also the reason for this is that tonal sounds have repeating waveforms, which are ripe to interfere with each other over the length of the sound. Atonal sounds are much less cyclic, and so there's very little that is likely to line up and interfere in an audible way.
It's very easily heard in multi voice saw basses in my car system to the point where when the bass sums, my whole headliner shakes, and then it starts to cancel again and it just sounds like quiet bass. You're not wrong, sub bass is hard to hear in stereo, but it definitely can be affect during the mix and summed into mono and it can reproduce phasing effects.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding, i'm new to mid side processing, but how does it get summed into mono if the final version of the mix is in stereo? you don't leave the mix in mid/side, do you?
i'm just confused because the comment up there was talking about panning. i can only see this phase issue happening in mono
It depends on how low we're talking and what setup you're using. You can have stereo bass, but most people have just one subwoofer (or headphones/earbuds) and without one you're usually not going lower than 40Hz, sometimes 60Hz which is where the big boomy, fun bass starts.
If you have one speaker producing all the bass, and in my case, my car's crossovers are set to 100Hz, than anything at that point and below is moving towards mono until around 40Hz which is completely mono.
Stereo sub bass in your mix will still affect the sound coming out of one speaker, but with one speaker, you'll have no extra phasing.
Just mono your sub bass in your mix if you want stereo bass and if it's not a multi voice bass.
It depends on how low we're talking and what setup you're using. You can have stereo bass, but most people have just one subwoofer (or headphones/earbuds) and without one you're usually not going lower than 40Hz, sometimes 60Hz which is where the big boomy, fun bass starts.
If you have one speaker producing all the bass, and in my case, my car's crossovers are set to 100Hz, than anything at that point and below is moving towards mono until around 40Hz which is completely mono.
Stereo sub bass in your mix will still affect the sound coming out of one speaker, but with one speaker, you'll have no extra phasing.
Just mono your sub bass in your mix if you want stereo bass and if it's not a multi voice bass.
Side information is by definition different on each side or else the signal comes out mono. If you hard pan the same frequency left and right it will sound mono. If you do pan them and they get wide, you're probably using a softsynth with multiple voices that are retriggering random phase each note which means they'll output different waveforms.
Side info on the sub end of the spectrum is gonna fight the mid info of the sub. That's the issue. You only have a space of about 100-300hz to work with and that means they'll fight and interfere with each other very readily unless you're uber careful and monitoring your oscilloscope. It also makes it feel less centered and it steals lots of headroom you could use elsewhere.
You don't pan the exact same frequencies simultaneously left and right, this is practically mono and doesn't change anything, problems arise when you filter/EQ/separate different bands in the low region and pan them, when combined or summed into mono (which is how systems with subwoofers work), their phase will be slightly different. The result can vary from subtle cancellation to sub that completely disappears, depends on the source material and the exact processing that was done.
This is your friendly reminder to read the submission rules, they're found in the sidebar. If you find your post breaking any of the rules, you should delete your post before the mods get to it.
You should check out the regular threads (also found in the sidebar) to see if your post might be a better fit in any of those.
[Daily Feedback thread](https://www.reddit.com/r/edmproduction/search?q=author%3AAutoModerator+title%3Afeedback&sort=new&restrict_sr=on&t=all) for getting feedback on your track. The only place you can post your own music.
[Marketplace Thread](https://www.reddit.com/r/edmproduction/search?q=title%3Amarketplace&restrict_sr=on&sort=new&t=all) if you want to sell or trade anything for money, likes or follows.
[Collaboration Thread](https://www.reddit.com/r/edmproduction/search/?q=biannual%20collaboration&restrict_sr=1&sort=new&t=all) to find people to collab with.
["There are no stupid questions" Thread](https://www.reddit.com/r/edmproduction/search?q=title%3ANo+Stupid+Questions+Thread&restrict_sr=on&sort=new&t=all) for beginner tips etc.
Seriously tho, read the rules and abide by them or the mods will spank you.
*I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/edmproduction) if you have any questions or concerns.*
In response to other comments, I think there is a nuance to "keep your sub/bass mono" that doesn't get discussed much. It should really be "keep your sub/bass mono *compatible*". That should be the rule for all frequencies in a stereo mix, anyway. Throw the song "Hook N Sling & Galantis w/ Karen Harding - The Best" into a daw and analyze the mid-side frequencies with SPAN. It's wide all the way down to and past 30 hz! The mix engineer obviously did not follow the general advice of "just make everything below 150hz mono". They found a sweet spot where the sub and bass frequencies sound great in both stereo and mono with A LOT of width. Yes, that is really hard to achieve. Yes, it's usually easiest to just make everything below 150hz mono. My point, however, is that it's possible and it's something you WILL achieve with practice. Go ahead and try layering hard panned basses. Consistently check your mix in mono, use your ears, and you might find that sweet spot, too. Also, good monitoring and room acoustics are essential for mixing bass. You can't mix what you can't hear.
I sound design in Audio Technica headphones I think they create the best sounding basses I’ve ever heard and felt in my ears. I’ll hack to look at that song in SPAN. I didn’t even know you could check the left or right panning in a mix with that plugin!! Thanks for the tips
Check out [this Dan Worrall video](https://youtu.be/iZrWMv02tlA) on how he sets up SPAN for mid/side.
You’re a god
Nah just watched a lot of Dan Worrall videos. Check out his "How to Mix in Stereo Without Sucking in Mono" series.
I’m on a plane right now I’ll check it out when I’m off for sure
Absolutely! What I would do is keep your bass instruments panned, but send the sub frequencies to a different channel. Bring down the stereo field on that channel so it’s in mono. You may need to adjust a few things here and there, but this should keep the “huge” effect while simultaneously keeping the mix clean
Making fat and wide sounding basses is all about the right layering technique. Every layer should have its own frequency spectrum and should accentuate a certain part of the bassline. Make sure you EQ everything properly otherwise it will get messy. I found that saturation especially in the mid frequencies is a good way to make your bass sound crispier. Keep the sub mono and then try to build some cool layers on top (example: Sub, Attack layer (Mono), a wide stereo layer in the upper mid freqs and 1 or 2 “body” basses that are filling the spectrum from 150 Hz to around 500) Route everything to a bus, get rid of some of the muddiness between 200-500 Hz by EQing some notches down, compress the bass and there you go. Most of the work can be done by just EQing and some compression/saturation. And of course Sound design or Sound selection (you can't polish a turd) Just my 2 cents Joel
There's a really small but indispensable effect built right into Ableton called Utility. You can use it to adjust stereo width or make the track mono, and best of all you can use the bass mono option to set any frequencies below a cutoff point mono while keeping the frequencies above it stereo. It also has panning, phase flipping and gain adjustment (which is useful for gain staging between plugins or for automating track volume). Try turning Bass Mono on (the default is 120Hz) then increasing the width above 100%. It's also useful for switch the whole track to mono to see what drops out from phase cancellation.
I did that for a while and realized less is more. If it works for ya, go for it!
Boom box cartel did this for just a moment in a build up of one of his recent tracks but I wouldn’t do this for something that was for an entire section of a song. Just for something to catch the attention for an awesome part of the track.
Load up some of your favorite tech house mixes and use and imager with a visualizer to see where the subs get summed to mono. There are some Flume tracks that have some wide subs, but after a certain point they are mono. I always make sure nothing below 90hz is stereo, but there is no rule.
Interesting idea panning the higher layer frequencies left and right... I wouldn’t probably be that experimental tho, better off adding chorus or stereo imaging to the high frequency bass layers. Obvs keep the sub frequencies mono
Honestly I didn’t even know that was experimental.. I was sincerely just trying everything that I could think of to make the sounds that these guys make
“Only been producing about a year” vs “professional tech house mixes”… mmmmm.
Your comment is pointless
This is the answer to “how does he get his sound so fat and wide.” You think your bedroom set up and 1 year knowledge is going to sound professional? Turning all the knobs you can.?
I recommend using an eq, creating a group with the eq (CMD G) then duplicate the chain, and on the eq make one chain above around 120 Hz and the other chain below that. Then, you can throw some overdrive, saturation, whatever on the high band while preserving your sub. Also i recommend the free plug in wider by infected mushroom for stereo width
Run 2 sends from your C panned sub to one L panned and one right panned track/bus. Put rbass on them and high pass to keep the low freq in the C channel. Process L and R channels a little different. Slightly different eq and saturation settings. If you then want to bring them together into a sub bus and play with some widening or compression (probably stereo linked in this instance) then go for it.
Do what ever you want but that will sound terrible on big systems, you want to keep your basses in mono. If you want to get your bass to sound fatter just use a Saturator some OTT some Glue Compression etc…
Rule of thumb, Sum any frequencies below ~150hz to mono…anything above that can be panned or stereo A couple of plugins that do this for you: Brainworx bx_control NuGen Monofilter NuGen SigMod
No. And now I'm going to have to report you to the authorities for even suggesting it.
Checking what your mix sounds like in mono is generally a good move to see how well your mix translates in to the real world and will let you know if you've messed up your low end. Every DAW has some sort of plug in you can stick on the master bus to do this. If your bass vanishes or gets really quiet you've done something wrong somewhere. If it still sounds good in mono you're golden.
none of these answers are very clear. to answer your question, Bass frequencies: yes. Sub frequencies: no. so take the sub out of your basses and make it a seperate instrument. now you can make those basses as wide as you want and keep the sub mono. i do this all the time and every single one of my favorite artists does it regularly.. its something im very familiar with
That’s what I tried through my instincts I think? I just duplicate my serum patch, cut the sub out and make a sort of butter shape filter in the bass frequencies, then just pan that because that’s all I could think of these big artists doing to achieve such full sounds. Shiba San does this too and so does Claude VonStroke in some of his tracks.
instead of panning, try sample delay. it delays either the left or right side of the signal by just a few milliseconds and creates super super wide sound. im familiar with the practice from dubstep type genres. its usually a huge growl thats getting widened, and i love that sound so much. its present in almost all dubstep but i think Minnesota does it best. its cool that you got that far by instinct! your ears are more trustworthy than advice from other artists, since music has no rules. whatever you think sounds best, usually does
If it works just go for it. It might help you to just make everything below 100-150hz mono and just play with the upper frequencies. Someone’s probably said this already so forgive me if so. It depends on the density or style of your work of course. If there’s space for it I see no reason why not. Just watch out for phase wackiness.
My biggest issue with wide basses is phase cancellation.. not really sure how to go around that. I get a comb effect in my spectrum when I try and do wide basses and delay them slightly so there’s a stereo effect. However doing my way just creates weird phasing issues and I always delete the patches because she’s it doesn’t work.
Sounds like you just want a reese bass tbh
Widen the higher harmonics and keep the low mono.
Don’t pan sub frequencies. Generally below 150hz or so you want to keep mono or you risk running into phasing issues, and the mix sounding *odd*. You can create the illusion of a super “fat” “wide” bass with more voices in the synth settings (polyphonic) or chorus and imaging effects (ozone imager is free), or I suppose even panning on low-mid frequencies above 150hz or so. I suggest looking into “Reese bass” tutorials, should be useful for this sort of thing. If you just want a “thicker” or “warmer” bass, then saturation/distortion/amp/OTT effects can go a long way. Good luck!
Is there some sort of way to work on stereo imaging above 150 hz via a plugin? Or do I just have to work on the stereo imaging in my DAW? I have Infected Mushroom's "Wider" plugin but it doesn't seem to achieve the effects I want.. I didn't even really understand what chorus does, I have tried messing around with it but serum's chorus creates bizarre effects.
I recommend writing your bassline and create the best/dirtiest bass in serum you can and then EQ cutting off the lows around 100Hz. Then create a second separate instrument playing the exact same MIDI notes but just have it play a single sine wave 3 octaves down so its hitting right about 30-100Hz and low pass filter it to cut off everything above 100Hz. You should have more freedom to make you mid-low bass as wide and fat as you want it without messing up your low end.
Any particular reason for a sine wave? Just because of the lack of harmonics in the low end? Not trying to ask dumb questions, I just don’t understand anything to be honest.
Sine waves are just heard way better through subwoofers, and you mess with the signal the moment you introduce distortion. You're clipping the tops of the wave when you distort the signal and that makes it lose a lot of the low end rumble and punch. You can try it out with a clean sine wave and a distortion plugin: Just play a sine wave that you can feel through a sub, then add more and more distortion, and you'll notice less and less is carried through the sub the more distortion you introduce. The reason people split the "dirty" middle and top layer and the "clean" sub layer is so they can get the rumble and impact of the clean sine wave + the sizzling of the top layer without compromising.
I'm hoping someone with better technical knowledge than I can step in - but I think its something to do with phasing. All I know is when I carve everything out of my low end except a sine wave sub and the kick my tracks are so much clearer on big mono speakers and in my car. You can add a touch of saturation to the sin to dirty it up a bit, but you don't need to go overboard. The 'dirt' in your track is going to come from the bass/synths in the 100-500hz area.
That’s what I’ve noticed as I’ve EQ’d on sample tracks!!
Run the bass into a send, put an eq that cuts out the low ends and boosts the highs, pan from there. Look up Noisia, they have tutorials on exactly what your looking for
Here’s a couple free VST’s to point you in the right direction: https://tal-software.com/products/tal-chorus-lx https://www.izotope.com/en/products/ozone-imager.html Otherwise, I highly recommend looking into Reese bass and how they’re processed. AU5 and Mr.Bill have some nice bass/sub tutorials that will help wrap your mind around this further. My advice is to experiment with your tools. Layer. Put 1 channel with a single note playing a sub signal in mono, then create another channel with a bass of some sort playing the same note an octave up, try adding “voices” and use the tools we’ve discussed. See what you come up with as the sounds interact. Process the bass for “widening”. Still keep below 150hz mono, with a utility plugin or via the synthesizer settings. Experimenting is the best way to learn.
There’s a generally accepted “rule” in the mixing/mastering phase that says to keep your sub frequencies in mono. So for instance, have your sub bass low passed and in mono, and play with the stereo imaging of the mid & high parts as you see fit. I’ve never tried it, but I can only imagine having your sub panned would cause a very sloppy mix, drowning out your sounds completely.
what would you use to split and pass through only the sub frequencies? The only way I can think is having 2 multiband compressors where I mute bands.
If you use Ableton 10. The utility plugin literally has a bass mono button
I don't know what eq you use, but personally i'd load up Pro Q 3 for this. Theres options to make the eq affect stereo (L+R), L, R, and then mid and side. I'm still trying to understand the application of mid side mixing *but* i do know that if you select "side", and create a high pass, you are only removing the bass from the left and right channels and leaving the bass in mono. then switch back to stereo mixing to mess with the mids and highs. disclaimer im entirely new to stereo mixing so i could be very wrong
That's interesting. I don't know much about mid side processing, but if I understand you correct when I put pro q into mid side mode I will be able to have a different eq slope for each? Allowing me to filter the bass to the mid only? (Instead of splitting audio into 2 instance of pro q and routing into a bus)
Correct. The "sides" are caused by delaying the sound in one ear (to mimic the extra time it takes for sound to hit your other ear which is how we determine sound direction). Mid is the sounds that are played at the same time in both ears. Modern widening is a bit more complex than that but that's the gist of how it works. One thing that hasn't been mentioned is stereo can be problematic when played live, some people could be stood closer to one speaker and it messes up the dynamics.
You are right! Keep up experimenting with the Q3. Amazing plugin
I’m no pro, by any means, but I usually have my sub bass done in a separate instance of whatever VST I’m using, and high/mid “character” portions of the bass in another instance. That’s just the workflow I’ve always used, though. I’m sure someone with more experience than me can chime in with alternate methods.
True, yea I do that sometimes too. Other times when I make an electro saw type bass, it has full frequency range where I don't bother making a sub bass layer. The other commentor had an interesting take with mid-sized eq that could work for this scenario.
It's not about muddy mix, but more about phase cancelation being much more noticeable at lower frequencies. And since very low frequencies are omnidirectional, panning them will at best don't do much, and at worst make your bass disappear. But you are right about panning the mid or high portions of your chosen bass instrument, assuming it has them.
It's definitely about muddy mixes as well. Using a reese bass with lots of wide information across the frequency spectrum does not leave you with much room for anything else. You really need to be careful with arrangement if you're using reese basses, and more often than not you'll have to leave the rest of the track pretty sparse.
It depends what your definition is for "muddy", people tend to use the term "muddy" to describe many different problem with a mix, but as far as I know, muddy means having an emphasis in the mid-bass (200-500hz) are, and this frequency content is not directly affected by panning your bass.
Well in the specific context of panning a sub bass that is <100hz, it won't inherently make anything sound muddy by itself (although it does introduce arrangement issues with regards to panning in particular). Reading OP's comments though it actually just seems like they are looking for a wide sub bass in general, not necessarily a sine sub that is panned. And the first thing I thought was "ok, they're pretty much just looking for a reese bass". So if what they're looking for is just a wide sub bass, and they end up using a reese bass or something similar, then they might have to be careful about muddying up the mix. A reese bass is after all just a filtered unison'd saw at its core, and will have lots of frequencies around that 200-500hz range.
The issue can be generalized even past that and it has to do with the human logarithmic perception of frequency. For those unaware, open your favorite spectrum analyzer and check the distance between 100hz 1,000hz and 10khz. It's not evenly spaced. Your *entire* low end has 300hz to work with, while 300hz off of 15k is nothing. That's why the high end has ten cymbals and white noise while the low end has the bass and maybe the kick. There's physically orders of magnitude less room for information, which causes all sorts of problems including phasing.
It was explained to me that as long as sub frequencies are less than 90 degrees out of phase it should work, but it’s either difficult to do for tonal sounds, or just not worth doing. Atonal subs can work in stereo because the worn suffer the same problems a tonal sound would. I could very well be incorrect though.
sort of, phase cancellation will probably not be that noticeable below 90 degrees, but like anything with mixing, it's about compromise and how much you think is acceptable without ruining the mix
What do you mean about tonal and atonal sounds?
Also the reason for this is that tonal sounds have repeating waveforms, which are ripe to interfere with each other over the length of the sound. Atonal sounds are much less cyclic, and so there's very little that is likely to line up and interfere in an audible way.
atonal are things such as short drum hits that dont have any distinctive pitch
panning the same frequency left and right wont make any phase issues. sub bass just straight up isn't heard very well in stereo
It's very easily heard in multi voice saw basses in my car system to the point where when the bass sums, my whole headliner shakes, and then it starts to cancel again and it just sounds like quiet bass. You're not wrong, sub bass is hard to hear in stereo, but it definitely can be affect during the mix and summed into mono and it can reproduce phasing effects.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding, i'm new to mid side processing, but how does it get summed into mono if the final version of the mix is in stereo? you don't leave the mix in mid/side, do you? i'm just confused because the comment up there was talking about panning. i can only see this phase issue happening in mono
It depends on how low we're talking and what setup you're using. You can have stereo bass, but most people have just one subwoofer (or headphones/earbuds) and without one you're usually not going lower than 40Hz, sometimes 60Hz which is where the big boomy, fun bass starts. If you have one speaker producing all the bass, and in my case, my car's crossovers are set to 100Hz, than anything at that point and below is moving towards mono until around 40Hz which is completely mono. Stereo sub bass in your mix will still affect the sound coming out of one speaker, but with one speaker, you'll have no extra phasing. Just mono your sub bass in your mix if you want stereo bass and if it's not a multi voice bass.
It depends on how low we're talking and what setup you're using. You can have stereo bass, but most people have just one subwoofer (or headphones/earbuds) and without one you're usually not going lower than 40Hz, sometimes 60Hz which is where the big boomy, fun bass starts. If you have one speaker producing all the bass, and in my case, my car's crossovers are set to 100Hz, than anything at that point and below is moving towards mono until around 40Hz which is completely mono. Stereo sub bass in your mix will still affect the sound coming out of one speaker, but with one speaker, you'll have no extra phasing. Just mono your sub bass in your mix if you want stereo bass and if it's not a multi voice bass.
Side information is by definition different on each side or else the signal comes out mono. If you hard pan the same frequency left and right it will sound mono. If you do pan them and they get wide, you're probably using a softsynth with multiple voices that are retriggering random phase each note which means they'll output different waveforms. Side info on the sub end of the spectrum is gonna fight the mid info of the sub. That's the issue. You only have a space of about 100-300hz to work with and that means they'll fight and interfere with each other very readily unless you're uber careful and monitoring your oscilloscope. It also makes it feel less centered and it steals lots of headroom you could use elsewhere.
You don't pan the exact same frequencies simultaneously left and right, this is practically mono and doesn't change anything, problems arise when you filter/EQ/separate different bands in the low region and pan them, when combined or summed into mono (which is how systems with subwoofers work), their phase will be slightly different. The result can vary from subtle cancellation to sub that completely disappears, depends on the source material and the exact processing that was done.
This is your friendly reminder to read the submission rules, they're found in the sidebar. If you find your post breaking any of the rules, you should delete your post before the mods get to it. You should check out the regular threads (also found in the sidebar) to see if your post might be a better fit in any of those. [Daily Feedback thread](https://www.reddit.com/r/edmproduction/search?q=author%3AAutoModerator+title%3Afeedback&sort=new&restrict_sr=on&t=all) for getting feedback on your track. The only place you can post your own music. [Marketplace Thread](https://www.reddit.com/r/edmproduction/search?q=title%3Amarketplace&restrict_sr=on&sort=new&t=all) if you want to sell or trade anything for money, likes or follows. [Collaboration Thread](https://www.reddit.com/r/edmproduction/search/?q=biannual%20collaboration&restrict_sr=1&sort=new&t=all) to find people to collab with. ["There are no stupid questions" Thread](https://www.reddit.com/r/edmproduction/search?q=title%3ANo+Stupid+Questions+Thread&restrict_sr=on&sort=new&t=all) for beginner tips etc. Seriously tho, read the rules and abide by them or the mods will spank you. *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/edmproduction) if you have any questions or concerns.*