Recording - December 2009 - 28

Boom, Muck not a thing that makes them loud. Some performers can give you a smooth and even track to begin with that needs no dynamic control. Some performers need a lot of limiting and cut and paste work to keep things from going to Hell in a handbasket. Compression and limiting can help you get that, but they are no salvation where bass loudness is concerned. Final compression and limiting of stereo mixes won’t do anything much to make bass louder, except in that limiting will tend to squash more dynamic instruments down so that the bass seems louder in comparison. This is illusory and doesn’t really buy you much. For the most part, 2-buss limiting won’t really affect the bass much, and 2-buss compression of bass-heavy mixes will tend to cause the compressor to start pumping along with the bass in a really annoying way. Multiband compression first started out to allow a compressor to compress bass separately from the rest of the mix. You don’t need it if you have done the processing on the individual tracks as part of the mix. For the most part, people compress things too much these days, and they think of compression as a fix that will make everything better. This is false; not everything needs to be loud all the time and the music gets boring when it is. Sometimes bass needs to be loud all the time, but that doesn’t mean everything else does too. 5. Know your customer What does the customer want it to sound like and what is the customer going to be playing it on? Part of the problem that you have is that you can’t really predict what the playback system is going to be like. For example, if you know that most people are going to be playing back a recording on booming car stereos, you have a serious dilemma because these systems mostly use bandpass bass enclosures that exaggerate only a few notes and tend to transform any nearby fundamental into the resonant frequency of the speaker box. One note may be extremely loud and another note may not be, and you cannot predict how the system is tuned because different listeners will have different systems. What can you do? All you can do is make sure that there is enough upper harmonic information that the sound comes across well on small speakers. If this is the case, it’ll sound loud and bassy even when the bass box isn’t being excited. A second thing you can do is to make bass sounds that are broadband and have a lot of different bass frequencies in them. In the case of a kick drum which doesn’t have a sharply defined tone, this is easy to do. In the case of an electric bass it’s harder and you can’t do it without losing definition in the sound. In the case of a standup bass or bassoon you lose too much to risk playing with the tone at all. 6. Keep bass instruments apart in the arrangement Since—if you followed direction 1 above—you cannot use stereo effects to separate bass instruments in the mix, and—if you followed direction 3 above—you can’t count entirely on tone to separate them, the only thing you can do is arrange them so they don’t step on one another. In the case of rock music this means bass and kick parts that reinforce one another instead of fighting. In some other musical styles it may involve having doubled parts and it may involve just plain dropping instruments out of the mix sometimes.RECORDING DECEMBER 2009 More Less 7. Use accurate monitoring If you can’t hear it, you can’t mix it. Plenty of folks doing music intended for play in clubs with big sound systems and in boomy car stereo systems have been using monitor systems that are intended to emulate those environments. The problem, as I mentioned in direction 5 above, is that you can’t really effectively emulate them. You need to have an accurate monitoring system that is pretty flat at the listening position down to the lowest frequency you care about. This is expensive and the major expense is often real estate and construction rather than electronics, but there’s no other way around the problem. This means either a full-range speaker system, or a satellite-sub system that is designed to be accurate, and it means a good-sized control room with bass trapping. There are two kinds of subwoofer systems out there one kind that is intended to be accurate, and another far more common variety which is intended just to be boomy. If you’re looking at subwoofer systems, investigate the crossover. If there is a lowpass filter for the sub and a highpass filter for the mains, and some kind of adjustable phase-shift network to match the two, you’re starting out in the right place. If the system just runs the main speakers full-range with no highpass, run away immediately. It’s not possible to properly integrate the high and low end with these systems, and the attempts of the main speakers to reproduce bass they were never intended to handle are bad news. Look for subwoofer systems that are sealed cabinets rather than vented boxes or bandpass systems; you don’t need your main monitoring system to get super loud, you need it to go super low. If you want something that’s loud, that’s where the check mix system that emulates the club or car rig comes in. Compression as a fix that will make everything better? This is false—not everything needs to be loud, and the music gets boring when it is. If you cannot tell the difference between the bass fundamental and the harmonics, or if you hear the bass levels change when the performer runs up and down the scale, you cannot accurately mix. 8. Don’t build the mix around the bass Really, I mean it. Okay, maybe there are a couple styles where this is appropriate, but when you mix, think about what the most important part of the mix is and build everything around that. If there are vocals, that’s often the vocals. Sometimes it’s not the vocals. Find out what it is, and if you think it’s the kick drum, think again. 9. Conclusion Bass that sounds right is important, and it’s the main thing that mastering engineers have to fix. Getting it right with the arrangement and the mix will always be better than trying to fix it after the fact. One point worth repeating as a final thought—remember that what’s right for one genre of music isn’t right for another, so knowing what’s right in the first place is a good part of winning the battle. Scott Dorsey (dorsey@recordingmag.com) is a recording engineer and audio problem solver living and working in Williamsburg, VA.

Recording - December 2009

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