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MAKING YOUR KICK AND BASS SIT RIGHT IN THE MIX

This is the toughie boys and girls; how do you get a great, solid bass end which is both full and punchy without sounding flaccid, farty or muddy?  How do you get the bass and kick just right?

I’ll be honest; the main problem you are going to face is accurate monitoring and there are two reasons why this is so.  First of all, your room simply isn’t big enough.  Bass notes have very long waveforms which take space in which to fully develop and propagate and there’s nothing you can do about it except to move to somewhere bigger.  The second issue is that your little speakers cannot accurately reproduce those bass frequencies anyway, not even if you have a SUB.

Which being one of my least favourite words!  Darn it I simply hate subs and the way they’ve ruined most peoples’ ability to mix.  Seriously, when I get tracks in for mastering the fact that they have been mixed on a system with a cheap, poorly tuned and mostly far too loud sub is the bane of my life.

To illustrate this point I will tell you a story.  Some months ago some maggot-brained youngster came to the studio wanting to show off his tracks.  The music was okay (perhaps a little under-exciting) but the mixes were horribly bass-light.  Of course, I knew immediately what his problem was, but the little scrote had the audacity to say “it sounds better with a sub”.

So, hang on a minute.  We’re listening to twenty grand’s worth of PMC monitors with piston drivers running off Bryston monoblock power amps through cables which cost several hundred dollars a metre in an acoustically analysed and tuned room and yet his “expert” opinion is that it sounds better with a sub?!?!

Five words for him:  YOUR SUB IS TOO LOUD.  Some more words; his mixes sound like ass anywhere except when they’re playing at his own place because he’s got his sub turned up so loud that it’s forcing him to unconsciously back off the bass end and thus his music is coming out sounding like thin, wimpy trash.  Do me a bloody favour.  Don’t worry, I didn’t chew his head off.  As a matter of fact I was unusually gentle in putting him wise to his problem and we didn’t even have to call an ambulance.

So look, my friend, I DARE YOU to unplug that sub and mix without it.  Better still, mix on as many different speakers as you can.  Play it at your mate’s place.  Play it in your car, in your boss’s van.  Play it on your mum’s clock radio for goodness’ sake.  If you can make your track’s bass end sound great on the worst possible reproduction equipment, it’ll sound great on nearly anything but using as many different monitors as possible is the key.

There are two sides to mixing that bass end.  The first is that you want it to have fullness and dynamics on the biggest and best system.  The second is that you still want it to be audible and have presence on the aforementioned clock radio.

You realise, of course, that your thundering kick and monster bass tone are sitting in the same frequency range.  This leads to a phenomenon called “push-pull” in which your bass is sometimes completely out of phase with your kick, ruining the impact of both.  As an interesting aside, most acoustic kick drums have their fundamental frequency at about 50Hz.  With G on a bass guitar being at 48.99Hz, it is therefore the note most likely to cause the push-pull problem because not only is it the closest match to the kick fundamental but it is also the note most likely to totally phase-cancel.  Anyway, I’m digressing.  What push-pull means is that when the kick and bass waveforms match (prophase) they sum and are therefore suddenly louder.  When they completely mismatch (antiphase) they disappear.  This is obviously going to be a problem for your nice solid bottom end.  Engineers who mix in 5.1 surround have the luxury of, say, sending the kick to the center channel and panning the bass between Left and Right channels, thus completely eradicating the push-pull issue.  But for the sake of simplicity I’m going to assume you’re still mixing in stereo like I am.

To avoid push-pull, which has been known about for decades, engineers used a technique called “ducking”.  They would split the bass signal into low and mid-high spectral ranges then feed the low end through a compressor which was side-chained off the kick.  So whenever the drummer whacked down on his kick, the low end of the bass would suddenly be compressed into oblivion for a fraction of a second.  Because the mids and highs of the bass remain uncompressed, you can’t hear the effect (not to mention that the kick drum takes precedence in the listener’s perception).  It’s easy to set up ducking even in a digital workstation environment; many plugins have a sidechain facility and even if they don’t you can use the separate channels of a stereo compressor.  Left gets the kick and drives the compressor, right get the bass and is compressed thereby.  Easy.

To “glue” the bass and kick together (with ducking or without) you could then bus them through the same compressor.  This has the effect of controlling the dynamics of both together rather than separately.  This technique will often give you a great, solid bass end but a word of caution is in order:  Compression is a thing with which it is easy to go too far – especially if your monitors can’t reproduce the bass end efficiently and you therefore can’t hear what it’s doing.  It’s much better to start out with a gentle squash of, say, 1-2dB and then add more later if necessary.

So you’ve got your ducking going on and you’ve bus-compressed the kick and bass together.  What’s a good way of getting the balance right between the two of them?  Well, if you find yourself in a small space with crappy monitors I have a little trick which may help.  I simply go up to the speaker, put my fingertips on the rim of the cone and FEEL what’s happening.  I’ve learned, after doing this for years, what “feels” right as to the balance between kick and bass.  Try it; if it works for you too, well and good.  BUT!  I will never make a final decision on a final mix by this method; I need to HEAR what’s happening and that inevitably means proper monitoring in a good room.

Now let’s address bass clarity.  We’ve already noted that the kick and bass sit pretty much right in the same spectral range but it’s important to ask yourself what else is going on down there.  For example, have you cranked the bass end on your guitar tone to make it sound fuller?  Well, okay, let me ask you this; if you want your bass to cut through, why are you piling the EQ onto the guitar?  Did ya think of that?  Or perhaps there’s a synth sound down there which is buggering things up.  So, apart from going and radically high-pass filtering all your other sources, what we’re saying here is that MUSICAL ARRANGEMENT is going to be your best friend.  I know it probably sounds too simple to be true, but I guarantee that it works.  Don’t write guitar parts in the bass range and vice-versa.  If you have a massive synth bass tone which is rocking, don’t go and slap your orchestral double bass parts in the same musical place.  And, most importantly, bass should mean bass.  Some bass players move up the neck during rehearsals because they can’t hear their bass properly.  Then, when it comes to final mix time in the studio, they’re the first to ask “why can’t I hear the bass?”.  I think you can imagine my response!

Lastly lets look at making your big, fat bass end audible on a cheap or small system.  Clearly those tiny speakers can’t reproduce bass frequencies at all well so how are you going to insure that your listener can hear the great bassline you’ve written?  Your answer here is to make sure that you have strong mids on your bass instruments.  Not only will this make your part audible on bad gear, but it’ll give the bass a fuller tone.  Engineers have known for years that if you want the bass to stand out you don’t crank the lows, you crank the mids.  Another oft-used trick is to take a send off the bass and put it through some kind of amp sim; a Pod or something like that.  Subject to which preset you use, this will add a lot of harmonic content which you can feed back into your mix to really make the bass sing and dance on small speakers.  Of course there is our old friend distortion, too.  This will have almost the same effect, as will re-amping.  Just use them in moderation.

Daily I use these techniques and others to iron out the knotty problem of bass end mixing.  Of course, I’m in a great sounding room with rudely expensive speakers, but the principles still apply.  If they work for me, they can work for you too.  Have fun tweaking your bottom!