There's no doubting that modern recordings have more low end impact than those that were created 20 years ago or more. A lot of this has to do with the physical limitations of vinyl but also the increase in availability of great tools to add harmonics and other psychoacoustic treats.
While EQ boosting is one way of raising your bass level, you'll quickly start to run out of headroom in the final master and distortion will ruin your balance. With some care the following plug ins and techniques are great for increasing your perceived bass presence.
Rbass
This veteran of the plug in world works by creating harmonics which in turn makes the bass sound louder and fuller, you still have to watch your volume here but its a great plugin in for Kick's and bass instruments. There is a frequency slider to target your instruments sweet spot and is very simple to use.
Loair
Lo air is much more about sub bass and really needs subtle use to prevent over egging the bass pudding. It's a subharmonic generator, so essentialy its adding a false tone below your bass to make it sound more imposing and bone shaking.
Lowender
One of my favorites and is great at generating tones to go along with your existing bass track. Again as with lo air, it's 'use with caution' effect that over used will be a highway to distorted bassville riding first class. Used subtly it adds a lot without being obtrusive, used by a lot of top engineers and likes of Andrew Scheps swears by it!
Pultec EQ
The Pultec EQ is great character EQ from the vaults of history that is still popular today because of its mode of use. With this EQ you can boost and cut at the same time which creates and interesting tightening effect of that particular frequency region. For example, boosting 5db at 60 hz and cutting 4db at 60hz has an appreciable difference in quality than just boosting 1db.
Parallel Processing
Put simply, its just having two tracks of the same thing and treating them differently. The typical method is to have a dry or (honest) track plus you're compressors and EQ's working hard on the second. This trick is not just limited to bass processing of course and can be used with any track in your session like vocals where you want to retain some natural dynamics but have the sonic characteristics of compression come through in the tone.
With all of these effects it can be a good idea to further tighten up your bass further by low cutting sharply from about 30hz. This gives us some more headroom when it comes to mastering as those (mostly) unheard frequencies will eat up headroom and make your track sound unnecessarily quieter.
Online Mixing
While EQ boosting is one way of raising your bass level, you'll quickly start to run out of headroom in the final master and distortion will ruin your balance. With some care the following plug ins and techniques are great for increasing your perceived bass presence.
Rbass
This veteran of the plug in world works by creating harmonics which in turn makes the bass sound louder and fuller, you still have to watch your volume here but its a great plugin in for Kick's and bass instruments. There is a frequency slider to target your instruments sweet spot and is very simple to use.
Loair
Lo air is much more about sub bass and really needs subtle use to prevent over egging the bass pudding. It's a subharmonic generator, so essentialy its adding a false tone below your bass to make it sound more imposing and bone shaking.
Lowender
One of my favorites and is great at generating tones to go along with your existing bass track. Again as with lo air, it's 'use with caution' effect that over used will be a highway to distorted bassville riding first class. Used subtly it adds a lot without being obtrusive, used by a lot of top engineers and likes of Andrew Scheps swears by it!
Pultec EQ
The Pultec EQ is great character EQ from the vaults of history that is still popular today because of its mode of use. With this EQ you can boost and cut at the same time which creates and interesting tightening effect of that particular frequency region. For example, boosting 5db at 60 hz and cutting 4db at 60hz has an appreciable difference in quality than just boosting 1db.
Parallel Processing
Put simply, its just having two tracks of the same thing and treating them differently. The typical method is to have a dry or (honest) track plus you're compressors and EQ's working hard on the second. This trick is not just limited to bass processing of course and can be used with any track in your session like vocals where you want to retain some natural dynamics but have the sonic characteristics of compression come through in the tone.
With all of these effects it can be a good idea to further tighten up your bass further by low cutting sharply from about 30hz. This gives us some more headroom when it comes to mastering as those (mostly) unheard frequencies will eat up headroom and make your track sound unnecessarily quieter.
Online Mixing
RSS Feed