Lessons

Lesson Info

Mixing the High End of Bass

We had just ramped ah base a ton through a bunch of different layers and started developing what I referred to is disgusting based tone and ah right now we're going toe kind of look into more massaging base into the mix but I wanted to go to a more simple track that had a lot less going on because obviously here we have a trillion layers so and I want to introduce a new song so that I don't have to listen to this one for a while so you guys don't either so they opened that right now okay so here I'm going to play through this song real fast it's ah much more basic just hardcore punk song than anything we've been dealing with so far I'm just gonna play this session of the song for a while and then start talking more about the bass in the song and how I want to go about treating thiss song obviously it's a lot more just simple straightforward and then if you look at the base although it did render in stereo it is just one track there's no d I there's no amp it's justa sands amtrak so it ...

kind of gives us more toe easier thing to look at when we're dealing with one track and start talking fitting things in and then we'll be able to take the information from this and go to the tracks that have more and more layers of base so first thing I want to do is just kind of marry this base tone with the guitar tone, so miss solo these two tracks so there's parts to me that fits pretty well, but we can start to, like, figure out what's everybody think as faras everybody can hear that, okay, what's going on right now, where is the base living to you and what do you kind of think we can dio with it? If it was something you're listening to? Where would you want to go with it? To me, it sounds this kind of teeny allover there's there's not a lot a lot of real punch in lower anything like that, I wouldn't agree with that completely so let's start to do that, and just because that's perfect introduction as well because of how I want the base, I feel like you're right there's not a lot of lowland in the base, but I think that the levels of the two together, the basin that gets our relating really well together already. So what I'm going to do is anything I do to the guitar at this point or to the base at this point, I'm going to kind of do the opposite to the base, so make sure that the relationship between the two doesn't change the way that I can have these both ok it's on the rhythms like I always talked about I'm gonna go in and I'm gonna high pass them right now which they were probably high past pretty well before I even rendered this stem so I'm not going to worry ah holton about it going super steeper aggressive but and I'm gonna find a spot in the base when I do boosts and cut I'm going to be a lot more aggressive than I would if I was fine tuning in a room just so that we can understand the effects because rarely what I bought most seven yeah I'm not going to boost that much in real life but I want to show how we can maintain maintain the relationship with boosts and cuts so obviously that's not a thing that I would say to do is just you don't have enough basis you're just crank the hell out of it you should be subtle every time you make a move but we're not going to hear subtleties is much here so we're just going to go wild instead some boosting at one hundred forty six hurst hurts on the base so similarly I'm gonna cut in one hundred forty six on the guitar I'm going to cut a little less then I boosted so that I can there's still more apparent lohan more low in the base now and we got rid of we didn't have any extra build up because of the guitar and I'm still from listening to it, we can't have extra buildup, it's not gonna affect anything for me to me, where the base was lacking a lot of the lowland, I'm hearing a lot of mid build up where the guitars could probably shine more, they're so similarly, I'm going to do the same kind of cut and making pulling made out, which should accentuate the bottom as well pretty stock stuff as well, where I'm going, I'm not really sweeping the frequency and finding this week point, but just kind of using the knobs, so to speak, where I'm keeping it at one thousand hertz, and I'm keeping my queue at one point zero to make sure that it's easy to understand, but you would obviously go wider or skinnier on your cue and adjust the frequency or actually sitting at in a real mix. So quick question for you here is, you know, this comes up pretty much every class we have are doing mixing like this, you're you're using a fair amount of additive. Q, which a lot of people think is a no no. Do you want to comment on that? Um, I don't think there's a rules, but a lot of people dio, yeah, I get that a lot of people cut before they do anything, and I usually if I'm I don't right now I don't feel like I'm looking at a severe problem, so I'm dealing with a severe problem that's where I started cutting a lot more the key here you hear just some weird frequency in your guitar and you go through in your sweeping and your haven't really thank you and you're like, pinpointing and then you're dropping that out and we'll probably find a point in this where we can go through and really find that, but I don't have I if I'm not boosting if I was boost in something like this because I'm missing just that point hole thing or even more extreme like ok, I need all of this and that's a problem, but I'm boosting three d b I'm not goingto not going to lose sleep about it if it sounds right to me and it sounds right to the band and it sounds right to the fan of the band, then I'm not going to really take issue with additive issue because if you we're supposed to boost stuff with the cues that would have just made them strictly cuts right? Touche so but I have heard that a lot I get told not to boost on my master bus all the time I think there's also something to be said for him previously in the class we talked about, you know you you don't have the perfect you know, parameters to start with sometimes, you know, you got a game of telephone that goes from the microphone to the cab, to your computer, you know? I mean, so a lot of times you lose some signal, and maybe a little post processing helps enhance that, I think might be important, definitely and that's a lot of what we're dealing with right now, and I'll get more into using more, extremely accused and then after lunch, but what we're dealing with is, theoretically, you received a session and the base was recorded, you don't have a die, you can it's rare that you're doing the mix, and you can email the band or give them a call me like, hey, I'm going to need you to get into a studio and just track all these dies for me, so it's and a lot of points and recording, you get what you get, and if your sessions organized in the files aren't tracked horribly, you've got to be thankful for that. And that's kind of the scenario we're dealing with here is we have a stem of base and that's all we're going to get, so we can't, obviously, we were doing a lot more subtracted, v q, with the high pass in low pass, when we're dealing with a lot of tracks and preparing that bus on the last during the last segment, but here this would be what we got and you work in a studio you know how it goes it's a this is what you're given you're gonna have to deal with it. So that's another ah point for using additive if you if you need to in here obviously not sounding good when I'm boosting here not that bad for me, so without any of you going on and I think by cueing the base, we let it to sit there and curing the guitar, and we obviously had no relative volume changes because we're pretty much cutting and boosting the same amount between the two tracks, but I definitely hear a better fit already right there, so and there is two ah, the defense of the editor of a queue you do start to hear kind of a thin emptiness in the upper mids because of this heavy boost, but you would obviously in a real studio situation, be making a lot more modest decisions with your e q two kind of massage everything into place. So now what I'm going to do is start thinking about the drums us about one of you guys asked about starting to fit drums with the base and that's where we'll go now I'm going to use multiple hues in this example just to show instead of obviously the first seven bandy q I used was we're dealing with the drums and now I'm going to boost a little bit and cut a little bit of base and kick, and I'm going to use a separate instance of the same make you so that we know like where were relating, but usually you could get away with just using one e q so I'm gonna do is I want more lowland in my mix without muddying anything up, so I'm going to boost the kick around one hundred I guess I'll go one twenty just a little. Well, I guess I'll use harsh examples like I had been I'm gonna go boost it for and then that's way too much, I know, but then I'm going to go and I'm going to make that same cut on my door, on my base bus right now, we've got one twenty so by bypass at a long enough right now, ok, so obviously we're doing the same thing where we're going very, very extreme right now just to prove a point, so I cut less than I did, so I'm still adding base to my mix as faras the frequency spectrum goes, I cut a little bit out of my bass guitar and boosted way too much in my kick, but we'll start to feel this coming together still ah now I can hear the kick flooding outside pulled back on that kick you where we were adjusting between the two and I think you guys see the relation between these what's going on right now right? I think it's not the perfect mix but I'm going to go and we're going to turn all these plug ins off and start to see how it everything theo chest tightness of the base really came in like the kick is now playing a lot better with the base and we did it we added lohan because rob pointed out it was pretty thin and then after we added low and we cut some lowland to pull for the space of the kick and started out with obviously we still don't have the perfect base thing but it's, sometimes you're not going to be given that option and we started with something less than what we got to it just a few just easy steps of being just reasonable and just fitting things together because we the stems we brought in balanced well with each other but they weren't quite there and you can really use these techniques to fit everything together and it's just it's like putting a puzzle together at that point it's you cut what you boost and you boost where you cut and you could go infinitely and that's how you're going to glue together without overly relying on automation and dynamics and all of that more confusing stuff do you always are you always trying to add a little bit more than you're taking away or is that just what you do know it's more doing that right now because this room I'm not hearing a ton of low and so I want tio really accentuate that but generally if say you brought the stems in and it was just everything's not glowing together as well as you think it showed when you get your rough mix and you're just doing volume and pan you would really try and you'd be pretty close to what you're cutting out of the base and boosting in the cake would be similar relationship wise but I wanted teo I wasn't feeling it is much so wanted to make sure that I was pointing out like why are we doing this because if I'm real subtle right now in the class like I can explain the theory but if you don't hear it you don't hear it so do we have any questions from online about any of this right now samson has ah good one here kind of begin sort of asking you know kind of gets at this idea of following the rules which is what would you do if in order to carve out space for the kick it just created a bad based home rethink what I was fitting the kick maybe mean depending on the session if it's ah if we can sample the kick to find a different kick that fits the based on in this sense, if you're given the bass track and it's already effectively obviously can't reinvent the base, so at that point I would start to consider can we trigger the cake and find something that's more suitable with this base given the option that we can't ramp, then if it was a different scenario where the drums air pretty decent and we have a dive and I can really have the base and start changing the tone, or we can get really wild with e q, which is what will obviously move onto and later segment with matching queuing and finding different tones and reinventing the character of the track completely and you could start to do that but may be duplicated like make a layer and experiment with three other women that are start parallel, treating parallel lee queuing and stuff more complicated, but usually I try and find the easiest solution for what I'm doing with whatever makes most sense, and in that case, if you're carving out and the kick doesn't fit, if you love the kick, obviously you have to go in a different direction, but if the kick is the problem and the base is an unsolvable thing with easy stuff than the kick would be the first place that I tried to solve the problem I think this is a good part to show. I just want a one more time kind of drove the point home that we, with four instances of fairly simply queuing, we definitely brought the mix more toe life. So I'm going to go on this low part that I think is more of its ah kind of climactic. So that was with all the e queuing we just did, which, really, it feels picked to me at that point it's, the music's very spares, but the mixes mohr starting to fill out with bass, drums and guitars, old messing tio. Other than the kick. At that point, nothing feels like it's pointing me in the chest on that part. Where is with the very minimally cue that we did? I definitely felt mohr impact against myself with this simply killing that we did to start making things fit together.