I'm working on a track in which I've split my bass into layers (mid bass and sub, a pure sine wave) crossing over at 120hz.
My question is this:
Just how low should my sub go before putting a HPF to eliminate the very lowest frequencies? (20hz? 30hz?)
Sorry if this is a rookie Q, but I have the opportunity to hear my track on a big system this week, and don't want to make the mistake of having too much bottom end mud)
The mud comes from the 200-350hz range really... I throw a high pass between 35hz - 42 hz usually just to clean things up down in the really low information range..
i wouldn't worry so much about filtering it. it's more important that the levels are right—if you don't have an accurate monitoring system, one thing you can do is use voxengo span (which is free). let it run for a while on your master bus to get an average reading of levels, and then look closely at the bass frequencies—they shouldn't be peaking WAY above the rest of the frequencies in the track; particularly the top end. this is a good way to check how balanced things are, as what happens often is you boost the shit out of your bass and sub bass (because your speakers aren't playing them back as loudly as the rest of your mix) and then when you listen to it on a full range system, or something with a sub you realize your bass is like 20db too loud! actually putting a sub in my car started to change the way i'd mix bass.
you can take a few reference tracks that are similar to what you're aiming for with your mix and run SPAN on them just to give you an idea of what 'proper' bass levels actually look like in span, then you can better gauge if yours are way off or not.
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