can someone please give me an advise ?

it often happens, when i use the bass sounds of my motif es, that i cant controll it. on my msp10 it sounds ok, but when i listen to the song e.g. in the car, the bass is much too much, when i bring the basstrack down in the mix, then the song sounds like **** on my hifi-loudspeakers in my aparment.

does someone know this problem?

Borau- I'd love to hear your Tuba amp heh

In addition to Borau's good advice, you could combine/mult two sounds
to get bass, meat and definition.

There are some plugs that also could help like Waves MaxBass, Aphex Big Bottom and similar.
As Borau said, it's tricky to deal with pure sine waves.


ruudman

thank you so much for your replies.

i think what you said should be the reason for my problem.

but i dont have a tube preamp, i do have a 30w marshall tube guitar amp, perhaps i should send the basstrack trough that :-D

does anyone work with trilogy ? i thought about getting that, but i somehow doubt it will help me.

For distortion, you can also use a stupid plugin, but I guess, you need more kinda Hipass Filter with EQ.
What style of Music do you do ?
I have Trilogy here and sometimes it's very very good.

i do all kinds of music, when i play my real bassguitar, i dont have that problems.
but right now, i work on a rnb song, where the synth bass is the mainpart of the songs groove. so i cant turn it down, the song loses its groove, but when its in the right level, the bass starts to get uncontrolled on some loudspeakers :(

i tried to eq the bass but it didnt help, when i turn down the freqenucies around 60-80 hz the bass sounds castrated, like there is no bass...

i did the hipass at around 33 hz

What EQ did you use ? maybe you need a better one ?
Maybe this helps:
https://www.gearslutz.com/board/rap-hip-hop-engineering-and-production/6876-eqs-hip-hop-style-music.html

2 questions to aid the diagnosis:

Does your ctrl-room have acoustic treatment?

What monitors are you using?


Getting the right level of sub to tape is entirely dependent on the depth and translation abilities of your monitoring IMHO - even with additional speakers for reference, you'll always be second-guessing without accurate treatment / monitoring.

Justin

i use the cambridge eq from my uad

i have yamaha msp10 monitors, unfortunatly no subwoofer, this could perhaps help. my control room as 4 basstraps in the corners and some wave pannels. i dont think my control room has perfect conditions.

I think we could have hit on a root of the problem here. If you want to know how much sub is going to tape, you're going to want to hear it in the first place... Either a separate set of monitors with deeper extension, or a judiciously implemented sub will be needed I think.


Justin

can u suggest a second pair of monitors with deeper extension or a sub which will be affordable ???

There are a lot of monitors out there, and in my experience, monitoring tends to be a highly personal choice, so I can list a handful, and you'll need to carefully audition them - bear in mind you might hate the suggestions!

Mackie 824

Genelec 8040

I'm out of touch with the pricing, bear in mind there may be more than 1 or 2 PMC worth considering (active or passive): http://www.pmcloudspeaker.com/index2.html In the price range, no-one offers more bass than PMC IMHO - note that the transmission-line principle is not to everyone's taste.

Over to the other Slutz for suggestions!

Justin

edit: The LB1 would be my vote for powerful bass / translation at the price, but it's passive. If you need active, check the TB2S-A out - I haven't used them, but they could be worth a look.

I deal with synth basslines a lot and what helps me are three things :

- A good hipass. There are differences between hps. The best for this kind of tweaking lives inside my Manley MP Mastering Edition. It takes a while sometimes to get just the right amount of bass, but I hp my synth basses every time. On real life speakers it can actually take a lot of energy away if you have too much subbass in your mix.

- Sometimes compression. Be careful though. Depends on the compressor big time.

- Genelec 7070A subwoofer.

Let that bass shake your stomach, not your chest !

Cheers,
Bill

thats exactly my ****ing problem,
the bass is in my chest, when i sit in my car, and not in my stomach.
where do you hp the bass ? i got my hp at 33 hz, is that to low ?

Of course it also depends on your car system. If it´s not up to snuff you won´t hear any nice subbass. If it is and you have the problem only with your own productions, then there´s room for improvement.

I can´t generally say where I drop the cutoff. It definately depends on the song itself, its tonality and off course the bass sound. I´d experiment with different settings, maybe start at 12Hz (yes, sometimes it makes a difference) then go up step by step. Note that if the cutoff frequency is to high, it may "steal" your lowest fundamental.

Sometimes it makes a lot of sense to cut bass at 48Hz and boost 80 or maybe 110Hz, thus you get more punch and less mumble. When mastering club tracks, bass is what takes the longest almost every time. So don´t hurry !

Regards,
Bill

With all due respect, you can configure the HP filter where you like, but if you can't hear (maybe that should be "feel") the LF printing to tape you'll be on a hiding to nothing...

Justin

Proper monitoring is important to sort this kind of thing out...

aside from that, i usually use a nice smooth tube overdrive when doing synth bass, most of the time in parallel. bring the clean bass in on one channel and the distorted bass next to it and mix to taste. sometimes a lot distortion at low volume, sometimes a little distortion at equal volume to the clean signal.

good luck

in addition to all the other ideas, which are spot on, here's some more specifics about layering.

add in a bassy sound that has NO weight. hi pass everything below 80 if need be. low pass out the buzz too, just a nice droney tone working 100-250 is all you want. dial this in on your speakers that have no bass, the yamahas. now you'll have the appearance of bass on small systems, this will preserve the groove in all listening situations.

next, use headphones, 7506's are good for this, and tuck your deep deep bass underneath everything. just kiss the mix with it, less is more. use your car as your ref, make sure you're not adding too much.

get that dialed and you'll probably be in very good shape. then send it off to a real mastering engineer, someone who does mastering and nothing else, and who uses good analog gear. the importance of good mastering cannot be overstated, because everything you are comparing your mix to has been mastered by a pro.

then, once you've learned to nail the bass, you can spend the next year or three working on the hi's, and when that's done move on to the mids...


gregoire
del ubik

Sometimes adding a little flanging can help too. It still sounds clean, but the frequency moves around a little and excites more harmonics.



-tINY

just to emphasize what *some* of the previous posters said:
- or maybe another room.

of course there's plenty of great monitors to choose from and plenty of funny techniques to shift bass frequencies up or down, but as long as you are not able to HEAR it properly, you're lost!



one advice: the Yamahas are active (admitted: not small ). nevertheless, try to carry them to an different place and set them up - in another room, best would be even in another building. an average living room with bookshelves and couches and so on is best suited.
take a laptop or a CD player and listen to some well mixed music - and your own stuff - there through the speakers. compare the sound you are hearing thru the monitors to the sound in some good headphones, in this very room!
do this for a while until you think you can recall the sound of a good mix.

back at your place again, start to mix the bass in the cans only, at moderate volume, without switching on the speakers yet. then add some of the other tracks and switch on the speakers, still at moderate level.

how does it sound? boring? well, then you 're probably on the right track. try not to change something in the LF range, just leave it like it is. bring the mix to an acceptable (rough) shape and take this mix to the car and listen...



why this effort? i made the - painful - experience that even headphones in an inapplicable room sound somehow unbalanced. obviously your ear (rather: the region of your brain that handles acoustic signals) strives to accept the actual room acoustics as "normal" and applies different criteria for "right" and "wrong".

just saw you're in Germany too... Hi!