Mixing and producing the bass parts, and the overall low end of your music is one the most important aspects to get a clean, clear and focused final music production. And this is true for every style of music, since the bass and low end instruments and sounds will provide the harmonic anchor and fundamental focus of your music story.
You are now going to learn my best guidelines and tips for producing and mixing your low end and bass instruments and parts, for a super tight, focused and powerful low end in your music. Are you ready? Let’s begin!
Course Link: Master the Bass in Your Music
Low End Mixing Group
Using a group folder for all your low end and bass focused instruments is not only a great way to get a clean and focused low end in the composition and arranging stage. Mixing all the bass and low range instruments like this, as one single group, is a great way to shape and finalize the low end range of your mix. Because this way, you can apply compression, EQ, saturation, filters etc. on the complete mix group. It’s a great shortcut in mixing, and a very effective way to get a cohesive and focused low end in your music.
High Pass Filtering
One of the first thing you can do to improve your low end clarity, is actually to focus on all other tracks in your music production. As a general rule I put a high pass filter on every track that should not really have any low end frequencies. You will be surprised at how much low end noise and rumble many instruments and recordings can have in them. How much you filter out depends on what type of instrument or sound you place the high pass filter on. I usually start with an 80Hz high pass filter on every track except tracks dedicated to the bass register.
Analog Warmth
Your low end instruments should of course focus on low end and bass frequencies. However, instead of simply putting a low pass filter or eq on them, I like to recommend another solution. Adding analog warmth on the group bus for your low end and bass instruments. For example tape saturation or a tube amp with a lot of warm character. This will naturally tame those harsh high frequencies and make the overall bass sound more warm and low end focused. On many tape and tube plugins you can even choose settings that favor a warmer tone.
Attack for Clarity
If you are writing bass parts with rhythmic performances, such as a driving electric bass, or a pulsing bass synth, or perhaps a staccato ostinato double bass part, you often want those notes to stand out so you can hear the rhythm clearly. Instead of increasing the level of your bass sounds, you can shape the attack part to bring out the transient of each start of the notes. There are several ways to do this, but I recommend your first choice to be a transient shaper. This is basically a special kind of compressor that is focusing on shaping the transient part of a sound, as well as the ringing sustain. Simply boost the transient part, and your bass lines will become more focused. Another way to add attack is to use an extra layer which has a very short and plucky character, without any sustain. This could be a muted pluck on an electric guitar, or perhaps a very short envelope on a synth.
Sub Bass Generation
Regardless if you use an electric bass, an acoustic bass or a synth as your main bass in your music, I recommend you to always add a sub bass generator as an extra powerful deep layer of your bass line. There are two ways to do this. Either you create an extra track or synth layer with a pure sine wave and have it layered an octave lower than your main bass line. The other way is to use a sub bass generator plugin that basically adds a sub bass harmonic automatically to whatever track you place it on.
Dynamic Range Compression
Compression is probably the single most used effect in music production. But did you know that it is actually a short name for “Dynamic Range Compression”? Because what it does is that it compresses the loudest part of your instrument or sound, so that you can increase the overall level. And by doing so it decreases the average difference between the loudest and softest parts of your wave form. Or in other words: it decreases the dynamic range. And that is why it is called a dynamic range compressor, or compressor for short. Now, since the bass is the harmonic anchor of music, it is extremely important that you tame the dynamics of the low end to make sure it never gets too soft or too over-powering. This is why you can be more extreme with the compressor on bass and low end instruments. Especially on rhythmic bass parts. I recommend that you add a compressor on your low end group bus, and apply a filter to it so it only listens to the low end frequencies. You can do this on a multi-band compressor as well. The only thing you want to be careful with is if your compressor makes the sound “pump”, unless you really want that effect.
Effects on Bass
This may sound like a strange guideline, because it is about what you should NOT do instead of what you should do. If you want a really tight, focused and clear low end in your music, you should avoid all types of stereo effects and space effects. Meaning no added reverb or delay. No chorus, flanger or other stereo and modulation effects. Basically, keep it clean. If you want to add effects, focus on compression, filters/eq and saturation/distortion. You should also focus your low end information in the middle of the stereo field. Meaning that if you use an electric bass or synth bass, make it a mono sound to make it super focused in the center. In fact, for most music I even recommend making the entire bass group in mono, but if you use for example an acoustic bass or orchestral double basses you should of course keep the room sound.
Side Chain Compression
One of the most annoying frustrations you meet in mixing music is the fight between the low end percussion sounds and the low end instruments. In most cases, you always want your low end percussion to cut through in the final mix. And if those hits happen at the same time as a bass note, it’s an instant mess. Now, you could solve this in the composing stage by avoiding those synchronized hits, either by re-arranging the notes, or by dragging either the bass drum or the bass note slightly before or after in the grid. But another very common music production trick is to use side chain compression. This basically creates a master and slave relationship between two sounds. When the master hits, it pushes down the slave in level based on the side chain compression settings. You may have heard side chain compression used to pump the bass in sync with the kick drum hits in electronic music and pop music. But I actually like using it to smaller degrees in any style of music. I even recommend you to try adding it to the low end group bus, and making your percussion bus the master. You can either use a multi-band compressor in side-chain mode, or a compressor where you can filter what it listens to. This way you can make sure that only the low percussion hits trigger the compressor so that it pushes down the level of the bass group bus. Even if the compressor only works in a few decibels of gain reduction it will make a huge difference in the overall low end clarity of your music, since it is applied to the overall low end bus.