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Make bass guitar stand out


Radiussound

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Hi guys,

 

On the studio monitors the bass is present and sits well in the mix.

However, on the laptop speakers or other small speaker the Bass is hardly audible, sometimes drowned away.

Sometimes this happens to me, then I add little distortion or boost some mid frequencies.

It also happens that I have to pull the volume of all the other instruments down so the bass gets audible.

I am having a hard time on making the bass pop out in a mix without lowering the other instruments, or is this the way to mix bass?

 

I’d like to see some more tips on how you guys give that presence on the bass guitar so it sounds great, also on smaller speakers.

 

Thanks

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In the mix, cutting frequencies below 60Hz and centering the bass could help.

Enhanced the transient attacks (Enveloper plugin) and/or compression (multipressor).

Consider mid-side imaging (Direction mixer) strategy to separate instruments.

 

Be aware that regardless of the techniques used, some speakers will never render frequencies they structurally can't...

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They say that the Beatles had "a cheap set of car speakers" in the control room at Abbey Road, and a set of filters that mimiced "AM Radio," because they or their engineers were aware that this would be how their music would be heard. I understand that engineers still put their song on MP3 and play it through cheap earbuds. (Quite frankly, I think that a lot of recent musical genres are very heavily influenced by that sort of consideration.)

 

I think that Atlas's final point is probably money – you just can't ask a speaker to do what it can't do. You might need to double some higher frequencies into that bass part – a parallel track playing the same notes – to be sure that you are using a range that the small speakers can sort-of reproduce. You can test a speaker by playing a range of identical pure notes at identical volume and then recording it. Look at the actual volume levels on the recording: they will not be the same. This is what that hardware can actually do.

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You can use plugins like Waves Rbass to extend the bass into higher frequencies. Really helps for smaller speakers (Even laptops) which can't physically recreate the lows.

 

I think it's a great plugin personally, and it's been around for years. It may appear to be a simple EQ boost in theory, but it's a different beast all together.

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