View Single Post
Old 12-09-2008, 08:02 PM   #60
yep
Human being with feelings
 
Join Date: Aug 2006
Posts: 2,019
Default

I'm skipping right over the "thump" part of the bass attack, but that does not at all mean that you shouldn't think about how it might muddy up the all-important kick drum beat, or how it affects the sense of weight and definition of the bass guitar part, or how it interacts with the guitar and other instruments in terms of body and rythmic feel, or what kinds of effect it might have on your overall headroom in the track. I'm skipping over it because we have a lot of ground to cover, and there's always going to be stuff to double back to. And electric bass is just one example, and a DI recording of it is about the simplest thing we're likely to deal with in a project.

On to the "steady-state note" portion of the sound.

So maybe we made a few tweaks above to get the high-end definition right. The sound is still the good bass sound we had at the beginning, but we've done a little work to get the highs to sit better with our other instruments. So far so good. (please note that starting from the highs is not necessarily the recommended methodology for bass, it's just where I started posting)

So now we're listening to the bass, soloed (or not, whatever), and we start to focus again on our "steady state" sound-- the "average" sustained note portion off the sound. And it sounds good, but something doesn't quite "feel" right. The bassline sounds good, but just seems a little uneven, maybe a little jumpy. The "body" seems to waver in strength. We throw up the other faders, and sure enough, there it is, the plague of the recording world: the disappearing/reappearing bass line.

The bass just doesn't seem to articulate every note consistently. What should be a solid foundation of low-end tonality instead seems a little like a spongy, uneven house of sand. It's not precisely a "sound quality" problem-- the tone is there, the meter seems to show pretty consistent bouncing around the average, the picking is well-articulated and good, so what is it?

Well, because this is my example, I actually know the secret in this case, but I'm not going to tell you just yet. I'm not going to tell you, because there are a whole lot of things that can cause this symptom, and the cause is actually not all that important, or even that helpful when it comes to the practical reality of fixing the problem. The fact is that for a whole bunch of psycho-acoustical reasons and realities of the nature of the instrument, bass is prone to this syndrome. Bass notes are far further apart in wavelength than the notes of higher instruments, and broadband aspects of the "tone" of the instrument that would encompass a whole octave or more of high-frequency notes can disproportionately affect perception of individual notes, or ranges of notes, or certain harmonic relationships of notes, when it comes to bass instruments.

So let's take a closer listen to this bassline. Let's say that the bass player is bouncing around a range of about an octave or so, and the lower notes seem good, but the higher ones just seem to lose their tonality. You can still hear the string attack just fine, but the body drops out. And it's not that the foundation moves up in range, it just kind of lacks balls. So you try a compressor, and that helps a little, but the compression is getting pretty heavy and affecting the sound of the instrument. So you try sweeping some eq boost around where you think the problem might be. As it turns out, right about 100Hz works pretty good. But interestingly, a few ticks higher actually makes the problem worse.

So you settle on 100Hz, feed the boosted signal into some light compression, and now you're getting close to where you want to be. Cool, but what happened? Why did that work? Is it because 100Hz is a magic frequency for restoring consistent body to bass? NOT AT ALL.

For the secret, read on...
yep is offline   Reply With Quote