Creative Sub Bass Processing

[_Agu_]

Then split the frequencies so you only affect the higher ones? That's what I do, almost all bass guitar distortion effects do it to too because you don't have the luxury of adding extra oscillators and the general point is that a bass guitar sounds good on it's own anyway.

I understand the reasoning why but there's more than one way to skin a cat, right?

Of course, it's just that in dubstep the sub is usually mixed so loud that any stuff on the sub range that might be sometimes called with words like "warmth" or "character" becomes so prominent it can easily make your mix sound muddy.

[Turnipish_Thoughts]

Is this a case of sub meaning different things to different people?

Technically sub bass is in the sub sonic frequency range, that's why it's called sub bass because it's under the bass frequency range and is also inaudible.

But I think lot of people see and term 'sub' as the musical element that rolls the low end of the track. The instrument or patch being used can often have energy in the sonic range and is more than just a sine wave. Which is why lots of people go on about low/high passing, compressing, splitting freqs e.t.c.

Both groups are right, but they're talking slightly different languages. We should first agree on the terms of definition before we enter into a debate about creative processing.

[test_recordings]

I understand that, just pointing out another way of doing it. To be honest it's a bit boring just having a sine wave on it's own, I personally prefer more complex wave forms but that's just me

[Banesy]

I don't get why people make a 'bass' then add a 'sub' of just a sine underneath, why not just make one thing at a suitable level in the first place?

Here are some reasons that I can see just from experience. This is relative to the brostep style...I am not sure how you want to tackle a sub on wobble basses.


1 - you need to process your bass patch from ~ 200hz and up with effects that will diminish your sub. Compression, stereo widening, distortion, dimension effects, phasers, vocoders...whatever... You don't want any of that touching your sub bass. You want your sub mono and responsive.

2 - After you get your fx on your mid-bass, you want your mid bass coming in at a different level than your sub bass...so in one of my tracks, my drop bass (which is high passed at ~200hz) is limited at -2db. My sub bass in this track is limited at -4.3 db. In a different track where I mixed with a more "technically correct" fashion, I have my drop bass limited at roughly -13 db and my sub is limited at roughly -17 db. Sub bass tends to not need to be at the same level as everything else so if you are dealing with multiple bass patches you don't want to sit and EQ each patch to get your sub levels synced up...you also probably don't want to be swapping back and forth across sine and squre-like subs (rough / smooth). It makes your life far easier to just cut everything out below ~200hz and add a separate sub that stays at one level. An added bonus to this is that you end up cutting out most of the 100-200 hz range which helps open up your kicks and snares and keeps the mud out of your mix. You can change how you cut the sub out of your bass patches but in general, your kicks should be punching at 100hz and your snare should be punching at 200hz so you might was well open that area up.

If you load up a pro track and start cutting with an eq, you will find that you don't loose much of the mid-bass sounds until you start cutting into 200-250hz range. I haven't read anything official but I think that it is just a standard practice to set a track up like this for the brostep style. It seems to be the only way that I can get my tracks anywhere near the levels of pro tracks. I am still a noob and still learning but hopefully this helps a little.

[_Agu_]

If you load up a pro track and start cutting with an eq, you will find that you don't loose much of the mid-bass sounds until you start cutting into 200-250hz range. I haven't read anything official but I think that it is just a standard practice to set a track up like this for the brostep style.

I've been trying to understand this thing for a long time. You see despite what everybody says about highpassing midrange basses at 200-300 Hz, if you load a pro track into daw and look trough a spectrum analyzer there's actually a lots of stuff happening under 200Hz. You can easily see moving harmonics from growls and other midrange synths around 80-300Hz. However every time I try to keep my bass highpassed around 100Hz, and leave these harmonics there, things gets muddy as hell.

I know pros has really good equipment and years or decades of experience etc. but I still don't get it how can you put so much stuff just 1-2 octaves higher than a sub bass, to exactly where the kick and the snare are. It doesn't even sound that there's much happening down there, but still there is.

[Trichome]

plain sub basses are boring imo

layer that shit up, and mix it right, and it will sound good

[Banesy]

If you load up a pro track and start cutting with an eq, you will find that you don't loose much of the mid-bass sounds until you start cutting into 200-250hz range. I haven't read anything official but I think that it is just a standard practice to set a track up like this for the brostep style.

I've been trying to understand this thing for a long time. You see despite what everybody says about highpassing midrange basses at 200-300 Hz, if you load a pro track into daw and look trough a spectrum analyzer there's actually a lots of stuff happening under 200Hz. You can easily see moving harmonics from growls and other midrange synths around 80-300Hz. However every time I try to keep my bass highpassed around 100Hz, and leave these harmonics there, things gets muddy as hell.

I know pros has really good equipment and years or decades of experience etc. but I still don't get it how can you put so much stuff just 1-2 octaves higher than a sub bass, to exactly where the kick and the snare are. It doesn't even sound that there's much happening down there, but still there is.

I guess I need to clarify…I am talking about drop sections with this cutting scheme. When I do non-drop sections, I am usually keeping my full synth range and adding a sub if needed.

Yeah I have been obsessed with that 100-200hz range for a long time…it is a mysterious zone that can cause a lot of trouble but doesn't seem to contribute much to a track. The core of the drop should be at least two octaves higher than the sub so if you write in G, the sub is G0 and then the G2 note comes in at 196hz. Everything below is just harmonic junk or FX output like reverb and saturation as far as I can tell. Granted, I am referring to newer tracks. Scary Monsters is a good example of an "older" track where the growls have a ton of mud. I haven't looked at it in an EQ but I would guess you will see a lot of growl movement between 80-200hz.

I think the main thing about that region though is that there is relatively little compression. Compressing the lower end makes it dense and muddy so by using multiband compression or splitting into frequency groups, you can get around over compressing it. I think that is why you see a lot of frequency activity there but don't hear much. It is "fluffy" material compared to the rest of the track.

[fragments]

If you load up a pro track and start cutting with an eq, you will find that you don't loose much of the mid-bass sounds until you start cutting into 200-250hz range. I haven't read anything official but I think that it is just a standard practice to set a track up like this for the brostep style.

I've been trying to understand this thing for a long time. You see despite what everybody says about highpassing midrange basses at 200-300 Hz, if you load a pro track into daw and look trough a spectrum analyzer there's actually a lots of stuff happening under 200Hz. You can easily see moving harmonics from growls and other midrange synths around 80-300Hz. However every time I try to keep my bass highpassed around 100Hz, and leave these harmonics there, things gets muddy as hell.

I know pros has really good equipment and years or decades of experience etc. but I still don't get it how can you put so much stuff just 1-2 octaves higher than a sub bass, to exactly where the kick and the snare are. It doesn't even sound that there's much happening down there, but still there is.

I've always been mystified by this as well. I suspect, though I've never sat down with a load of tracks and really listened and looked to figure if its true, that it has as much to do with arrangement as fancy mixing techniques. There could also be all kinds of subtle side-chaining going on...one sounding pushing the other out of the way. I usually look and listening really hard when rolling off sounds that need some low mids. Honestly most of the time I just try to keep them out of each others way rather than trying to set up crazy mixing stuff.

[NinjaEdit]

I like to make a classic reese by lowpassing a supersaw and adding phaser and reverb.

[dansci]

I'm curious, if I have a bass/sub bass patch and I want to transition smoothly to a pure sub bass should I use audio or modulated midi? Or is the whole bass transition thing good when making the drop sequence in brostep?

[NinjaEdit]

Are you turning down the bass or lowpassing? Either way you could have the sub be a separate patch.

[Banesy]

If you load up a pro track and start cutting with an eq, you will find that you don't loose much of the mid-bass sounds until you start cutting into 200-250hz range. I haven't read anything official but I think that it is just a standard practice to set a track up like this for the brostep style.

I've been trying to understand this thing for a long time. You see despite what everybody says about highpassing midrange basses at 200-300 Hz, if you load a pro track into daw and look trough a spectrum analyzer there's actually a lots of stuff happening under 200Hz. You can easily see moving harmonics from growls and other midrange synths around 80-300Hz. However every time I try to keep my bass highpassed around 100Hz, and leave these harmonics there, things gets muddy as hell.

I know pros has really good equipment and years or decades of experience etc. but I still don't get it how can you put so much stuff just 1-2 octaves higher than a sub bass, to exactly where the kick and the snare are. It doesn't even sound that there's much happening down there, but still there is.

I've always been mystified by this as well. I suspect, though I've never sat down with a load of tracks and really listened and looked to figure if its true, that it has as much to do with arrangement as fancy mixing techniques. There could also be all kinds of subtle side-chaining going on...one sounding pushing the other out of the way. I usually look and listening really hard when rolling off sounds that need some low mids. Honestly most of the time I just try to keep them out of each others way rather than trying to set up crazy mixing stuff.

It all has to do with side chaining and it is far from subtle. I like to chase after Zomboy's style with this because his secret to awesome drums is ninja side chaining skills. When a kick and snare come in, everything ducks so that only the kick and snare come through for a split second. When you do this, it doesn't matter what is in the same freq. space since it goes away for a split second. The content between 200hz - 10khz in his tracks are so fn loud so the only way to push this up is aggressive side chaining. Sub bass def needs it too so the thump of the drums comes through.

He might be on to something different these days but he used to use lfotool to run volume envelope cuts rather than compression side chaining. Some production school had a short clip of him showing this. For the life of me, I can't get lfotool to sound so transparent so I still use compression side chaining

[Banesy]

plain sub basses are boring imo

layer that shit up, and mix it right, and it will sound good

I am not trying to be mean in any way here but I have to call you out on this comment. As boring as it sounds, a pure waveform is all you need. Any other content that you might get by processing a sub is prob above 100hz and not sub bass which means you could run a separate patch as a "mid-bass"

I am calling you out only because your comment misleads people into over processing a sub. I think people have trouble with subs because low passing a sin and sending it to the master sounds boring or too simple to seem like the thing to do.

[test_recordings]

You can't lowpass a sine without cutting the sound itself so what's the point. A sine is a single frequency, that's it

[Samuel_L_Damnson]

If like to point out that a sub bass is anything below 100-120hz depending who u are and it is deginately audible until they get really low. As in your ear detects it as well as ur body. Hence you can hear a sub on cans. I like yo use a pure sine and then layer over a more analogue sounding wave compressed and lowpassed over the top. Also I cut out thebsub range on the layered wave so it doesn't add with the other sub and eat up all the headroom. But each to their own.

[RKM]

i was wondering that recently

often making basslines, my main melody/'synth' line will be made with a bass sound, but after a lot of effect adding it can sound less heavy than i want, so i often duplicate it, turn off the effects and filter out more frequencies and run both
but yeah quite often comes out muddy as shit

what's a good frequency in general for high passing subs, (why did i hear mala does like 50hz, tried doing that and it was almost inaudible)

[Samuel_L_Damnson]

I would just lowpass at 30 hz unless u are playing some very low notes. 50 is too high imo

[NinjaEdit]

A good place to hit is 45hz (E-F), so 30Hz is far too low.

[Trichome]

I am calling you out only because your comment misleads people into over processing a sub.

which is why I said "layer that shit up"

anyway my point was that you don't need a pure sine to have heavy sub. in fact I almost always drive my subs a bit because it reduces the dB level but sounds audibly the same volume (allowing you to turn it up louder and get ridiculous amounts of bass in your tune without it clipping or overpowering everything) I can almost guarantee the majority of tunes with good subs aren't pure sine waves. listen to a Commodo tune and theres your proof.

just cos you've only ever managed to make good sub basses with pure sine waves doesn't mean making good processed ones is impossible...

[test_recordings]

I would just lowpass at 30 hz unless u are playing some very low notes. 50 is too high imo

Do you mean highpass? There aren't many notes between 20 and 30Hz to make it worth it