Big Bottom bass

check out the bass tone i got on wiz's dark clouds tune(love this tune 8) realgearonline.com/post/24439/thread   thats a 72 jazz bass, bo hansen di, vp28 no eq. I think i filtered it off at 30hz, there is good bass info down there, 40 is too high imo. As far as kick/bass relationship, the first thing is pair your bass with the right kick, a classic combo is the Pbass with a smaller kick, and a Jbass with a larger kick, they get along well in these pairs orchestration wise, the only other things i do is cut a little hole here and a small opposing (wider)boost there, sometimes key the bass compressor with the kick signal to duck it a bit, and of course automation.

hope this helps

Interesting topic.

According to Wiki, "Cop Car" had two bass players-Zach Crowell and John Fields. An article I read about the album said they used synthesized bass on the album. So, the synthesized bass may have added the bottom your talking about. There's also all kinds of tricks that people are doing with sine waves to add to bass sounds.

Good stuff JW, this is why i use linear phase eq when i filter top or bottom. although I do plan on some harrison style filters for their phase/bump color. 

BTW, i just listened to the cop car tune for the first time.... JMO, but sorry, fucking wonder bread boring, and that is NOT a bass tone, it might as well be frequency specific white noise, it's got 0 vibe, and i could give a ratz ass how many copies wonder bread sold smh

btw jimwilliams greatest avatar pic ever lol

I usually only put my filter point at 20hz on the bass to roll off the subsonic stuff that can do funky stuff to comps and speakers. I always roll the kick off to around 40 with a 12db filter and then for some reason i'm always having to pull about 3db of 130hz out of the bass, if I don't I can't get a good kick and bass relationship.

a quick shortcut to big bass that I have found is the Pultec EQ. I started out with Waves and Softube, which are good, but now I'm onto the UAD collection. It really breathes, and gets big down there. One day I will try to build a real one or two.

You've just got to be careful not to completely bury your mix in subs. I have made that mistake. Check on a car stereo, or some large 12" stereo speakers, bigs if you got 'em what have you, to make sure you didn't overcook the bass.

I do sometimes like the subharmonic enhancers on certain midrange or higher elements to bring out big bottom. Have never used one on bass guitar, though.

A Neve style preamp, with a good DI, is a good place to start for sickeningly fat buttom, on any instrument.

I also would think that having plenty of midrange on the bass, along with some saturation or distortion, will really help the apparent volume and size of the bass guittaurre track.

Or just slap on a Moog, yeah, that'll do it.

A little saturation goes a long way in fattening the bottom end.

I think BIG BASS is the sound of now, along with loudness, and limiting or heavy compression... I'm actually kind of excited by it, and really prefer this type of mix.

I think a good place to start is mixing with a limiter on the master bus, like Fabfilter Pro-L or something, and/or the Andy Wallace trick of an SSL at 4:1 ratio driving anywhere up to 8 dB reduction. A compressor and a limiter react a little differently, so it's good to experiment with both.

This will pump up everything all at once, including the bass frequencies. I think a lot of transients sound "bright," so by filtering them out a bit, you're left with an overall bassier sound, subjectively. And by leveling up the quieter sustain elements, you might be using the Fletcher Munson curve to an advantage, if you are wanting to hear bass, which the human ear is much less sensitive to than mid frequencies.

When you're using a mix bus compressor or limiter, you can get away with far less compression on individual tracks. This is the Andy Wallace school of thought. You still might need it though for uneven performance dynamics on individual instruments.  For example if the drum transients are already at the top most level of your basic mix, which is pretty common, the bus dynamics processor will take care of that, just by pushing the fader up on the drum.

Kick drum transients exist in a very, very low frequency. If you start boosting under 100 Hz on your kick drum, you'll get this massive whump under everything with a lot of power to it, that will really drive the master limiter or compressor. You have to be careful not to push it too far, though, because it can be overpowering and make the mix sound smaller. Some of the stereo compressors have a sidechain HPF that can help with this, allowing the compressor to pump less with every kick.

Using a compressor or limiter on the mix bus is just like any other compression scheme, you have to spend the time getting the ratios, attack, and release behavior right, or you can end up with either a pumpy distorted mess, or a really smooth and loud mix, or something in between. I am just completely into this sound, right now, so I'm learning more about how to do it right.

I haven't tried it yet, but I'm really curious about the UAD Little Labs VOG Voice Of God. It is a high pass filter with a resonant peak at the cutoff frequency, so you can theoretically get a really big boost at some low end part, without a wall of subs behind it. I just like resonant filters anyway, so this product has got my attention. There's a 500 series hardware of it as well from Little Labs.

People sure have a lot of theories..

But here's how it's done.  There are TWO ways to do this, usually used together.  if you don't believe ME, go watch a bunch of Pensado's place and he uses these a ton of times.

1. Harmonic synthesis using the missing fundamental theory.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Additive_synthesis
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missing_fundamental

Here's a Youtube vid with examples that I found.. 



And another with more mathmatical explanation. 


Everybody seems to think that they need huge bass frequencies to make a recording with "huge bass" frequencies, however, they don't ask the question:

How do they make it sound so big from such small speakers that don't have the frequency response to reproduce those low frequencies? Earbuds, bookshelf speakers, TV speakers, small car speakers.. Etc, don't have the size or excursion to reproduce much below 100hz, nevermind 60hz or lower..

Easy.  The human brain will reconstruct frequencies from higher overtones that your ears hear.

In other words, 2nd harmonic distortion can be used to make something sound "more full".. Fancy that.. Don't we already know that from somewhere?  TUBES!

Only if you take that and add more even order harmonics, you can eventually remove the fundamental tone and hear very little difference.  I.E., if you have a note at 60hz, create a harmonic at 120hz, 240hz, etc and then reduce the fundamental.  Your brain will hear "60hz" even though it's not even there.

Waves patented an algorithm to do this, and created MAXXBASS as probably the most well known plugin to use missing fundamental to give the illusion of more bass.

And..

2. Additive synthesis.

Low frequencies on a bass guitar are full of odd harmonics that just fill the spectrum with "mud".  

For this, you also do a high passing filter (just like you would with missing fundamental) but in this you add a triggered or gated sine wave to augment a lower note.

This is super common on kick drums, to add a gated 50-60hz sine (sometimes with a little distortion for missing fundamental).  it's less common on basses due to the changing nature of the root note, but it's still been done to add some heft.  The human ear is pretty terrible at picking out low frequencies (it's why we have such a hard time mixing lows) so adding a little something in the 80-100hz range probably won't be too terrible as long as the tone isn't too loud.

Now, take the additive synthesis and run it through the missing fundamental approach and now you have super tight, super heavy sounding low end.

As far as getting them to work together, the kick should always take the lower side of the bottom end.  Use the kick's energy at 60hz.  High pass the bass around 80-100 to clean up the range around the kick and use the missing fundamental theory to replace that "low low" end.  This way it sounds clean but still has low end.

Also, the small amount of distortion you add, adds the growl that is necessary for the illusion of clarity.  Adding EQ just makes it "clanky" sounding.

And above all, this is "MIXING".  It's not called "special kudos time for ultra pure methodology in audio clarity" time, so just do what makes it sound good.

(EDIT) another option that I've been guilty of is to boost in the 150-200 range on a bass and then distort it slightly.  I ruthlessly cut the 300-600 range but the added distortion kinda fills that region in with harmonics, so it's a lot more clear but the harmonics "support" the mids and lows.

Try a dbx 120X to generate an octave below. Yes, they are dirty so side chaining is best. You can create 20 hz out of 40 hz that way.

It's an easy way to blow NS-10 woofers. I installed one into a rap studio in 1989 and kept myself busy for years swapping woofers. Ever see a JBL 15" 2220 woofer with the cone stuck out 3 inches?

Gated synthesis and sines!!!

I'm actually trying to find that song on Youtube, but all i find are live versions.  I don't have Itunes..

Ah found it.  



Very nice bass tones.  Sounds like more augmentation and a little smooth distortion before the compressor.  Highly compressed but still round sounding.  It might have been mult'd and processed as high and low tracks.