Mixing Bass with Dead Soul Revival
If you’ve been following my “first single release” journey for my new band deadsoulrevival.com you know I’ve been examining how we recorded, mixed, and promoted our upcoming release. Today let’s talk about mixing the bass.
For many people bass and low end is one of the hardest things to nail in a mix. With practice it gets much easier provided you know what to practice.
For an even more depth look into crafting bass sounds that you don’t have to “fix in the mix” pick up a copy of my course The Sound Visualization Method.
My goal is for the bass to be felt in the very low end and heard distinctly in the mids and highs.
The way I like to make the bass work in the context of a mix is to first take a listen to the guitars. Then I’ll decide on my vision of what I think will work best in terms of a bass tone that compliments the guitars.
I use the guitar as the reference point because the guitars are usually a little more set in stone than the bass and are often more of a focal point.
It’s at this point I’ll decide if I want the bass to have some overdrive or distortion on it. An overdriven bass can cut through a dense mix very nicely. For this project thus far I’ve been using primarily the clean DI and an overdriven/distorted amp sound.
I’m using the DI for clean lows and one or more amp sims for the mid/high overdrive part of the sound. You can simply duplicate the DI track and insert an amp sim plugin.
If you use a low pass filter on the DI and a high pass filter on the amp track you can create your own crossover point. So let’s say you picked 200 hz as your crossover you would have only clean DI below 200 hz and only amp tone above 200 hz. The best of both worlds.
Make sure you check the phase of these tracks against each other to decide which version you prefer.
The next thing I’ll do is pull up the drum kit and see how the bass is sitting next to the kick drum. Generally speaking I like the kick drum to be the lowest thing in the mix. I’ll take a look at my eq’s spectrum analyzer and see at what frequency the kick is most dominate in the lows.
Let’s say it’s 80 hz. I’ll then go back to my bass sub and use a dynamic eq with a side chain. The side chain is fed from a send from the kick. Every time the kick hits the bass signal gets ducked a little bit in the 80 hz range.
This will create a hole in the bass signal that the kick drum can poke through and be heard clearly. With this method you don’t have to turn up the kick to have it heard. This has to be finessed or it can sound unnatural.
The bass can sometimes have some jumps in volume depending on where the note was played on the neck or how hard it was played. So, while I’m at this blending stage if the bass is getting lost at times I’ll add more compression on the bass bus.
The best way to compress bass is in stages a little bit at a time. So I may wind up with two or three compressors on the bass. Once it starts to sound obviously compressed you’ve gone too far. It should still sound natural. Sometimes I will edit the clip gain or automate the volume of certain parts if they are getting lost.
I don’t spend tons of time eq’ing the bass at this point. I wait until the guitars come into the picture. That is when I’ll start finding different areas for each instrument to “live” and be be heard clearly.
Next time we’ll talk about guitars and getting them to work with the bass and drums.
Until then…
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