FabFilter and Dan Worrall have released a 30 minute video on bass which we recommend everyone working in audio watches. It’s packed with the kind of engaging, extremely high quality content we’re used to from Dan. However, if you’ve seen it and thought ’30 minutes? I’ll come back to that later’ here’s a list of ten of the subjects covered in this comprehensive video and we’ve even included timestamps so you can get straight to the part which sounds most interesting to you. We suspect that if you jump in you’ll end up watching the whole thing! 

0.30 Translation Of Bass

The clearest explanation of the problem of translation. Your monitors are part of a system and exactly how the drivers interact with the cabinet and how the drivers in their cabinets interact with the room they are in. If you can’t hear it, you can’t make any decisions about it. Can you use headphones? Maybe, but as this video points out, these aren’t really a satisfactory solution. To really sort out your bottom end you’re going to need a big, powerful subwoofer and enough bass trapping to control it properly.

7.30 How Does Bass Work Anyway?

The importance of harmonics and the distinction Dan draws between ‘Body Bass’ which exists entirely in the sub 100Hz region and ‘Brain Bass’ which contains additional harmonic information. The importance of the harmonic series is central to understanding how sound, and particularly low frequency sounds, work.

Dan also explains spectral and temporal separation. A good musical arrangement is the best way to keep potentially conflicting bass sounds like bass and kick out of each other’s way but where this isn’t possible separating their spectral content using EQ or using dynamic solutions like side chaining kick and bass together so that one ‘ducks’ in response to the other is effective. Watch the clear explanation of how to do this using a ducking gate, side-chained compression or using a multi band compressor to affect only the bottom end, and when and why to choose one solution over another.

16.35 The Importance Of Musical Key For The Best 808 Kicks

Dan points out that, assuming you want your kick to sit around the 50Hz region you will need to be in the key of G or A. If you are writing in E you’d have to be right down at 40Hz or all the way up at 80 if you want your kick to be on the tonic of the key you’re in. It’s a really important point which has significant consequences.

17.40 ‘Brain  Bass’

The role of harmonics in audibility of bass and how psychoacoustics can be used to trick the ear into perceiving deep bass. This includes a great demonstration of how you can create a bass which can trick the ear into perceiving a low fundamental which is beyond the capabilities of the system which is replaying it. You can trick the ear into inferring a tone in a sound which isn’t there because of the order of tones we are accustomed to as part of the harmonic series. If we hear higher harmonics without their lowest fundamental, our brains synthesise it! Lastly there is a great demonstration of how saturation creates additional frequencies due to intermodulation, both sum (higher) and difference (lower) frequencies.

21.15 Parallel Distortion On Bass

If you’ve never used distortion on a bass guitar to add audibility you won’t have noticed how you can add a surprising amount of distortion without the bass really sounding particularly distorted, especially if you run that distortion in parallel. A great addition to this technique is using emphasis/de-emphasis EQ before and after the saturation. The idea being that if you remove midrange from the bass going into the saturation, allow the saturation to distort the bass using this post-EQ signal and then apply the opposite EQ after the saturation, you can use even more saturation without killing the bass sound.

23.50 PA-Style Bass

Managing bass content in the same way as a lot of PA systems do using a subwoofer output via a send. This is similar to the role of the LFE channel in surround content as there is a dedicated route for bass content to take, usually kick, bass and possibly floor toms, these were the only instruments routed to the subs. Using a similar approach using routing within the DAW can result in tighter management of the available low end.

 25.15 High Pass Filters On Bass

Using High Pass Filters on bass sounds to tighten up, emphasise or shape the low end. While it might seem counter-intuitive to use a filter which cuts bass on a bass instrument, if you set it below the fundamental of the lowest note then all it’s removing is subsonic rubbish which will eat up headroom and potentially pump compressors. A good example is a drummer I once worked with who, while a great drummer, used to ‘bury his foot’ on the kick, meaning he’d leave the beater resting against the drum head in between kicks. To make matters worse he had a habit of bouncing his knee in time with the music between hits resulting in unwanted very low frequency content down the mic. You’d never hear it acoustically but it needed filtering out when recording.

26.30 Using Analysers

Why you can’t use an analyser to check your bass. Settings like the slope setting can radically affect how flat material looks on an analyser and deliberate slopes are introduced in many analysers so pink noise appears flat on an analyser. Appropriate use of an analyser is really important because as Dan puts it “If the only problem is that it ‘looks wrong’, that’s not a problem”. You can use them to help interpret what you are hearing, but you should never use one instead of your hearing. Your monitoring should be flat, your mixes shouldn’t.

29.25 Hype The Low End?

Why you shouldn’t ‘hype’ the low end of your mix. There are two reasons why this is a bad idea. The first is that on small speakers, if you try to force a small system to reproduce frequencies below those it can efficiently reproduce it will fail, but in failing it will ruin the reproduction of the frequencies it can adequately reproduce to some extent. So by pushing the bass your small system will use all its available amplifier headroom trying to force speakers which are too small to create frequencies which are too low. Leaving nothing but a mess for the midrange and treble. However things aren’t perfect at the bigger end of systems. PA and club systems are usually set up with an overblown bottom end and the acoustics of big venues are usually fairly reverberant so an un-hyped, tight low end will probably sound more impressive under these conditions.

32.10 Bass Stops As Well As Starts

Take care of note ends. Related to the point above about booming nightclub acoustics leading to messy, indistinct bass, If you are trying to create tight, intelligible bass then pay as much attention to when notes stop as much as when they begin. A really good point and something which is overlooked in lots of areas of production. For example do you take as much care over aligning the ends of notes in stacks of vocal harmonies as you do on the starts?

Watch the video. You might not think you have time for a 30 minute YouTube video but make time for this one!