Mixing Bass: EQ and other tricks.

[Phil Starr]

So I've discovered a new trick in squeezing a bit more out of the bass coming through the PA. I'll share that later in the thread as I'm still getting to grips with it and don't want to put out any misinformation. However we've a thread here about how to treat vocals in the PA and we've had some discussion of using HPF to improve the FOH sound and I thought it would be interesting to see how other people approach putting their bass through the PA. If that helps I'll maybe start something on guitar and drums.

 

I'm kind of making some assumptions here. This is strictly about a pub band playing a fair few venues in a year and one of the band members is mixing. You've less than an hour to set up. A 5min soundcheck is a luxury and there is little chance of anyone getting out front to listen once the gig starts in earnest. We are lucky enough here to have people who run PA for a living and I'm really interested in what they say but I'm also looking at things we could all do with a fairly basic mixer.

 

Oh, the trick: no details as I don't fully know what has been done yet. Our new guitarist is responsible. Basically he is duplicating the bass channel in the mixer and applying different eq to each channel. One channel is labelled 'Low Bass' and the other 'High Bass' I only noticed this when they appeared in my monitor mix. Turning up the high bass increases the articulacy of the sound and the 'Low Bass' lets you have a deep bass presence without overwhelming the rest of the mix. You'll have to wait for details. In the mean time the question is; what have you tried successfully and what problems have you found?

 

[Woodinblack]

Certainly interested here - I have just gone cab-less with my new 2x Evo 8 setup, and at the moment I am not in love with the sound, although people seem to think it sounds fine. It could be that I am just a bit separated from the sound. 

I found rather than going straight from my board (which I am not setup for as my dwarf is still away being fixed), the better sound I got was taking my TC450 as a preamp and boosting my mids in the mixer. But I have only done this for one gig and two practices so far so I am nowhere near what the actual solution is yet. 

[itu]

Isn't this about separating instruments to their respective bands? Why should a singer use low frequencies when the bass or keys are the ones working there? Bass drum wants to be the lowest, let's not put bass there. Otherwise lots of power is consumed to nothing that could not be heard.

 

Audio codecs do that as well as skilled mixing personnel.

[TimR]

I assume you only have a 3 band EQ on the mixer and the mid is parametric. By doubling up you can use the 'mid' set at different frequencies.

 

Might try this for our vocals. Take a thru out straight into the next chanel input. 

[ratman]

22 hours ago, Phil Starr said:

Turning up the high bass increases the articulacy of the sound and the 'Low Bass' lets you have a deep bass presence without overwhelming the rest of the mix. You'll have to wait for details.

 

Nice idea. What is his crossover point?

[Phil Starr]

I'm not sure enough of the details yet to answer any questions accurately. It doesn't look to be a 'crossover' set up though, more of a 'stereo' signal. I caught a quick look at the graphic of the 'high bass' looked like very like the signal I send through my floor monitors whan I'm mixing heavily filtered bass, some mid boost and the top end rolled off. He's using a Behringer XR18 so plenty of options on the eq.

 

In the past my favourite set up was to go through the PA and use a Hartke Kickback 10 as my monitor. The moment you put gig level bass through the PA the sound from FOH becomes an issue on stage. Mids and top are radiated 90x60deg (depending upon your PA horn) but bass at FOH is radiated 360 deg and swamps the stage. The last thing  you want is more bass on stage so you have to cut it almost completely from your monitors. The Hartke sounded great at middle volumes but had nowhere near enough power handling for bass so I turned the bass down to minimum and being a kickbback it directed all the mids and tops I needed straight to my ears. It sounded so tinny without the PA but great mid gig.

 

I know many bassists in the past have used a stereo set up and that goes right back to the dawn of amplified bass. A common trick was to use a guitar amp and speaker for a mid/top sound and something suitably massive for the bass sound.

 

 

 

[Phil Starr]

On 06/05/2024 at 12:48, Woodinblack said:

Certainly interested here - I have just gone cab-less with my new 2x Evo 8 setup, and at the moment I am not in love with the sound, although people seem to think it sounds fine. It could be that I am just a bit separated from the sound. 

I found rather than going straight from my board (which I am not setup for as my dwarf is still away being fixed), the better sound I got was taking my TC450 as a preamp and boosting my mids in the mixer. But I have only done this for one gig and two practices so far so I am nowhere near what the actual solution is yet. 

I think most people would want some pre-shaping before taking their bass to the PA, whether that is through an emulator or a bass pre amp of some sort.

 

If it helps I have a 'basic sound' that I use across all three bands I play with. I set it up at home through good quality headphones and then through some simple studio monitors and then I take that to put through the PA and floor monitors if I use them. I then adjust the eq on the bass channel to get that sound through FOH and then eq the floor monitors further to get the same sound on stage. In practice I've saved the FOH settings after a couple of successful gigs and don't touch that. (if the saved eq sounds wrong (usually too bassy) that's down to room acoustics/resonances and that's adjusted globally on the graphic) Floor monitors start with a saved sound but usually get extra eq. at the sound check as the exact setting will depend upon how much bass is spilling back from the PA. If I'm using in-ears then no further eq is needed mostly. In the band where my guitarist mixes he takes the same feed and that is what he splits.

 

The 'basic sound' I've set up via a Zoom B1ON. I have a very similar sound set up on a Sansamp if ever I play with people who won't/don't use in-ears and I have to split the signal to go through backline which is FRFR (an LFSys Monaco with either a Warwick Gnome or a Bugera Veyron set flat)

Edited May 8 by Phil Starr

[Baloney Balderdash]

On 06/05/2024 at 18:42, itu said:

Isn't this about separating instruments to their respective bands? Why should a singer use low frequencies when the bass or keys are the ones working there? Bass drum wants to be the lowest, let's not put bass there. Otherwise lots of power is consumed to nothing that could not be heard.

 

Audio codecs do that as well as skilled mixing personnel.

I isn't as simple as that.

 

A great mix is as much about making it coherent, making the instrument blend together, complementing and enhancing each other, as making them heard as separate elements, and the latter isn't done by assigning every single instrument to a specific strictly limited frequency area.

 

Taking all the low end out of the vocals or all the top end out of the bass guitar would result in the vocals sounding really thin and tinny and the bass guitar would loose definition and sound muddy.

 

And doing like this (assigning every single instrument to a specific strictly limited frequency area) to all instruments the mix would all become an indistinguishable mush, with all the individual character sucked out of the individual instruments.

 

Harmonic content is what makes different instruments sound different from each other and what defines the different character to individual instruments, if nothing but the fundamental note it heard what you have left is a sinus wave, and it will all sound the same, have the exact same character and timber.

 

That is not to say that vocals doesn't benefit from having applied a HPF, or bass guitar in most cases doesn't benefit from having applied both a HPF and a LPF, or that you shouldn't otherwise EQ the different instruments to fit better into the mix, but it isn't done by simply applying a different steep narrow BPF to each of them.

 

 

Edited May 8 by Baloney Balderdash

[Woodinblack]

1 hour ago, Phil Starr said:

I think most people would want some pre-shaping before taking their bass to the PA, whether that is through an emulator or a bass pre amp of some sort.

 

Indeed - if I still had my dwarf I would have that, but at the moment it is off being fixed. I am using a B3n but not that familar with it, or set it up right. The TC450 though as a preamp does seem to work quite well, although getting the mix right for the bass is the main thing. Actually the main thing is more reliance on the IEMs.

[itu]

9 hours ago, Baloney Balderdash said:

...but it isn't done by simply applying a different steep narrow BPF to each of them.

I think I didn't literally talk about narrow band pass filtered stuff where every source is strictly separated from each other, did I?

 

If you sit behind the desk (I am not talking about personal instrument monitoring, because that is a totally different thing) and make - even very rough looking - filtering, the end result may sound surprisingly good. This has a lot to do with masking (check some theory about hearing). That is a technique used in audio coding to lessen material that cannot be heard. That extra material only consumes quite a lot of power and bandwidth.

 

Bass has pretty limited frequency response. I have measured some magnetic pickups, and anything beyond 4 kHz is practically non-existent. The response has fallen a lot far before that. I might say that 1 kHz would be very high stuff from bass. Because ear is sensitive in that area, vocals (naturally) contain far more interesting stuff there, and those g-word players are also there among keyboardists, brass and so on. How do you think a bass would have any interesting stuff to say there? In the middle of that chaos?

 

I do understand your worry, but we are not buried under anything. We support the whole system, the band. We represent the base and the rhythm. Everything on top of us should be part of the foundation we build. (Although we play frequencies our equipment is actually unable to produce! Only our hearing builds those lowest frequencies that cabs cannot push out.)

Edited May 8 by itu

[Chienmortbb]

This could get heavy but @itu is correct. Our  hearing corrects  for the  low frequencies we are missing when we  high pass the bass. However, the frequencies above 1KHz are vital for bass with regards to dispersion. Not a problem via FRFR PA cabs but vital if you have any on stage sound. 

I wonder if we neglect “feel”, the feel of backline at our peril.  A properly designed bass cab can flap your trousers and more, can, IEMs duplicate that? Of course not but trouser flapping bass is not what the audience wants. 

The conundrum is that we are all here for slightly different reasons, slightly different circumstances.

[Greg Edwards69]

On 07/05/2024 at 17:06, Phil Starr said:

I know many bassists in the past have used a stereo set up and that goes right back to the dawn of amplified bass. A common trick was to use a guitar amp and speaker for a mid/top sound and something suitably massive for the bass sound.

Indeed. I discovered this 'trick' after discovering Billy Sheehan. Whilst I've never run two separate amps for lows and mids+treble, I did used to run each pickup from my Attitude bass through separate signal paths (that included eq to trim the low end out of the 'top' path), and mix them into a single input on my amp. Doing this I was able to adjust the mix between the two signals on the fly to compensate for room acoustics. However, this specialised pedalboard meant I could only play one bass, one way.

 

I moved over to the Helix several years ago to allow me to switch between different setups, but I've yet to get around to dialling in an stereo Attitude preset - I've been enjoying what it can do with a traditional single output bass.

 

I do however retain some of that processing separation that I learned from my previous setup. I have a couple of split paths in my main patches. One is a crossover split centred at 200Hz that I use for drives and modulation effects to retain a full and clean low end.  This goes into an AB split - one path with an amp and cab model that's skewed toward mid range and the other with a Noble DI model that provides a solid low end and crisp treble. 

 

Another variation I see commonly applied to bass, particularly in metal mixes is duplicating the track and applying a heavy scoop to one for clean lows and highs, and then a frown eq and distortion to the other for a grinding midrange.

 

That said. I've been so impressed with the Noble DI model in the Helix, I'm going to try going back to basic and build a simple preset with as few blocks and possible and see what I get. It's always worth doing this when your signal chain starts getting complex to make sure you're not losing sight of what you're trying to achieve.

[Al Krow]

@ratman came along to a recent gig and felt that the bass tone in the mix was really thin.

 

We've pinned the cause down to a combination of the desk HPF kicking in at 100Hz and a 3dB bass cut at 60 Hz which had been set like that in my desire to avoid any boominess, but was clearly overkill!

I've taken off the desk HPF for the bass (and kick drum), and replaced with one cutting in at 50Hz on my Zoom multifx; got rid of the -3dB desk bass cut but added a 3dB boost at 140Hz.

Voila! So much more weight to the low end now and sounding much less thin/clearer through my IEMs too!

 

The low-mids boost at 140Hz does seem to be magic fairy dust for both FoH and IEMs - I guess I tend to forget that anything up to 200Hz is bassEQ-land and not to allow myself to be conned by the it being labelled "mids" (albeit low). 

 

Not often you get an expert bass player and sound guy rolled into one in the audience, and I suspect this very helpful bit of feedback which the silent stage approach had kept a little hidden from me is going to be a bit of a game changer - thank you Alex!

Edited June 11 by Al Krow

[jrixn1]

8 minutes ago, Al Krow said:

I've taken off the desk HPF for the bass (and kick drum), and replaced with one cutting in at 50Hz on my Zoom multifx; got rid of the -3dB desk bass cut but added a 3dB boost at 140Hz.

 

Thought I'd check my current settings and what do you know!

(The HPF frequency is the left of the two numbers - so ~80Hz)

 

[Baloney Balderdash]

On 08/05/2024 at 19:51, itu said:

I think I didn't literally talk about narrow band pass filtered stuff where every source is strictly separated from each other, did I?

 

If you sit behind the desk (I am not talking about personal instrument monitoring, because that is a totally different thing) and make - even very rough looking - filtering, the end result may sound surprisingly good. This has a lot to do with masking (check some theory about hearing). That is a technique used in audio coding to lessen material that cannot be heard. That extra material only consumes quite a lot of power and bandwidth.

 

Bass has pretty limited frequency response. I have measured some magnetic pickups, and anything beyond 4 kHz is practically non-existent. The response has fallen a lot far before that. I might say that 1 kHz would be very high stuff from bass. Because ear is sensitive in that area, vocals (naturally) contain far more interesting stuff there, and those g-word players are also there among keyboardists, brass and so on. How do you think a bass would have any interesting stuff to say there? In the middle of that chaos?

 

I do understand your worry, but we are not buried under anything. We support the whole system, the band. We represent the base and the rhythm. Everything on top of us should be part of the foundation we build. (Although we play frequencies our equipment is actually unable to produce! Only our hearing builds those lowest frequencies that cabs cannot push out.)

Now that really depends on the specific number of instruments involved, the specific instrumentation, and not least the specific type of music and individual track/song, doesn't it?

 

At least that is my experience with composing and mixing music.

 

If it all could be fitted down to one specific formula for each type of instrument and for all music, regardless of any form of context, we wouldn't need sound technicians and producers, and we could leave all that work to a simple computer app.

 

Edited June 11 by Baloney Balderdash

[Al Krow]

18 minutes ago, jrixn1 said:

 

Thought I'd check my current settings and what do you know!

(The HPF frequency is the left of the two numbers - so ~80Hz)

 

 

What nice confirmation of the 140Hz low mids boost being magic fairy dust, thanks John!