Mixing a subbass for both bassy and no-bass speakers!

tpantano · Post by **tpantano** » Sun Dec 12, 2010 12:38 am

How can I mix a very basic sine bass, so that you can hear it on speakers that can't handle sub frequencies without it distorting, but so that you still get that nice boom through a subwoofer?

johnschwarz · Post by **johnschwarz** » Sat Dec 18, 2010 8:05 pm

similar question:

a lot of times i will mix in my headphones, and it sounds sweet (they are good headphones, but maybe my ear is just not listening for the right things), then i take the songs to a 'live' setting, and some are missing bass freqs, or sometimes the snares are really high and piercing...
is there a way to know this beforehand? like looking at a spectrum?

ogleeson · Post by **ogleeson** » Mon Dec 27, 2010 11:51 pm

Just make sure its not too loud in the mix, basically! And run a decent multiband compressor over the final mix to flatten things out. If you can get hold of it - get a vst plugin called Ozone, by Izotope. It has enough presets to make life easy.

I suspect you might get alot of people bangin' on about having decent monitors and a room with good acoustics and never monitoring only using headphones, but we dont all have oodles of cash to throw about. Just reference you mixes on as many different systems as you can.

X-Trade · Post by **X-Trade** » Tue Dec 28, 2010 12:01 am

Triangle waves rather than Sine is a good start.

Sometimes it helps to apply some additional high EQ or drive.

But actually a lot of producers layer a more 'traditional' bass sound with sub-octaves or two of actual pure sine or possibly triangle sub-bass. Put both through to a group track and drive and compress the two together such that they 'fit' or 'gel' really nicely.