Two Simple Bass Production Tricks You Should Know

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If you've ever wanted your bass instruments or bass guitar to stand out and cut through the mix a little bit more. And you're also looking for little cool ways to make it more interesting. Maybe you're curious about side chaining your base with your kick. This video is for you today. There are two cool tricks, very simple tricks, to use and to start implementing right away in your music production that I think you're going to find really interesting.

My name is Zion and together with myself and Josh Doyle, we run the Triple Threat Artists course and community. It's a place for singer songwriters to become a Triple Threat by adding that producer element to their name. Nowadays, a lot of music is created by producers who know how to song write, and it, you're kind of behind the curve.

If you don't know some music production, and that's what we want to help you with this course. And this channel is all about that. If you haven't subscribed to our YouTube channel, definitely check that out, subscribe and hit the like button, but let's jump into this.

But one more thing before I forget, we have a couple of freebies on how to produce your music. Well, a one is a PDF guide to call the red zone production guide, and it kind of walks you through the different stages of music production. You can download that for free below as well as a tool called gizmo that we've created that helps music, songwriters, creators to keep track of all their metadata and keep those things organized. All right, without further ado, let's jump into these tricks.

This is a track. This is a lo-fi hip hop track for our YouTube channel Lo-Fi Panda Music (https://www.youtube.com/c/lofipandamusic). If you want to check it out, the link is below I'm the music director for it. So I like to mix a lot of the songs or at least have the final say on the mix. This track was produced by my buddy Blake. He's an awesome producer and it's supposed to sound very old and kind of warbly and kind of grainy and warm.

It doesn't have a lot of bright, shiny sounds on it. Even though there's some slight bells in there, I really duct those back. I really, really pushed a lot of those things back using a I used neutrons isotope, neutrons, EQs, and stuff like that. Anyway the point of this video is to talk about base though. So when I want to focus on right now is the bass guitar.

Now what I did first and foremost is I took the basis, split it into two, or I didn't split it. I copied and pasted it into two tracks. The first track I call it bass low. I roll off everything over 300 Hertz. So here's 300 Hertz. I roll off everything and it's a gradual slope. This is a 12 decibel per octave slope. And then I on the high track, what I did is the exact opposite. I grabbed a filter. This is a high pass filter. And I did the exact same thing, same exact slope. So I don't have any phase issues or try not to have any phase issues and roll it off at 300 Hertz.

So what happened? Why do I do that? What's the point of that? Well, it's because I want to treat the low frequencies a little bit different from the high frequencies. Namely, I want my, the low bass frequencies to always be right down the middle. I want them to be in mono. Now this track is pretty mono already. And but if we listen to it right here, so load up,

Music Playing.

It's right down the middle. But if we wanted to make sure I could take this width and put it down to negative a hundred and it would sound like

Music Playing

Right now, you're probably wondering why is something moving over here? I'll explain that in just a second. That's the second trick. But the first trick I want to point out is that the, my low base is in mono, meaning it's right down the middle. I don't have any stereo separation between the left and right. I do the opposite with a higher frequencies. I actually widened them using the widening tool.

Most Daws have a widening tools. It's also called a stereo enhancer. But what you do is you enhance your stereo, enhance the higher frequencies, everything over 300 Hertz. So it fills out the base part. So this is going to be what it looks like without it. I'm going to go ahead and put zero here and you're going to hear, this is both the low and high base together and it's all mono.

Music Playing

So now what I want to do is I want to actually widen the top one. So I'm going to graduate that in.

Music Playing.

So if you're listening to this on a good stereo headphones or speakers or whatever. Maybe you've got good laptops speakers. You're going to probably notice that subtle difference. Now, why would we want to do that? Well it's because it helps the bass clear space, those higher frequencies, clear more space for the other instruments. And it makes it cut through the mix a little bit more. What are the disadvantages to doing this? Well, one disadvantage is it does mess up the tone of the bass guitarist. If you're working with a bass guitarist and they really liked the tone that they had, you might want to make sure they're okay with you doing that. But the other disadvantages you can run into some phase issues. So what I always do is I put a mano plugin on my BUS to make sure that it sounds about the same. Now I'm going to go ahead and turn off the, the the kick, the side chain, so we can hear it better. I'm going to just listen to the high and I'm going to turn the mono button on and go back and forth to see if I hear any frequencies that are disappearing in the mix.

Music Playing

Now, inevitably these types of stereo enhancers and with tools, they often bring… They often introduce certain phase issues to certain frequencies. And the goal is to figure out if it's doing it too much, and if it's problematic for your mix or if you'd like the sound of it. The other thing about it is if you're going to be making music such as lo-fi hip hop, that is probably going to be played on one speaker through someone's Bluetooth speaker, that's out by their pool, or a laptop that, you know, when the speakers are so close together, it's practically mono anyway, you want to be very conscientious of whether or not your, your frequencies are disappearing. And it's pretty noticeable pretty quickly. If it is, I didn't hear any problems with that. There might be some frequencies that are disappearing a little bit, but I didn't hear any issues. So I'm liking that. I'm, I'm digging that. So now let's put this whole thing back in the mix

Music Playing

So I'm loving that. Okay. So that's trick number one is splitting your base into two parts and then treating them differently. You might want to do that also to 'sparkl'e up using an exciter. I say, 'sparkle' …. using an exciter on the high frequencies. You might want to do that, or you might want to EEQ certain frequencies out of the low, without messing up the high or compress them differently. You could do a lot of different, there's a lot of different reasons why you might want to do this. I like to do this a lot. There might be faster ways to do this, but this is the way I like to do it.

Let's get to part two. So the part two of this is to use ducking. Well, I've already kind of shown you it, but I'm going to show you with the kick on and how it affects…. I've got a a side chain frequency here that's being effected. So let's listen to the bass. This is the low bass actually will listen to both.

Music Playing.

You can definitely tell when the kick happens, because this frequency it's right here. This is the one that I've told to do it. It's ducking way down and every time the kick happens. So why do you want to do that? It's because you want to make sure that you give room and space for the kick. Also, it sounds cool. Plus, it's a very modern thing to do, and I like to do it even though lo-fi is supposed to sound kind of old, it's kind of a new, fresh take on old mixes, right? Old lo-fi fidelity track. So how do you do that? Well, I use Neutron and you first, when you put it into, this is Ableton's way, you have to figure that out for your dog, but it neutrons pretty set up to do this kind of thing really well.

They've kind of thought about this because a lot of producers do this, where they control one frequency and duck for certain frequencies based on another. And I've told it to, to use the kick, look at the kick and every time the kick happens, I've told it this to be dynamic. If I turn this off, this would just be a big cut right here. And I don't want to do that. I actually want to make it so this only cuts when it's side change to an external frequency and I've told the external, and it's going to the kick free kick track. So now when you hit the when you hit play…

Music Playing.

And then the mix,

Music Playing.

And actually other tracks are doing the same thing, even on my main piano, I'm doing that a little bit as well.

Music Playing.

So that's it, those are your two tricks split them out. And so that you can make the bass in mono or the low frequencies in mono, and then also using side chain to give that pumping effect and make room for that kick. I hope you learned something. If you did send me an email back.

All right later, guys!

Zion

Background music is from Lofi Panda

This episode was produced and marketed by the Get Known Service