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Hi. Welcome to the latest tutorial here from Replay Studios.
In this tutorial we'll be looking at bass guitar EQ. And in the last tutorial we looked
at bass drum EQ and the logical progression would seem to be to go from the bass drum
to the snare drum. But I prefer doing the bass guitar because the bass guitar and the
bass drum, they have to work in tandem, they have to work together. If you can get the
two working together that's really half the mix done already because everything else just
seems to fall into place. Think of it as a construction from the foundation up. You have
to have the foundation well developed and well thought out to do everything else. And
the instruments that are going to give you the low end are the kick drum or bass drum
and the bass guitar. So now let's hear the entire drums with the bass guitar so that
you can hear the rhythm section which gives you the pumping that you need in a song. Let's
just go through the verse. Now I'll show you one of the most important things that you
need to have a good bass sound. If you remember in the previous tutorial I talked about how
you use a technique called mulling or a technique where you use various sound sources or various
microphones on the same sound source. And what happens with the bass guitar is the bass
guitar has a lot of low end information but it doesn't have that much high information
which sometimes makes it hard to hear. So as you can see what you are actually hearing
are two sounds from the bass. You could actually use three or four. In this case we will be
using only two. And the one is the actual sound of the bass guitar direct and the other
sound is a distorted track of the same bass guitar. And I'll show you in context. I'll
put the music playing and you can hear the bass well defined and then I'll switch off
each of the components, the distorted bass guitar component and the original undistorted
bass guitar component. Let's hear. We could only hear at the end the original bass guitar
and you can see that it is much cleaner. In this particular section there is not much
of a problem, but for example we went into the chorus, which I'll just show you now quickly.
I have to put the guitars in. Everything get's a lot denser and you could easily loose the
the bass guitar. Let me show you what I am talking about. You can see when the guitars
come in the bass has to compete against other things. And I'll switch off the distorted
bass and you'll see that it immediately just seems to disappear. So you can see you can
still see where the bass is in the mix where as if you don't have the distorted guitar
it just seems to disappear as soon as you get more instruments ciao ciao bass you don't
hear it anymore. So let's go back to the verse which is a bit simpler. It's still the same
principle and now I'll show you the two basses together and then each individually. Hopefully
you can understand that each of the sounds individually they don't cut it. They don't
quite make things work. But the two together they have to be mixed in a certain way makes
everything very discernible. So now what actually happens is if you remember in the previous
bass drum EQ, you'll remember that at 55 Hertz, because the song , I like tuning the drums
to a specific note. The key of the song is C Major but I tuned the drums to an A which
is the relative minor, so you would have for example the A note, the C Note the G and the
D and the E Note for your drum elements and everything works well. If we remember I can
actually show you the drums. The kick drum at 55Hertz I gave it this resonant peak. Now
the important thing to do is, where as in the bass drum you give it a boost, in the
some frequency you actually subtract it from the bass. What happens with that is seeing
as though the bass drum is continually occupying that frequency, you don't want to build up
too much energy in that frequency because that's when things start sounding moo shy
, tubby, you get everything really muddy. What you do is, remember the first thing always
the most important thing is to apply the high-pass filter. If we go to our friend Music Math
which I've shown before in other tutorials, you will se that the lowest note that you
can get on a typical bass guitar is the E Note. We are using standard tuning and we
can see that the E Note which is over here by the pointer says 42 Hertz. So this song
is tuned in normal tuning. If it was dropped D it would be lower, if it was Dropped C even
lower but this is normal tuning. Anything below 42 hertz on the bass guitar you don't
need so you could put the filter somewhere over here. I would leave it somewhere at 36
so that you don't really incise on the actual note. At 55 Hertz I'll pull down quite a bit
so that the bass, the fundamental note of the bass drum come through. And you take away
in exactly the same place. Put the drums on again. That makes sense. The really really
important thing to have that sub bass working really well is when you place, if you remember
from a previous tutorial I talked about the Baxandall type of EQ curve and what you do
is you place the EQ point right at the beginning in this case it's 20 Hertz. You put it right
at the beginning the Baxandall works in this way. You want a very very low Q that's probably
too low but probably something in this region. And then you will, this is how much? 24 dB
that's just way too much but we'll start applying this and you will see that we are still taking
away from the 55 Hertz and we will get this really thunderous low end working very well.
Let's just put it playing and I will start upping the boost. We don't want anything,
we don't want the bass values to go too high on the loudness meters. Hopefully you've got
good speakers or a good pair of headphones and you can hear how the bass just totally
fills out in such a solid way. you're not getting anything muddy, you're not getting
anything chubby, it's just doing what a bass should do. Just filling the room up. OK cool
bring this down just a little bit maybe. Bring it up sorry so that it's not quite so extreme.
Now this is a very very important part of bass guitar EQing. Now what I will do is switch
off the distorted part. Sounds good but you want some type of character. And now an important
thing that happens with the distorted part is you don't need the low end information
because you've got the low end information coming from the other undistorted part so
you've got the clean tone coming through well and then in the area where it starts getting
just a little weak is where you put in the distorted part. And if you remember what I
told you about the spectral analysis, just let me do something, you'll see that in this
2K region the distorted guitar is just a little bit weak. I'l put it to play again and you'll
see that it's weak, just give it a slight boost in that area and that way we will have
that constant curve that constant fade out that we look for in the frequency spectrum
analyzer. Remember from about 2K or more or less from the 2 to 3 or 4K region you want
everything to have this slow roll off. We can see that in this area it's just a little
bit weak. Everything's nicely balanced and now let's just see how this sounds with and
without the EQ. Without the EQ you can hear everything not being quite as sharp. Let me
just do that as well with the drums. Remember roll off the low frequencies on the distorted
bass and Bob's your uncle. You can build you can bring it in with this fader you can see
that this fader was at -4 dB below and you can bring it up to taste. So I'll take it
all the way down and then slowly push it up and you'll see exactly where it starts sounding
good. Flat. Sounds good already. Bit aggressive but not bad. OK sounds perfect. Hope this
helps you and remember, good recording, good mixing and good music. See you soon.