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  • Paul Tucci

    Member
    at 12:17 pm

    Drew,

    There’s nothing like a big ol’ bass bomb from Phil or an acoustic bass to grab peoples’ attention. There’s a certain joy to be had with a big PA and subwoofers 🙂 . That acoustic bass can own the low end, especially in your genre.

    So the lowest fundamental of an open E on the 4 string bass is 41Hz. Capturing it is a different story. You have to have those freqs recorded on tape/in the computer before you can can process them to fit in the music. EQ alone may not work if the relative level of 40 is way lower than the 100Hz area as your graphs showed. Multi-band compression won’t help much if there’s precious little content down there.

    One trick I’ve used in similar circumstances is when the kick drum doesn’t really have deep bass but I want deep bass (without utilizing a sample) is to low pass a duplicate channel of the problematic instrument so that only low freqs are present. Then drop it down an octave via whatever tuning effect you have available. Where you low pass (high cut) the dupe channel is critical. If you want more below 50 Hz, I’d aim that low pass filter at 100ish Hz with a steep filter. Feather the newly created deep bass into the mix against the original. High passing (low cut) the original bass channel may clear some mud from the combination of sounds. It’s a cheat but effective if you can’t capture the low end off the pickup or microphone of the original recording.

    PT