Howlin

[iShouldBsleeping]

That sounds like a hell of a good idea

Unfortunately, everything sub 150 hZ is a tricky battleground for me... I've got a little absorption effective in that range but there never really could be enough... I have to sleep in here Oddly enough, my car stereo is absolutely awful for listening for enjoyment, but it will punish any sort of sub bass excess with extreme prejudice.

Thanks for the tips!

Yeah that sucks. If it wasn't for my car subwoofer I would have no real reference for the low end. I hear it gets easier with experience though, even without the proper monitoring environment. Jean Marie Horvat can mix an 808 on auratone cubes!

[pauli]

Deep bass is always a bit of a crapshoot even in very good listening environments On top of the physics issues, my understanding is that frequencies near the extremes of our hearing threshold are perceived as highly nonlinear... and as such everyone hears them quite differently... so what works for one engineer may be highly individual to the way he perceives bass.

This is somewhat predicated on the assumption he's mixing in the box, but I bet you Horvat has a custom signal chain for 808 kicks and that's how he does it. If you're familiar enough with the way something sounds and what your preferred processors do to it, you can probably mix it fairly reliably on anything. An auratone cube in that situation makes a lot of sense for sitting the mid-range portion of the kick sound, and given his discography, he's probably very intuitive on what's going on in the sub based on that.

My friend, our conversation has just gotten deeply nerdy.

[iShouldBsleeping]

Deep bass is always a bit of a crapshoot even in very good listening environments On top of the physics issues, my understanding is that frequencies near the extremes of our hearing threshold are perceived as highly nonlinear... and as such everyone hears them quite differently... so what works for one engineer may be highly individual to the way he perceives bass.

This is somewhat predicated on the assumption he's mixing in the box, but I bet you Horvat has a custom signal chain for 808 kicks and that's how he does it. If you're familiar enough with the way something sounds and what your preferred processors do to it, you can probably mix it fairly reliably on anything. An auratone cube in that situation makes a lot of sense for sitting the mid-range portion of the kick sound, and given his discography, he's probably very intuitive on what's going on in the sub based on that.

My friend, our conversation has just gotten deeply nerdy.

Wow I did not know that about the non-linear thing on sub bass.. interesting. In regards to Horvat, during the interview they actually were talking about the sub bass.. he said he can tell if he's mixing it right by looking at how the speaker cone reflexes! Either way, I dream of the day my home studio is treated, in a room with no parallel walls, with some expensive monitors through a nice analog summing box

[ptalbot]

Either way, I dream of the day my home studio is treated, in a room with no parallel walls, with some expensive monitors through a nice analog summing box

In the meantime, a good frequency analyzer could help you greatly with sub bass, matching commercial references curve should put you in the ballpark in no time.

[pauli]

The tricky bit about analyzers and referencing is that frequency buildup isn't half the problem when it comes to sub. The even bigger issue is that in an untreated room, sub will often have several times the reverb length as opposed to the rest of the spectrum, so much of what you're hearing is several seconds older than what you're seeing on the analyzer in real time, and it's probably phase canceling very unpredictably as it folds on top of itself.

What makes matters even more depressing is that the nature of comb filtering is both time dependent and frequency dependent... So if your reference track is in a different key or different tempo... Most likely it will be both... The way the sub comb filters could potentially be entirely different.

Fortunately, most music requires very little sub, so you can get away with rolling off quite a big on the mix buss. IMHO anything below 30 hZ is almost worthless for music, so all of my channels get a 12 db per octave cut there... I also cut everything from at least 100 hZ on the sides channels of the mix buss before I even start panning so that the channels bass content automatically reduces as it's panned... That'll give you more control over the sound of your mix if you're sending it to mastering, because if there's bass in the sides channel, your ME will almost definitely cut it to create headroom for loudness, so it's better to understand how your end-product will sound while you're still balancing. On top of all that, unless it's EDM, R&B or some other urban/club genre, everything below 50 can usually be gently rolled off with no sacrifice... But there's still a full octave of sub to deal with... and I've already mentioned why I'm wary of referencing and FFT analyzers. IMO, unless we get lucky and can build a dream room with state of the art speakers, there's really no substitute for checking on a half a dozen listening systems until the bass feels contained.

The bit you mentioned about watching the cone reflex is interesting, though... I have a really lousy plastic Chinese PC speaker setup with a silly 2 inch woofer that sits on the floor... Used to do all my mixing on it so I know them quite well (lol) and one of the things that I'll do is lay my fingers on the dust cap to get an idea as to how much rumble there is and whether or not it's in time. Even better, I'll stuff a sock in the port and see if it starts crawling across the floor . Not only does that hint at excess in the bottom octaves, you can get some buddies to bring their floor woofers over and you can start betting on the races!

[ptalbot]

The tricky bit about analyzers and referencing is that frequency buildup isn't half the problem when it comes to sub. The even bigger issue is that in an untreated room, sub will often have several times the reverb length as opposed to the rest of the spectrum, so much of what you're hearing is several seconds older than what you're seeing on the analyzer in real time, and it's probably phase canceling very unpredictably as it folds on top of itself.

Which is why you should trust the analyzer more than your ears in that area.
This will always be a problematic area, unless you have the perfect room, so we will be tricked anyway and are basically blind to what's really going on down there.

What makes matters even more depressing is that the nature of comb filtering is both time dependent and frequency dependent... So if your reference track is in a different key or different tempo... Most likely it will be both... The way the sub comb filters could potentially be entirely different.

I'm not entirely sure this is such a factor under 50hz. If your analyzer is capable of averaging, this should give you a good idea of the target, whatever the tempo.
And anyway, comb filtering will also happen differently in different rooms because of room modes. So once again you're blind there.

Fortunately, most music requires very little sub, so you can get away with rolling off quite a big on the mix buss. IMHO anything below 30 hZ is almost worthless for music, so all of my channels get a 12 db per octave cut there... I also cut everything from at least 100 hZ on the sides channels of the mix buss before I even start panning so that the channels bass content automatically reduces as it's panned... That'll give you more control over the sound of your mix if you're sending it to mastering, because if there's bass in the sides channel, your ME will almost definitely cut it to create headroom for loudness, so it's better to understand how your end-product will sound while you're still balancing. On top of all that, unless it's EDM, R&B or some other urban/club genre, everything below 50 can usually be gently rolled off with no sacrifice...

I agree with that. It's good practice, and there are quite a lot of plugins that allow you to mono-ize your output under a chosen frequency.

But there's still a full octave of sub to deal with... and I've already mentioned why I'm wary of referencing and FFT analyzers. IMO, unless we get lucky and can build a dream room with state of the art speakers, there's really no substitute for checking on a half a dozen listening systems until the bass feels contained.

It can be contained on half a dozen and crazy wild on dozen others... where do you stop?

The bit you mentioned about watching the cone reflex is interesting, though... I have a really lousy plastic Chinese PC speaker setup with a silly 2 inch woofer that sits on the floor... Used to do all my mixing on it so I know them quite well (lol) and one of the things that I'll do is lay my fingers on the dust cap to get an idea as to how much rumble there is and whether or not it's in time. Even better, I'll stuff a sock in the port and see if it starts crawling across the floor . Not only does that hint at excess in the bottom octaves, you can get some buddies to bring their floor woofers over and you can start betting on the races!

Sounds like a good idea in theory, not sure about the practicality of it and how much you can tweak based on that...

[pauli]

I'm not completely disagreeing with you... an analyzer will definitely get you closer, and it's necessary and better than nothing in an untreated room. But you can't really completely trust an analyzer either. Reason for that is an analyzer can only tell you what's there (on average as a function of time), but only your ears can make a qualified judgement as to how it actually sounds, and that applies not only to bass, but the entire audible spectrum. An analyzer can't tell you anything about how sub bass will feel on your skin and thump in your chest, and even if it demonstrates no comb filtering in the audio itself, that says nothing about how it might comb filter once it gets out of the speakers, even in an ideal listening environment.

And then there's intermodulation distortion, which is a very complicated issue, and probably a much bigger potential problem than comb filtering. An analyzer (and a skilled user) can usefully predict whether or not intermodulation distortion will be a noticeable issue on appropriate speakers, but in essence you're only predicting how the audio will translate to a very small percentage of the speakers it might conceivably play through. Most listeners will be be listening on either earbuds, headphones, or cheap PC speakers like the ones I described above. Headphones and earbuds most likely won't reveal much, but cheap grotbox speakers very well might. But unless you're in a treated room, there's no way you're ever going to hear the full impact of the distortion due to the comb filtering and the overlong reverb time on the bass end may very well mask the issue entirely.

So do I use an analyzer? Absolutely, wholeheartedly, unashamedly yes. I use Voxengo SPAN personally... it seems to have the best features and I can configure the slope based on the situation in a predictable way. Which is your favorite? Melda makes a free one, MAnalyzer, that I don't find particularly useful on individual channels, but it's great for matching up the overall tonality of the mix to a reference. I mostly use these tools to help with the low end, too, because I'm very well aware of the issue with my room, and it definitely helps me get better translation in much less time. My point is this, though: look at a bunch of photos of well treated mixing studios, and you'll find most of them have speakers of all qualities all over the place... even the pros in pro rooms check everything on a bunch of systems because there truly is no substitute. Analyzers are great, and I love them, and of course referencing to commercial masters is vital in taking the step from a good mix to a great mix, but you've got to be aware of their limitations, especially when it comes to translation to least common denominator systems, which is most of them, these days...

Side point... another great audio analysis tool I like to use is an oscilloscope simulator. If you're interested in trying one out there's a great free one called smexoscope. I find these are fantastic tools for visualizing what compression is doing to your audio, and uneven room reverbs can disguise things like that too. Pop one on the mix buss to make sure you're not flattening it out too much... real time loudness averaging has its flaws and shortcomings like anything else, so oscilloscopes can be a great compliment and tell you things the averager isn't. Even better, you can use them to fine tune the attack and release settings as well as the ratio on just about any individual channel compressor when you're struggling to catch peaks or generally smooth out the dynamics. I tend to view compressors more as signal shapers than dynamics managers when I can help it, so oscilloscopes are great for practicing that philosophy .

So anyway, I wasn't trying to disagree with you... mostly just wanted to point out the limitations and the continued need to cross check on as many systems as you can, especially if you're not in a treatable room scenario or you're relying on headphones. If analyzers were bulletproof in their predictions, somebody would've figure out how to get computers to mix music automatically... there's simply no substitute for actually hearing the mix in different environments and on different equipment when your goal is to mix audio that will sound good anywhere

Awesome discussion... I love to nerd out!

[ptalbot]

Thanks for the precisions Pauli. It's a great topic.

I like SPAN and use it extensively as well. I'm "mixing" (I put that in quotes because I know that I'm only scratching the surface of it) in an untreated living room, not by choice, believe me.

I do have 3 pairs of speakers (JBL LSR2328p + sub, Avantone MixCube and a pair of cheap Logitech PC speakers) to check my mixes on, and I can switch them in the Cubase Control room, I also check on other systems in headphones (senh HD650), eaeburds, laptop and iPad "speakers" and various speakers in other rooms, and I try to get the mix sounding fine in all these environment, but for sure the low-end in particular is something I don't trust on any of these...

Your smexoscope looks like a cool trick. Not sure I will know how to use it but I will give it a try. Thanks!

[pauli]

The smexoscope basically gives you a visual reference for the shape of audio dynamics in real time. So a good use for it is to watch how the display changes shape as you adjust the attack, release and ratio of a channel compressor... It's a great tool for learning how to use compression, but it's also useful to compare the dynamics of two clashing channels, which will help determine if setting changes are moving things in the right direction or that a different compressor might be a better choice. It really does help advance your instincts.

As it pertains to bass, there's another awesome use for the smexoscope that might help you a lot. Sometimes EQ just isn't the answer when trying to balance the kick and bass against one another, so we use sidechain compression. Due to its nature as a transparent technique, it can be really hard to hear the effects of the processing, but an oscilloscope on both channels will make very plain whether or not the timing or ratio is helping as much as it could. It'll also make it more obvious if you're way overdoing it to compensate for your room.

[tonyt]

I listened to the 1st mix. I like the punch of the kick and nice vocals but everything else is either a little muddy or has way too much bit in the high mid. I'm listening in a controlled room with hs-5 and mackie hr824 into an krk ergo room calibration system (all mixes do travel well outside the studio) it sounds like you might have been compensating eq cuts/boost in a untreated room and/or head phones that are not flat (frequencies response wise) to make sound it good in your monitors but when you play it on other speakers its sound different (travel). so how to solve this problem invest in a speaker room or headphone calibration system to help you have a flat frequencies response in your monitors weather they are speaker or headphones so you can hear what your suppose to hear and have your mixes travel any where