And if you have a good pair of headphones you should use them as a reference. I know you have a sub and they are almost impossible to use as a reference like that without a lot of treatment. But head phones should give you the truth on the spectrum, One thing I do too is my deepest low note with peak at about the same db as the strongest part of the high end snare / hh. If they are the same you have balance. Not all music is balanced tho.
Another wide bass tip:
Liquidsonics Seventh Heaven (the basic one will do) does some awesome things to very low frequencies via the VLF knob.
It was a screenshot from winamp, so you are right about that 
I thought it looked familliar but yeah I wouldn’t make any desicions based on that
It was the only thing I had at hand to show you the curve. But the problem is genuine.
Sorry for crap image.
The first thing I noticed is the hole between your sub and mids. If you are using a quite sine like bass it will lack harmonics in the first octaves (say 100-400 Hz) which is the area that helps your brain understand where the sub is even when it’s inaudible (for example on a small speaker).
A technique to generate these harmonics is the parallel distortion one I mentioned. The chorus is optional but the extra width can help the bass pop out more. You only need subtle drive to generate the first harmonics above the fundamental.
This is an additive way to do it but you can go subtractive too by filtering a more harmonically rich waveform.
As mentioned by others dynamics processing may help to get the bass to sit tight. OTT is an easy way to play with this and is also good for making things crispy. Try a regular limiter or clipper too, just ironing out the peaks a bit if they are spiky
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I’ll call this an ‘approach’ rather than a ‘tip’ (not qualified), similar to duplicating a bass track. I made an Ableton device with two instances of the multiband dynamics module to split a midi sub with significant harmonics into just sub and just harmonics, then apply different processing to each. I’ve had so much fun testing every effect and combination thereof on the harmonics only, and have occasionally ended up with an interesting distorted bass that sits well with a very subby sub.
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FM is the easiest way. But there isn’t anything necessary wrong with having a gap there. Often time bass music like to cut out the first fundamental so that it’s not super boxy. But mastered that gap is more like a little dip.
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nice one, this is essentially the same thing, just using the multiband comp to remove frequencies instead of an eq. It really opens up the creative possibilities when you have the mids on a separate channel, doesn’t it! A lot of people like to split the top band into mids and tops for a three way split, but just separating the low end from the rest has worked well for me
Oura I think you mean the second harmonic? Fundamental and first harmonic are the same thing. Anyway I find myself taking out 150-160 Hz quite often as things can get sort of boxy in that area. You want the heavy sub and maybe some harmonics that let you hear the notes better but 150-200 can feel bloated in my experience. I guess you could view it as doing a scoop between the 2nd harmonic thud of the kick (80-140 Hz ish) and the fundamental of the snare (200-400 or is it even higher these days lol), making them a bit more defined
The 200hz snare went out of style 10 years ago but some still do it. But usually it’s cut real short. So it’s not a dooosh like it used to be. I don’t even tune mine half the time. There is no real tone to it. It’s just pitching so it sounds good.
But yeah I meant the second harmonic. One octave up maybe I should have said. But I sort of learned accidentally when I make kicks I put a little notch down there and it just makes it perfect. Sometimes you need it tho. Might depends on the key and other factors.
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Thinking of Bass as a percussive instrument in terms of arrangement.
You know how to balance or offset snares and kicks to create like interdependent rhythms …play off each other.
Then you introduce Bass (maybe as samples so you can see what you are doing) and do the same thing.
Dont put the bass on top of the snare or on top of the kick - or at the least so the attack part of the Bass sits somewhere where there isn’t a snare or kick.
It works every time, you don’t have to worry about side chain, and it guarantees groove.
Cons are it might be more difficult to work with - if you work with long reese sounds (if you don’t cut them into stabs that is) - and you kind of have to at least have resampled your sounds so you can arrange them ‘‘along’’ with your percussive elements/drums.
Sometimes this means certain other instruments ought to be high passed when the percussive bass hits.
(Like trying to balance the frequency content of the bass with that other element)
The most important advantage with this approach is you can avoid a lot of compression and EQ and mixing issues by simply treating the bass as a drum sound/percussive thing. If it punches through and sits ok in the mix, then you are golden.
Lots of other ways of working with bass means you have to worry about your low end, control the tails of basses that might end up accumulating into mud or mess - and so on.
And it’s also neat because when Bass is not long constant drone like lines - but smaller percussive bits - they draw more attention to themselves.
I think that D&B post 98-00 whatever, a lot of D&B, particularly because of bass lost some funk, by starting to treat bass like a metal guitar. I mean it was cool how distorted and warpy and everything got - but if you listen to great basses in this style - like Optical, there’s a lot more individual hits and not long droney lazy reese - metal guitar like lines.
I hope this makes sense
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just thought of a good one i use occasionally. neglect not the ability to set channel latencies! sometimes if you nudge e.g. the bassline by 5ms, or the sticks by 15ms, or the rides by 10ms, you can get their transients to come through more clearly, also making your drums’ transients more clear.
i just touched a tune i did a few weeks ago again, and did this for the bassline because i felt like there was some muddiness (the bassline follows the beat) and giving it that little bit of offset from the snap of the drums seems to have cleared things up.
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@rdp made me remember about the offbeat pumping bassline thing. i had used it once before on a tune but bizzy b said the bassline was coming in late not realising it was programmed like that because that was the only way to find space in that mix.
still i been using it a little on the last few tunes i been doing and it’s working noice
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