What is bass?

[elektro80]

I guess I should state that I do know what bass is. What I am trying to discuss here is the fact that many don´t really know what they are hearing bass wise.

OK.. an oberservation:

Many of my friends don´t really enjoy that deep and clean bass from high quality loudspeakers. they can enjoy the deep boom.. and when the room starts to move.. but most tend to like that traditional 70-130 hz crunch with a lot of driver distortion. The mixes these guys are making tend to reflect this. When given access to studio monitors that don´t distort violently, they don´t know how to understand what they hear. The fact that very cunning producers often add distortion and other artifacts to the bass.. in order to give the inpression of "loud bass" and speakers driven to the brink of selfcombustion.. is of course also messing up people´s understanding of bass.

I think it is not really possible to make mixes that "translate" if one doesn´t understand how bass really sounds and how various gear really handles deep bass. This is of course possible to understand intuitively.. but..

Many will choose their studio monitors based on the specs. alone. So.. if you choose a pair of studio monitors that will hit 25HZ.. those will be better than some that "stop" at 50 hz. ? this is of course not always the case. More important is the fact that most pro studio monitors that can go seriously deep will be better at the 50-200 Hz range than say a pair of M-Audio BX5s or similar. On the other hand.. the huge new nasty monitors that hit 25Hz won´t neccesarily perform well at 30-25 Hz anyway.

[seraph]

[elektro80]

Yes..


Well.. but I hoped to get some Kassen insights and more though.
I hope to get into a discussion about how we percive bass and how to handle it productionwise. You know..

[astroid power-up!]

elektro, one of your pieces, the one about the sinking ship in WWII, that had some of the most wicked bass sounds i think i've ever heard.

yeah. working with sine waves exclusively in a d&b context, i became slowly aware of tone perception, and my mixes became brighter and brighter. originally, i loved low, sub 50hz sounds, because of how they rattle the brain. however, in a mix, it's hard to be aware of them unless they are distorting (and therefore creating artifacts in the aforementioned higher range).

[Afro88]

Exactly. I was a fan of deep bass for quite a while (I still am ) and tended to put alot of it in mixes. When I first got monitors and learned about EQ and the like, I'd just grab 58-63Hz on the kick/bass and gain like crazy Needless to say, we (myself and my mate who I write tracks with) learnt a hard lesson when we played our first "proper" gig and all our stuff sounded very "distant" because there was too much bass and we couldn't turn the volume up much for fear of killing the PA system.

I think it's very important to spend alot of time working around the 70-150 range and getting that clean. If people can hear your bass around this range and it sounds good (ie, not muddy and crap) then at least the bass will translate well onto hi-fi's and PA systems alike, and you don't get a shock when you play it to your friends over a cheap hi-fi and they say "where's the bass???"

Sine wave basses are great, but mean nothing unless the track is played over a good system. You just have to make sure they have a good attack transient so you can hear the start of the notes on a typical system. That way, when your bassline goes into the sub regions the listener can hear the beginning of each note as it move down into the subby, bassy as hell regions and then rise back out again. Makes you go "woah, that bass is so low I can't even hear it", because you know the bass is there. It's done well on Adam F's early drum and bass stuff (like his Colours album).

[Kassen]

[elektro80]

[elektro80]

These are great points, Kassen.

[Kassen]

[Kassen]

[elektro80]

[opg]

I always worry about not having enough bass in my songs. Sometimes I just avoid it. Like on "Anglerfish," I didn't put any bass notes at all, just a kick drum. Then I didn't trim off the low end on the other sounds like I normally would with bass. The water bubbles, for example, have more of a low end than I had anticipated. If I had a bassline in that song, the bubbles would have had their low end cut and the higher pops and gurgles of the bubbling would have been more noticeable. In that song, I just decided what was more important.

On every song I make, I constantly switch back and forth between my M-Audio SP5Bs (small, but reliable), and a big old Sony stereo. When I can hear those low-mids on the SP5Bs, the lows on the Sony, and there's nothing wasting power below 40 Hz when viewing the frequency spectrum, I'm usually happy with the results.

[Kassen]

Hmmm, most of my tips are indeed more apropriate for more "popular" types of music but if you want to release your music and want it played on home stereos then you´ll need to do something about those problems. You simply can´t sell cd´s that will make stereo's choke, then blame it on the stereo's. For soundsystems it´s even harder.

Industrial ambient has been around for decades and manifacturers of audio gear seem in no great hurry to start building sets suitable for playing it on. If anything the quality of home audio is going down; suround sets are getting popular meaning people invest roughly a third (if that much) of what they once invested in one channel of amplification and speaker. First people went down from vinyl to cd and from reels to casette, now people are moving towards mp3; at this rate they´ll be listening to 4bit sounds on their computer case´s internal speaker in a few years, claiming it´s a improvement.

Still; many artists are able to mix drones down in a way that gets across quite nicely on the average system. I think it´s too easy to blame it all on consumer gear. Quite a few of my tips will work on this material to some degree and of cource this material is affected by the exact same psychological phenomena. You can do subtile modulations in the 20-40Hz regions and indeed that´s perfectly valid but you have to realise that our hearing isn´t very sensitive to modulations in that range at all; if they need to be perceptible you´ll need higher harmonics for the ear to track anyway. Did you try fir-based eq´s? I think that for this type of material those will work much better then iir. They should leave all phase interactions alone while still enabeling you to take some of the very low end off a little, I suspect that will free up headroom and generally improve matters.

You have to remember that many playback systems will already atempt to do such things in order to decrease the load on the amp and the needed speaker size. Given that I´d perfer to do it myself before the amp can touch it. You can always keep another copy with a different mix for your own enjoyment.

[opg]

[Kassen]

[elektro80]

[Kassen]

[opg]

[mosc]

Good points by everyone. An interesting discussion.

A few months ago, Greg, Robin Miller and I went to see Rebecca Mercuri and Milton Babbit's talk about he RCA synthesizer. During Babbit's talk, he requested the tech to play one of his peices from 45 years ago. The music started and Babbit immediately asked him to stop it and make it louder. The tech made some adjustments and started playing the piece again. Babbit immediately stopped it again. He said, "This sound system can not play the music the way I intended it to be heard, so we won't play it at all."

I was very impressed.

Much of this discussion focuses on the fact that if the music is going to be played on mediocre equipment, then we better be aware of that and make the music in such a way that it sounds good on such gear. Well, when we do that, what happens when we play such music on really good playback equipment? Would it be heresy to say it might be mediocre?

Should painters paint so that their art looks good when reproduced in magazines? Should filmakers make films that look good on small TVs with tiny speakers?

Who are we creating music for?

[opg]

[elektro80]

This is the production forum, so I guess in this context music= recorded music.
On the other hand, it is quite obvious that a lot of art doesn´t have suitable playback engines. A sensible 2 dimensional playback device for sculptures anyone? Should artists only design and make sculptures that look good as jpegs/gifs on a webpage?

[Kassen]

[mosc]

Well, my questions were rhetorical.

From research I have done with John Meyer, see: http://electro-music.com/forum/topic-6944.html , and with Robin Miller, I know our ear/brains really can hear and discriminate very low bass. If you put in a high-pass filter and cut everything below 75 Hz, then you are throwing away two octaves. We only can hear 10, so that's 20%.

As people get older, their high frequency response starts to deteriorate, but not the low frequency. People who spend a bit of time listening to loud rock music often have their top octave trimmed. This makes the bass even more important, IMHO.

It is true that most speaker systems don't reproduce much below 75 Hz, but it is possible to get decent performance down to 25 Hz or less. Experiments with Robin Miller prove that at least down to about 45 Hz, you can perceive stereo. Not only that, but there are beautiful dramatic enveloping sounds that you can make when you use stereo at this range. Robin described some of these at his talk at recent Audio Engineering Society meetings, and at electro-music 2005. Perhaps I'll document these in a future post on the forum. Also, it has been proven that difference frequencies between the left and right can induce changes in brain wave frequencies, and this effect gets stronger as the frequencies get lower.

[elektro80]

I guess the reason Mahler wrote for the symphonic orchestra had nothing to do about communication. That´s´fine. Introverted art can be quite ok.

[Afro88]