From the course: Audio Mixing Master Class

Bass wide - Pro Tools Tutorial

From the course: Audio Mixing Master Class

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Bass wide

- [Instructor] In situations where the bass is up front like with the synth bass or a bass in a power trio, sometimes you need it to be a lot wider than it sounds. The problem is you still have to keep most of the low end in the center to keep the track from leaning to one side. Here's a way to do just that with the wonderful wide bass trick. First thing we're going to do is listen to the song with just the guitar, bass, and drums, and this is a basic power trio song. (rock music) What we have is a bass amp here, and we just want it to sound a little bit bigger than life and a little bit wider. Listen to it just the way it is right here. (bass music) Sounds pretty good, it's big, it's fat, has a lot of high end, so it sounds pretty good and it's a good place to start, but the first thing we're going to do in order to widen it out is to add a couple of new bass tracks. So what we're going to do is come over here and we're going to say Duplicate. It doesn't matter how you do it. All you need to do is duplicate the track twice. Okay. So now that I have two new bass tracks, what I'm going to do is put one on the left and have another one on the right because that's the way I'm going to pan them. But first of all let's listen to one of the brand new ones that we just duplicated. (bass music) Okay this needs a little bit of compression so what we'll do is we'll just copy the compressor that we had from our main track here. Let's see what it sounds like. (bass music) Okay, that's pretty reasonable. Now what we want to do is keep the low end in the middle so we'll keep our main bass track, the original bass track, in the center, but first of all, we're going to just modify the frequencies a little bit so what I'm going to do is roll off the low end, and here's what we'll do. And roll it off so it's 150 cycles or so, 200 cycles, have a listen. (bass music) So what we want is mostly the high end from the bass, and what we'll do here is we'll pan it a little to the left. Now on our second new bass track, we'll do sort of the same thing. We're going to take a copy of our compressor and put it on there, so we have a fairly compressed and even bass track. Have a listen. (bass music) Now we're going to add our EQ again, and this is going to be a little bit different. First of all we're going to roll off the bottom again. Maybe not so much. (bass music) We're going to roll off the high end too. (bass music) We're going to goose it just a little bit in the mid range. (bass music) And to just make it sound different we're going to add a harmonic and it doesn't matter what you use, I'm going to use a SansAmp here, but you can use any guitar modeler that you want. I'm just using this 'cause it's fairly simple. (bass music) What I want to do is just overdrive it a little bit and make it sound different, and after we have that, then we're going to pan it to the right. Now let's balance up the left and right channels. (bass music) (rock guitar music) For those situations where you want the bass to sound more interesting and to take up more space in the mix, first duplicate the bass track twice, then pan one track to the left, and the other to the right. Place a high-pass filter on one of the duplicated channels, and set it to around 250 hertz, or whatever frequency that seems to work best in the track. Don't set it too low as we want most of the low-end frequencies to come only from the original bass track. Insert another high-pass filter on the other duplicated channel and set it to a slightly different frequency. Now insert either a distortion or overdrive plugin after the filter and set it to slightly overdriven. Finally, adjust the pan and the level of the duplicated left and right channels to add width and definition.

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