Mixing bass in a dense mix.

[darwin-bass]

Live performance. Say you have 5 vocs, e-gtr, a-gtr. drums, piano, B3 and bass. Silent stage with drums in a sound box. Drummer likes to ride the toms. Lots going on. How do you mix the bass?

Do you band-pass it heavily (50 Hz to 1000 Hz) and use frequency slotting to get it to live in that low warm region?

Do you cut mids and boost highs & lows to get it poke out with thump and definition?

Something else?

 

[Relayer71]

Live performance. Say you have 5 vocs, e-gtr, a-gtr. drums, piano, B3 and bass. Silent stage with drums in a sound box. Drummer likes to ride the toms. Lots going on. How do you mix the bass?

Do you band-pass it heavily (50 Hz to 1000 Hz) and use frequency slotting to get it to live in that low warm region?

Do you cut mids and boost highs & lows to get it poke out with thump and definition?

Something else?

Boosting the mids (if they're not dominating with the other instruments) and panning the bass off-center to one side can help make it stand out.

 

[David Pinton]

I would start by hi-passing all the instruments except the kick

 

[Zooberwerx]

I would start by hi-passing all the instruments except the kick

Hmmm....I'm pretty aggressive high-passing the kick or attenuating the lows on the mic channel with a concomitant boost at ~ 250 hz. It's in pursuit of the desirable "thonk". Best example I can think of is Grateful Dead's "Touch of Grey".

Riis

 

[Windreaper]

I feel it's more about mixing everything else. Talking strictly about making room for bass, you can HPF stuff higher than you think, 150Hz or more (or use a combination of HPF and low-shelving filter). It's also easier dealing with issues at the source - if ringy toms are wreaking havoc on your mix, consider putting dampeners on them.

 

[RattleSnack]

Amateur tone guy here, just for my band - I brutaly HPF everything. Then (my) bass guitar just sits perfect.
In case it is still not right, I push slider for bass up, or give it a little bump around 3.5kHz.

 

[Stylee Mousse]

Depends entirely on the type of music. I played for many years with a Tom heavy drummer and used a variety of approaches to recording and live reinforcement.

To be audible you will definitely need some higher mids of the Toms will bury the bass.

Big cuts for Tom eq around 500 hz or so, helps a lot to tighten them up and open some terrain for the bass low mids

 

[Element Zero]

Big cuts for Tom eq around 500 hz or so, helps a lot to tighten them up and open some terrain for the bass low mids

Yup. That and slap a piece of moon gel on those toms to help with excessive resonance.

 

[Bullitt5135]

I'm thinking "cut mids and boost highs & lows" will not give bass definition in this situation. More likely, that will invite mud and clank.

I mix for a 10-piece wedding band. It's a really dense mix. I just try to give the bass it's own space. In addition to aggressive HPF on instruments and vocals, I also high-pass the bass to get rid of the low end mud and rumble. I often boost the bass around 800Hz to give it some definition – and notch other channels in the same freq range. Keeping the overall volume down also helps.

I recently started experimenting with placing a GK500 Fusion/212 cab up front under the mains. I patch the bass to an aux channel and send that to the GK amp. I can control the GK volume from my iPad and EQ the channel as needed. The idea is to get the bass out of the mains entirely. Since the band has very low stage volume (bass player uses an Aguilar 350/112 for personal monitoring & tone), I don't want to crank the bass in the backline and cause bleed into the vocal mics. The first gig with this setup was promising. The bass sounded punchier and more defined than running it thru the mains. I need to experiment with whether to keep the bass in the 18" subwoofer or not (not sure if it'll cause phasing issues with the 212). I should note that for wedding gigs, we are prioritizing the sound on the dance floor – the rest of the room is secondary.

 

[BoogieZK]

It's a this moment that you realize that a good bass tone in the mix is not a solo bass tone.

Try to find a pocket where you like your tone and you hear yourself.
I'll guess 120Hz to 250hz.

 

[waveman]

Get that acoustic guitar and low drums out of your way.

 

[Mastiff_5]

My first trick is always to boost the 200hz area on the bass (provided that isn’t a trouble freq for the room) and see if it helps the bass poke out a bit by turning the channel up. If it does, then I make sure the mud is cleaned off the stage by HPF’ing the guitars, the vox, etc. I let the keys run with a flat eq except to notch what’s troublesome for the room. Then Q that/those freq’s to fix the room. Make sure the toms have useful gates on them.
After the mud is fixed. I cut the bass eq around the 200-ish, flatten the rest, turn it up and HPF to taste (4 or 5 string will make a bit of a difference there).
Mud freqs will hide the bass, but much of what the other folks have said above deals with that. If you have a silent stage, the filtering should be quite potent.
Make sure you know your room, run a RTA on the room all the time - even if it’s just on your phone. You’ll see what’s troublesome, and where you can push things around.

 

[Mastiff_5]

@Bullitt5135 offered a good nugget there too, that 800Hz neighborhood can be very useful for getting the bass to pop.
- also, take a look at the eq form coming in from the bass: you can’t boost what isn’t there very effectively.

 

[bajistapromedio]

High pass everything else besides the kick and bass (unless the music calls for subsonic keys parts), and be very conservative about routing anything else to your sub sends besides kick and bass.

Don’t be afraid to play around with compression to focus the attack and sustain of the bass.

Experiment with the mix between DI signal and the mic’d cab. I often find that shelving highs and lows for the cab mic and doing a fairly wide Q mid cut on the direct signal gives me consistently good results for bass.

 

[Jefenator]

I felt buried the other night in a quartet.
There's only so much you can do when a drummer's overriding priority is to keep all 4 limbs occupied.

 

[Wasnex]

Live performance. Say you have 5 vocs, e-gtr, a-gtr. drums, piano, B3 and bass. Silent stage with drums in a sound box. Drummer likes to ride the toms. Lots going on. How do you mix the bass?

Do you band-pass it heavily (50 Hz to 1000 Hz) and use frequency slotting to get it to live in that low warm region?

Do you cut mids and boost highs & lows to get it poke out with thump and definition?

Something else?

It was depended largely on the room, how loud I was mixing, and the quality and volume of the stage wash. For indoor gigs, I found that I rarely had sufficient control over the bass to really make much of a difference. The strategy was usually to minimize damage rather than make the bass sound great. To get much control over the bass, it would have been necessary to mix about 10dB louder. Keeping the volume at a comfortable level was a top priority for me.

I usually high passed pretty much everything and used frequency slotting. Indoor gigs often have a lot of build up in the low mids, so I wound up scooping it out to try and clear up the vocals.

 

[Gervais Cote]

My setup for such band is very simple :

P bass
Fender PV63 63 pickups
Fender or La Bella flats
Two cabs of 12" stacked vertically
EQ flat

Works every time unless I’m in an over boomy room and if so, I turn down 10-20% the bass knob on my amp.

 

[logdrum]

Downgrade your drummer's set to a 2 piece, snare and bass drum and hi-hat. Ask him to get inspiration from The Fearless Flyers' Nate Smith.

 

[Nuisance]

I would start by hi-passing all the instruments except the kick

This is the answer you seek.

 

[darwin-bass]

This is good news since all the tips are right in line with what I have been doing all along. And it brings me to a related question.

In a busy live mix which slots in better, rounds or flats?

This weekend I played in such a dense mix. I played my P with flats. I asked the sound techs afterword how the bass fit in the mix and was told they cut 100 Hz a bit (room acoustics) and boosted the high end some but the bass sat well. Makes me think perhaps the flats are a natural HPF / LPF on the bass to focus the energy in that critical 100 Hz to 800 Hz region. Perhaps?