So, just watching the reductive EQ Video and Danny says that some Kick and Bass need red. EQ to filter out rumble. Thing is: With monitors and a room like mine (JBL LS305 in an untreated room) i’m not able to hear low end rumble below 30hz properly. A friend of mine who works as a mastering engineer told me, that even below 20hz you can loose important low end information for big systems, if you cut it always. So how to proceed? Just leave Kick and Bass without a lowcut if you cant hear it properly and leave that to a mastering engineer?
Of course it will sound better if i lowcut my K&B below 30hz, cause that bumps the frequencies above 30hz (which i can hear on my system, so it gives a tighter low end to me) but maybe on a big system or in a mastering studio, suddenly my very low sub freqs are missing.
Hope you get what i mean and someone has an answer
Low cut is for creating space to get a louder mastering, also gives clarity to the overall mix
Proceed to make a low cut 18db with fab filter and becareful with the mid lows they eat a lot of headroom
hey melodei. kick and bass can both be lowcut (highpass) at 27-30Hz without problems, most mastering engineers do around a 27Hz cut anyhow. also the side image will be cut out completely on bass frequencies anywhere from about 80Hz to 300Hz. again it depends on the song, the key, and the bass and kick used. if you have a song that is in the key of F (going up to about C) then you will want to retain more low end information. if you have a song in the key of B or higher then it’s not as important because the fundamentals will be in the low-lowmids but beyond the sub regions, and you can lowcut/highpass further up, say 50Hz or higher. but no matter the key of the song, decide who is the bass star of the show, kick or sub/bass ? if kick is the star then maybe you will want to leave more sub frequencies in the kick and cut more out of the bass, or maybe the bass is the star, and in that case I often will cut quite high on the kick. another thing to dialing in a tight clear lowend is choosing the right combination of samples and synths. one great technique for doing this is to create your bass and just use any random kick sample to get your creation down in the arrangement but then once you have a song structure going loop a 4 bar section and then scroll through kick samples in real time and listen until you find one that sounds great. it will sound great because the frequencies will be balanced with the kick. you can do the reverse of this as well making a nice kick first and then designing the bass around it. make sure you clean up your low end by highpassing the side image using midside eq for all sub frequencies in particular. happy mixing !
Thank you! Most of this i already knew but still the question at hand is whether i always make a lowcut at below 30hz. I heard that most club systems wont play below 30hz, but my monitors wont even play below 40hz, so between 30 and 40hz is a blindspot for me.
But i will take your advise and try to make adequate decisions.
@Timo, yes, I use the iZotope Tonal Balance plug ALL the time, for precisely the reason of the OP. I don’t trust my speakers’ and room’s low end. It certainly lets me know/shows me if anything crazy is going on down there, but apart from that, I can’t really be sure it’s working
