Hello GHF,

I am looking to see you all of you go about spreading your mid range basses. I used to just use a separate sub and then would spread my mid basses by duplicating them then panning one left one right and adding ab a millisecond or two of delay to one of them. I know this isn't the best way to do it since your spreading below 250 so I was looking to see how everyone else goes about it. I Ideally would like to make a single rack that will handle this.

Thanks,

Dave

http://soundcloud.com/nicefingers

there are many ways to do it. I work in abelton and v8 suite comes with a nice effect for this. I believe its called bass-chorus-split. essentially it splits your bass into 4 channels low mid high and dry and applies chorus effect to them. I take this and kill the chorus and use it to apply different effects to the high and mids. In your case this could be easily achieved by applying utlility to the mids and setting it to 200% a splash of delay or any other fx that might sound nice.

Old Birty Dastard?

What a dastardly birty. In response to your question, normally I load up a an Instrument rack (in ableton) and run a few duplicate parallel chains i.e. Sub, Low, and mids to highs. The sub and the low generally I ensure are mono with Utility then on the mids/highs I play with stereo effects. If you are using Massive the Dimension expander is great. Utility works pretty good too. You can add reverb or chorus etc.. I think what you need to be mindful of if you do it the way I suggested, is careful/ruthless eqing so that you don't have low frequencies doing strange stereo tricks. Not to mention as you go along check your mix in mono for phasing. Nothing is worse than when you finish a tune and realize it can't be played in mono to similar effect to your stereo mix.

Personally, I don't see any problems with the method you are using. You could just make a mono duplicate of your 'mid' bass eq everything above 250 Hz. Next cut everything below 250 Hz on your right and left basses and proceed as usual. Also to help make your right and left basses unique in the stereo field try using a different filter cut off/distortion/reverb etc on on one or the other in addition to the track delay.

i use auto-pan, but not continuously..also reverb, but not very wet

what yo are doing is essentially what 'Spread' does in various apps...but vary it, modulate it to taste....y'know, variety is the spice of life...have it hit on the 4, or the two, then cut out...changes changes...dup the track and draw a crazy pan envelope on one...experiment

I think we talked about this kind of thing before... but it was a pretty sweet thread and I learned plenty of things from it so I dug it up (just skip past the momentary argument there in the middle).

http://glitchhopforum.com/glitch-hop-production/walk-through-your-bass-t416.html?hilit=bass

awesome thread, got that bookmarked

where are those users now!?! they had their shit together

They've probably all moved on to the Moombah forum.

i try to spread 'em a lot less these days. if anything, i often center them more. sometimes a lil chorus, maybe a super tight reverb or small delay. it takes up so much space in the mix and a lot of the time serves no purpose. listen to tipper's mids: nice and centered so you can flex the stereo on the highs. this allows you to fit so much more in your mix without things sounding cluttered, and you can make use of spatial techniques and put the listener and the sound ANYWHERE in a 3D spatial domain (think about a cube: highs/mids/lows=up/down, panning(left/right EQ,etc)=left and right, delay/reverb/midside EQ=front and back).

wow thanks so much guys for all the info it has been very helpful!

You probably wanna spread your highs more than your mids. thats what will give it the extra sparkle on your basses that your looking for without adding mud to your mix. open up a return channel and throw an eq on there and put a hi pass around 1k. then add a little reverb. Next put an ableton utility on it and set the width to 200% and then compress. after that send you bass group to that return and then mix in the dry wet. should make your basses sound wider and more round because of the reverb adding a slight tail to each of your bass sounds so they sound more seamless. hope that helped. thats only one of the techniques i use. there are a million other ways to achieve the same goal as well.

as iONik and others said, and listening to lots of good producers i found that out too. U dant wnt to spred ur mids too much, i usually leave them pretty much centred, maybe little chorus/reverb if the sound needs it, but i will spred my highs a lot. Leaves u much more space to play around and ouur basses tend to take the whole mix anyway, no need to spread them even more. But u can have for exemple the main bass pretty centred but then have a really spread and wide bass just once in a while on a break, then bring it back to center, dubstep producers use this a lot.

personally I use the "spread" knob on Operator/Sampler etc, but for high end focused spread harmonic distortion is my shit. I guess its kind of the same result... and it comes down to the programming of the software, but feel like I get more high end sparkle out of Camelphat harmonic distortion and in the mastering stage with Ozone than anything else.

One general tip I guess is to watch a spectrum on your master channel... If you aren't getting as much spread as you want out of something it could be because you already have something playing in that range and the freqs are clashing. Which should be obvious if you look at a spectrum on your synth and then a spectrum on your master. Then you can mix accordingly.

harmonic distortion is the mastering phase is something that should only be used in the rare case that a mastering engineer gets a poor mix that cannot be altered in the mixdown phase. don't get it twisted; despite the pretty name "harmonic distortion,"its still distortion and most of the time is severely damaging your audio. get that shot sounding right in the mix and you'll avoid lots of problems.

good call on the spectrum tho, def good to know visually how your mix is doing

word Ionik I usually will go super light on it in the mastering phase if I do it. It's easy to overdo. But in a few cases i've found tiny amounts to make a world of difference.

yeah i agree, i'll use it sometimes on other peoples, but on my own stuff i just go straight back to the source. always the safest route.

Can anyone clarify for me... If you duplicte your mid basses and pan one left and one right, wouldnt they cancel eachother out since they are Eq'd the same???

I edited this response cause it wasn't 100% true. mah bad. - AR

edit, glurp...vvvv what ionil says...yeh

also, i like to have a spectrum and a tuner on each track as well as a spectrum on the master, fwiw

actually the spread knob on most ableton functions detunes each side by a few cents, which will really screw around with your mono source. also, the haas effect does cause phase issues. i think most widening techniques can be really cheap on basses. i prefer to widen out other parts of the track using panning (synths, incidentals, etc). i guess what i'm getting at is arbitrarily widening any type of sound is asking for trouble. only do it when it needs it, which is not too common with basses as it will eat up an reverb, etc that you have used on other aspects of the mix.

with that i feel like i should offer a widening technique. with a linear phase EQ, eq the left and the right of the stereo spectrum different for really organic and unique widening effects. an awesome way to engineer space.

shit, yeah after thinking about it your audio will always mix in the environment it is played out in unless its headphones, so you need to be conscious of phasing.

But still in the case mentioned, the audio will not cancel... if its the exact same audio from 2 sources at the same level it will double the amplitude, not cancel it. Only if it is an inverted signal will it cancel it.

But yeah as ionik said phasing can be a problem with Haas effect.

maybe i'm mixed up but isn't phase cancelation the reason there is a hass effect at all? the delay cancels out a comb filter with a center frequency that is proportional to the delay time and that our ears interpret as directional information. like the way a chorus works? i'm kind of fuzzy on the mathy end of this stuff.

So recently I have been using Operator to build nifty little bass instruments that gradually spread as the frequency increases. Stack five of them, tweak the waveforms, and make them raise in pitch. I usually do first one set at 1, second and third at 2, fourth and fifth at 3. I make sure each one is outputting a mono signal, and then center the first, pan the second right 5%, third left 5%, fourth right 10%, and fifth left 10%. This can definitely give some pretty cool stereo effects to a filter that sweeps across all of them, and I haven't noticed any phasing issues (on meters at least).

Lotta good tips and comments here so far, and that thread Deek posted is pure gold.

I would like to add another tip, which is Mid/Side EQing to boost and cut frequencies in your mix, which can be achieved with Live 8s native EQ8.

Another is grouping two Utilities and putting then on seperate chains, while centering one to mono (turn down width to 0) and the other all the way to the sides (turn up width to 200). Usually I'll boost the sides chain about 9db. This won't create phasing like when using the Haas effect with a delay.

I'd also like to say though, that at least for me, sometimes I like the phasy sound created by using the Haas technique with a delay, especially if I am going for a more lazery kind of bass sound.

THIS!

holy shit, thanks for the heads up....


got a track that the bass has been killin me for so long, and i had freeze/flattened and threw away the midi

slapped that on there, better in 4 seconds, still working it, tweaking the settings and added some fx to the highs and mids...but, soooo much better already

thanks!