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Have your sinewave bass CUT thru the mix! [video]

🕑 Added 2021-02-01 14:24:35 +0000 UTC

Comments

Janne Hatula

What hits the distortion has an effect on the tone (try highpassing a bass before distorting it and hear). A lot of times, if it has some tone already, I keep the sub in tact. I remember Optical explaining that for sub to be the most effective, it should be a sine and not a square, for example – I forgot the actual sound-physical reason. But I've been going by that myself. Obviously if the bass is very close to sine and has no harmonics, you have to hit it fully into distortion to actually generate harmonics. But yeah, at some point you will start to lose sub. There are distortion plugins that allow you to choose what part to keep and what to roast (e.g., Softube Saturation Knob, Ableton Saturator etc).

John Citizen

For some reason, I thought adding distortion/saturation or processing to the sub was a no-no, and that any processing should be done to a top layer of the bass? Is that more something this done on neuro style basses that might have a lot of modulation and movement, so you can have that expression on the top layer, without creating a bottom end that changes level wildly? 🤔 Also, do you have any general tips on using reverb on bass? This is something I avoided for ages, but it kinda sounds great, although it can cloud a mix if done wrong. Presumably the best approach is to use a return with an instance of reverb that has a HPF on its input to avoid mud - but are there any other tips you have regarding reverb on bass?