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Mixing Bass

Lesson 5 from: Robert Lang Studios Mixing Class

Casey Bates

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Lesson Info

5. Mixing Bass

Next Lesson: Mixing Guitars

Lesson Info

Mixing Bass

So the next thing we're gonna do is base and bass guitars for me. Uh, most of the time, D I. I prefer the control over the d I because there's so much you can do with it after the fact. I'm not a big fan of D and guitars, but we'll get to that. Um, so this base was a Ernie ball music man just straight through a focused right. I s a mic pre and in approach rules. Nothing fancy. No compression on the way in. I'm a big fan of those bases because they are high gain, especially when it comes to music like this. I want something punchy and big sounding, whereas I've done enough. Have some heavy bands where a guy comes in with a fender jazz bass, which looks really cool but is pretty much the worst kind of base you could have for heavier music. Ah, so here is what the DIY ice tone sounds like. Now. I was super happy with the d. I tone on this because you actually you actually have their some beef to it already. Without anything. It's you. There's actually some low end happening here, which, t...

oo many times the D eyes in depending on the base and how the guy actually plays the bass tends to you end up having to push a lot of low and back into the mix. Now one of the other benefits of Dying for Me is creating bass tone after the fact. Because too many bands like, If I'm focusing on just creating a bass tone for this song, you're gonna hear, hear what with the plug ins that I have on here. If I were to just start, if we want to go right into pro tools with this tone, it probably would have never flew with the band. They would have been like. This is a crazy tone with this. Sounds too weird for what we're trying to do because I end up. I'm heavily distorting this tone in the end and having a completely dry base. It affords you some leeway later on down the line, and I tend to think that most the time bases my bases and it being a lot more distorted than anyone would think and would be. It would be weird to kind of just Hey, let's track base to this and have it sound this distorted. So here's Here's the plug and I used for the bass tone. So we've got the d. I hear and I'm using this waves guitar amp. And I don't have any real affinity with this. I probably ran through a couple different, you know, aunt modeling plug ins just to see I love like the Sands and plug in. And this one, just this Motown setting was the direction we wanted to go and you're gonna see here It changes drastically the sound of the base. And like I was saying, if I were to just sit down in a studio and recording base for the day and this is the tone that I picked to record into pro tools probably would think I'm crazy, but you're going to see here we go even farther with it later on down the line. So this that is the tone we chose. And right after that, we're gonna come to my favorite plugging of all time, the Renaissance Arqam Renaissance compressor. This thing, I probably I've probably ever been a session. I haven't used this plug in its for compression. I I use it because it's one of the most transparent plug ins I've ever compressed Republicans I've ever used. You can hit it hard and it doesn't screw with the sound, and it gives you so much more control. So this is this the first time I've used it today and you'll see I use it quite a bit more. But with the base, I mean, you can just look at Thea dynamic range here. It's kind of going up and up, you know, you get here the and it gets pretty big, and it's just a little quieter here in the verses. Now that distortion we put on it is gonna squash this quite a bit. I mean, that's just what it does. It's gonna it's going to smooth it out so I don't need to hit this crazy heart. I just want toe basically using it just to control any peaks or whatever. So here's what it sounds like with the compressions and without is not a big difference there. Just just adding a a little bit a little bit of control, e que wise. This is the guy settled on it, probably, you know, it's a little too much in the mid range here all this down and just drop everything below 50 Hertz here and I'll dio I kind of use Thea are based. Plug in to really beef it up. So let's hear what, like, I guess, in a strumming part here like this E I like the sort of base. So I'm good with this. There's not a lot of low in. Now that we've put these plug ins on here and compress it a little bit, it definitely needs to be beefed up some more. So my one of my favorites for that is the Renaissance base plug in. And this is a cool plugging because you can come in here and kind of choose the frequencies you want. Toe. You want to highlight with this with this? Ah, with the base and what I usually do is I'll pull the plug in and I'll pull this intensity slider all the way down. Kind of pick a frequency that I think I'm gonna be going for and play the way we play the track and kind of bring this intensity lineup until I get the amount of if I want out of the base. So here it is without it and I'll be bringing it up. Now we've got some. Now. We got some serious Lohan going on this base, which is awesome. Waves has another plane called Max Base, which you can use to do something like this. Or you can run any Q. A great queue that I've done before for some, which I just absolutely love. The sound of is the ah, waves Pull tech e que clones. Do we have those on here? Yes, these guys very musical, awesome sounding plug ins. I mean, I can like were around 60 on that one. So let's try boosting it up here. A similar ish effect. But yeah, if you don't have. If you don't have this one, use our base. If you don't have our bases, this one love this flooding. So let's stick with So now we've got a bass tone going. That sounds kind of weird, but let's hear what it sounds like when we get everything going together here. I really like the low end of it. It definitely needs more clarity in the high end. We need to be. I'm not gonna mess with just yet. It's giving me what I need for that rain, The low range. And so I want to move on to guitars. But we're gonna come back, and, ah, revisit this for sure.

Class Materials

Bonus Materials with Purchase

Audio Tracks from 'I Want My Money Back' by The Money Pit

Ratings and Reviews

Joe Wilkinson
 

Regardless if you've listened to the music Casey has personally worked on or not, you'll find a lot of great information on his methods for mixing. It is such a great idea that this class comes with the files that Casey is actually work with so you can work side by side. This class includes best practices in organizing mixes, using busses, and what I consider the most important take away: listening to the MIX and not necessary just a single track over and over again. My requests: attendees had better formed questions to ask and to do another class -- I would love to hear some of the techniques and mixing that went into Church Mouth by Portugal. The Man.

fbuser 42790ebd
 

It was straight forward and helped show everyone it doesn't take fancy plugins or shiny toys to make great records. Even his vocal chain is mid tier but he yields excellent results with years of knowledge on his side. Casey you should come back to do a song off Emarosa's 131 album. There has to be some cool tricks there.

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