Too Much Bass. Not Enough Space.

Equal Loudness Curves from 20dB - 90dB

It’s amazing how far mix engineers have come in the past few years. Mix engineers have learned advanced techniques because of our great friend “the Internet”. From audio-engineering forums to YouTube tutorials, virtually every concept of music production has been made a part of the information superhighway. 

However, I’ve noticed that it’s often easy to direct the majority of one’s attention to the cool concepts within the realm of audio engineering. For example, I would argue that the average mix engineer has virtually no interest in phase relationships beyond that of an inverted snare bottom microphone. That’s just fine -- for that is the reason that people like me even exist. 

That being said, there are some concepts that I believe would benefit the average mix engineer. I’ve worked with quite a few mix engineers through my career so far and there are a couple of extremely common problems approaches that I hear in their work. 

I’ll focus on one mixing approach in this piece. The approach used typically involves placing the kick drum and bass guitar/synth more than a few decibels too loud when compared to the levels of the rest of the instrumentation within a mix. Scott Craggs of Old Colony Mastering wrote in his 2016 piece for SonicScoop about avoiding this “Crime Against Speakers”:

I get a fair number of mixes where the low end is dramatically out of proportion to everything else. It sounds like a 40-foot tall bass drum surrounded by a team of midgets playing microscopic instruments.

This is almost always the result of mixing on small speakers that don’t reproduce the bottom octaves well, if at all. And this is nothing new – people have been mixing on NS10’s forever.

He goes on to say that the key here is to know your speakers. I would go further to say that you need to know your room. Air moves differently in different rooms. Reflection points, low-frequency pileup, and phase coherence can be real nuisances in certain most spaces. It’s imperative that mix engineers consume commercially-released projects in their critical listening environment. If one doesn’t know what low-end should sound like in their space, the result is almost always bass overcompensation within a mix. 

So why exactly is this a problem? Consumers have responded to marketing that emphasizes bass response for years, so why would a mix that’s weighted heavily towards low frequencies be of any concern? The answer is headroom, put simply. 

Bass eats up headroom, causing the other elements of a track to be stifled under the weight of low-frequency waves. This means that a track that has an overcompensation in the bass is going to sound quieter than a track with a well-balanced bass response. In addition, in regard to bass eating up valuable headroom, there are issues created that go beyond perceived loudness. 

As Joe Lambert stated in his Music Mastering Masterclass in 2017, when program content contains too much low-end in comparison to midrange and high-end, the mix will likely sound more compressed (or less dynamic) than it really is. This can lead to poor handling of microdynamics. 

Because the song had too much bottom end, it probably felt more compressed than it really was, especially to them. Because when you have too much bottom it gives this sense of glue. So now that there’s 3dB less bottom end, that stuff just needs a little bit more glue. 

Of course, as described by Lambert, this is a problem that can be fairly easily mitigated at the mastering stage, considering that spectral balancing is most of what happens during the mastering process. However, at times, a 4 to 5 dB cut needs to be made in order to rebalance the mix. This is a considerably larger cut than what would be considered typical -- usually, we work in 0.5dB increments at a maximum of +/- 2.5dB. 

In addition, if the mix engineer was working with too much bass in their track, it is likely that they handled microdynamics fairly poorly. This means that a small amount of short time-constant compression likely needs to be applied in order to compensate for larger peaks.

Low-Ratio Compression

I’ve always been of the opinion that a mastering engineer should do what is necessary to deliver an immersive, dynamic, and larger-than-life experience. But many mastering engineers would be avidly against making “drastic” changes to a mix like a 5dB low-end cut and applying microdynamic control, as the current standards set by vocal mastering engineers dictate that a mastering engineer should barely touch the mix -- a concept that I’ll touch on at a later time. 

Choose your speakers wisely. Choose your room wisely. Choose your mastering engineer wisely. 

Craggs, S. (2018, August 18). Avoiding Crimes Against Speakers: 3 Tips from a Mastering Engineer. Retrieved from https://sonicscoop.com/2016/08/18/avoiding-crimes-against-speakers-3-tips-from-a-mastering-engineer/

Lambert, J. (Director). (2017, September 28). Music Mastering Masterclass with Joe Lambert [Video
file]. Retrieved 2020, from youtube.com/watch?v=eQF8ORNJYbk