VINYL BASS BOOST

VIDEO TRANSCRIPTION

So today I'm going to give you a little quick tip on how to high pass in the low end, the way that I do as a mastering engineer. Now, when you high pass in the low end, if you listen to a lot of stuff that used to be on vinyl, 70’s stuffs. Even a lot of, sort of guitar based music, independent music, it's very bright. It's not a lot of low end going on. The reason for that was you couldn't get loads and loads of bottom end on vinyl because the group goes really wide because the energy use on base. So it's a lot thinner with the top end, so you can get it louder. You can get it onto a seven inch. And so you don't want it to have loads of bass on there basically, but there is a little trick for getting more level two things without losing so much low end.

So let me jump into my computer. I'm going to show you in FabFilter Pro-Q 3. Probably the best thing to do. I'll show you a little preset that I've made that will basically give you a kind of vinyl low end without losing any substitute. So let's jump into my computer. I'll show you that at the end, I'll tell you where you can get this preset so that you can apply it to your mixes and see how it sounds. So here we are in the FabFilter Pro-Q 3. Now the preset I'm about to make is going to work obviously for the fab filter, but I have actually made a few more for logic standard plugins and a few others. I'll tell you how to. Get hold of at the end of the video. So, not just for fab filter, this works for all.

So, as I said, we're looking at a high pass filter. So that it's basically parsing all of the high frequencies through the filter and taking out where we cut it. Obviously we don't want to cut it there, but what you do when you were cutting for vinyl, as I said, you want to cut a bit of really extreme lows off because the energy that's in the low end is going to affect how much level you can get onto disc. So the same thing applies. Now, the more level you have in the low end, the more that's going to affect how much is going into your limiter. So then that's going to affect how loud you can get something. So a lot of the times you'll find that mastering engineers always cut in the low end. I don't personally always cut in alone, but a lot of them do just to get rid of anything that's under say, around 20Hz or lower.

If you go any higher than this, if you start going to 30 or 40 or 50, you start losing kicks and stuff. And especially if dance music you'll lose loads of stuff when you start going above 20. But what we're going to do today is let me just show you what I do to get around that. So let's get this so that the slope goes quite low. So we're getting any kind of waffle noise. Anything that's going on below 20 Hz. Then we're going to lose that. I don't want it really tight. I don't want it sort of brick wall like this because I still want it to be smooth. I don't want to lose of it, but what I want to do is just round it off so that it's just a nice smooth curve.

Now it's a very, very simple thing to do this, but it's super effective. And so, really get this preset. Try out for yourself and let me know how you get on. What you do is just put this so that it is a 3 dB. Because we don't want to use a lot of EQ at this range. Because we are mastering, we're at the end of the chain. You can use on your mix bass too, because it's a nice little thing for the end of your mix bass. So just a little lift to about 1 dB, about 20 Hz. So it gives this kind of shape here. Now what this is doing is it's just going to give a nice bit of weight to the low end. A nice bit of foundations to the low end. Now, later on, you might want to hold the base, trim it, multi-band, compress it, whatever. But this just run this through over the top of your mix or run it before you get to everything. Gets rid of all of the noise and the dirt from the low end gives you a lovely little bass bump so that you get the feeling of it being a lot baser than it actually is, because you've cut off and trimmed a load of the low end. You can try it a little bit higher.

You can try it a little bit higher, but as I say, this will always get things sounding louder, still keeping a thump in the low end. But you won't be dragging up loads of stuff from the low. So that's it. Super simple, but super effective.

So thanks for watching. I hope you enjoyed that top tip. Now, if you want the preset for this, make sure you go to my website called anoraks.co. Now Anoraks is a place where I put all these kinds of stuffs. Things that are free and stuff. It's where my community is. So make sure you go to anoraks.co. Just log in there or sign up. If you're already a member, and it's in the members area and you'll see it in the social bits in the members area. So go into there. There's loads of freebies and loads of other stuff in there. So go to anoraks.co. Link below. Make sure you subscribe. Like this video. Thanks for watching till next time. Goodbye.