The bass is all over the place

[357mag]

Just finished laying down the bass for one of my songs. Wow man. Very different from guitar. With guitar the volume stays pretty much constant between notes and chords. You don't hear obvious changes in dynamics or volume.

Not so with bass. I can easily hear some notes I played louder than others. Some notes just pop out at you. Others fall in the background.

I hope a compressor will solve this issue. I could try recording it over, but I don't think it will change all that much.

Please tell me a compressor will even it out.

[louisgriffin]

maybe you should give it a go yourself and have a listen
see what you think.

nothing hurts in trying. experiment matey.

there's nothing better to make music and recordings with these days than your ears.

[dub3000]

Originally Posted by 357mag

Not so with bass. I can easily hear some notes I played louder than others. Some notes just pop out at you. Others fall in the background.

what happens if you run a sine sweep with the reaper tone generator? maybe your room needs some bass traps.

but yeah, bass usually needs a fair bit of compression regardless. go look for a boss cs-2 pedal (great on bass), or the digitalfishphones blockfish vst.

[357mag]

Acoustics don't really factor in to it the way I usually record. I use my POD X3. I really suspect what is happening is since bass does not use distortion/compression you will get notes all over the place in terms of volume. I suspect that an accomplished bass player could play much more evenly than I can.

I guess I will have to experiment with adding a compressor to the track when I start mixing.

[Sonic Vampire]

yep, a really good player may not need compression but for most of us we need a good dose of smoothing out. Also bass's are quite notorious for have notes that resonate louder than others and some notes that are a bit dead. did you use an amp sim patch to record your bass? if not, look at using one in your mix as it often sounds better than just a DI signal.

[357mag]

I used a bass amp modeled after a Hiwatt and a cabinet modeled after a Mesa Boogie. The sound is pretty good really. Just needs to be smoothed out.

[Sonic Vampire]

Originally Posted by 357mag

I used a bass amp modeled after a Hiwatt and a cabinet modeled after a Mesa Boogie. The sound is pretty good really. Just needs to be smoothed out.

yeah, that should sound good. mulitband compression can also be good for some bass sounds, usually 2 bands is enough

[3dmus]

When you say "Acoustics don't really factor in to it the way I usually record. I use my POD X3. I really suspect what is happening is since bass does not use distortion/compression", I suspect you misunderstood the comment from dub3000 about the sinus sweep etc; you may have a less than ideal acoustic environment which can accentuate certain frequencies. This is regardless of how "even" it may have been recorded!

Don't underestimate how significant your acoustics are here, especially for bass! When I did a sinus sweep I was shocked how uneven the bass response of my room was. Some frequencies seemed at least twice as loud as others!

[Sanskrit]

Hey 357
Compressors can help a lot to smooth things out. However, I've found that getting up close and personal with the wave forms, and manually setting up volume envelopes, can be real effective. Sometimes I've even abandoned the compressor completely, and gone with the envelope approach. snskrt

[Baer]

357, take the room acoustics comments seriously. It's not a question of recording -- the issue is with room modes affecting listening during playback. It could be your playing, but more likely it is the room.

Listen to your track with headphones. If the bass evens out, the problem is with your room. If the problem still exists through the headphones, the problem was in the recording. You could probably also tell just by looking at the waveform.

[matey]

dear 357mag,
I've somewhat had this problem with bass tracking, solved as I bought myself an audio interface with a preamp inside (a cheap but good presonus firebox)...

cheer

[357mag]

What is a volume envelope and how would I use it in this situation?

[stratman]

Originally Posted by 357mag

What is a volume envelope and how would I use it in this situation?

The Reaper User Guide explains this in the section called Reaper Automation.

It's section 14 of the Reaper User Guide v2.5.

Pete

[manning1]

357mag.
some ideas re bass.
1. look at the waveform of the bass trak.
and write down as a list the time points where the notes stand out.
2. at each time point , split the note in rpr. so the note is a clip.
at the top of the clip in rpr youll see a volume handle.
hold mouse at top of clip n drag down a bit till happy.
i sometimes find hand edditing like this is preferable than crudely applying
a compressor. OR try hand editing in conjunction with subtle comp.
its all a question of judgement.
3. after balanceing all the notes in the trak and once your happy just glue all together.

or just post the bass somewhere n i'll send it back to you
with no notes popping out.

[pipelineaudio]

If you look at the ReaEQ interface closely, youll also see a note name readout.

Often with bass it is a certain note thats really loud, and you can knock it with the EQ