How to make wide stereo bass without introducing problems?

Electronic Music Production // Dark Arts
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Barfunkel
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How to make wide stereo bass without introducing problems?

Post by Barfunkel »

For a variety of reasons, people often say make the bass mono. However, I sometimes hear tracks where the bass sounds kinda "3 dimensional" with headphones. I always just repeated the mantra "bass must be mono" in my head, and thought it's just psychoacoustics or such that make it sound wider than mono.

However, I just put some of those tracks through SPAN (configured to monitor mid/side, not left/right) and I could clearly see side information in the low frequencies.


As an example, this track:

youtu.be/PdRSDfBMJE8

Looks like this. Green is mid, red is side. The low end red line moves in time with that dum dum bassline, so the bassline is obviously quite stereo.

Image

While my latest track, made with the principle of mono the bass looks like this:

Image

The graphs are of course moving about and look different at different parts of the track, but generally, my tracks never contain that kinda low end side information.

So the question is, should they? And if so, how to achieve such, without getting phase etc problems.
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Lost to the Void
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Re: How to make wide stereo bass without introducing problems?

Post by Lost to the Void »

Ok, to answer your question in very simple terms: You don`t make wide stereo bass without introducing problems.

I ran this tune through in the mastering room, flipped the monitoring controller to side only aaaaaaaaaand..... barely any low end in the sides
The sides are gently rolled down from 500hz all the way down to 10hz, so the majority of the stereo information is in the mids and the tops especially. Basically it is as a vinyl master should be. What low end there is in the sides is effectively masked by the vastly louder lows in the mids.

Now, your ears don`t hear bass in stereo, once the wavelength goes beyond the length of the distance between your ears, it becomes very hard to locate bass in the stereo field (which is why it is common to only use one subwoofer in a setup).

So, when you are listening in headphones your ears are no longer experiencing "real" sound, and any minor discrepancy in phase in the lower frequencies will be more apparent as each ear is receiving different information directly.
The real stereo effect is coming from the mids and tops in this tune. It`s actually been produced and mastered very very well. The tune opens out as you go up the frequency bands. The shakers being the most obviously split up in stereo.

IF you want to achieve this type of sound, just be very aware of stereo and mid-side placement of your sounds. Think of the mix like a tree, thin trunk for the bass that opens up as you go up the tree and the branches spread out towards the top frequencies.
Gently sculpt the stereo image of your sounds as appropriate to frequency, once you get to about 100hz everything can really start narrowing down.


As for your scans, they aren`t too useful for this discussion BUT it looks like you are rolling out your stereo information too much.
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mindstuff
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Re: How to make wide stereo bass without introducing problems?

Post by mindstuff »

If I add reverb/chorus to a bass to make it wider, I'll then mono the low frequencies with bx_control (mono maker). I'll use a meter and look at the phase spectrum (DMG track meter) to make sure there is no stereo info in the low end, done. I've got a bass that sounds wide at the top frequences and sits in the mix nicely in the low end, in most cases.

However, Hannes Bieger gives an excellent explanation in this youtube video that its not that stereo info is bad in the low end but whether its correlated...meaning will it not phase cancel when playing in mono.
youtu.be/D-MBA1sC3oo

By the way the DMG track meter also has a Phase Meter with a correlation meter at the bottom. I think in that video Hannes is using a pretty expensive metering suite that is intended to run outside the daw. https://www.flux.audio/project/pure-analyser-essential/

I found the DMG tools gave me the same info and I think they was less than $50.

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Re: How to make wide stereo bass without introducing problems?

Post by Lost to the Void »

Of course the other issue of low end stereo information is the issues it causes when cutting to vinyl, but that's less important these days
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Re: How to make wide stereo bass without introducing problems?

Post by Barfunkel »

Hmm, if not stereo bass, what does SPAN tell me about those kinda tracks? I mean, you can obviously see the red line (ie. side) jumping in time with the bassline and it's jumping in quite low frequencies, not just hipassed over 150Hz or whatever.
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Re: How to make wide stereo bass without introducing problems?

Post by Lost to the Void »

Barfunkel wrote:
Sun Nov 10, 2019 5:00 pm
Hmm, if not stereo bass, what does SPAN tell me about those kinda tracks? I mean, you can obviously see the red line (ie. side) jumping in time with the bassline and it's jumping in quite low frequencies, not just hipassed over 150Hz or whatever.
There IS stereo information under 200hz on that tune, but like I said, it's low - level compared to the mid and is effectively masked (and meters aren't particularly accurate in the low end anyway, so don't trust them completely, though you can setup SPAN to be more accurate). You will notice it on headphones of course, as you are listening unnaturally.
If you listen to just the sides on that tune, then you can hear how it is balanced.
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