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Well, I am having some trouble with the bass and bass intros on a bands EP i am recording for them. Here is what I have so far Your Friends Suck.rar

What can i do to make the bass not sound like sh*t on to intros and throughout the ep. It sounds fineish on my stereo, but not on my laptop speakers. I think the bass is too low.

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dvdhawk Mon, 08/02/2010 - 08:11

Hi Brandon, welcome to RO.

The physics of this are simple. Good bass tone requires one thing, the ability to move a lot of air - that's what sound is, vibrations in the air (or other material). A 1-inch speaker typical of a laptop is not intended to produce music and could not possibly blow you away with it's bass tone. The low E on a bass guitar produces a wave that is about 28ft. long, if it's a 5-string bass - the low B makes a wave that is over 36ft. long. It takes a lot of power and a speaker with a lot of 'cone-travel' to make those notes. A speaker as small as 5-inches can produce a good bass tone, but it requires a well-tuned enclosure to provide the right amount of back-pressure and porting. A good studio monitor with an 8-inch woofer, (or even a 6.5-inch) will get you where you want to go, and some would still add a subwoofer to that to accurately mix.

The best a laptop can do is provide a facsimile of what the bass sounds like. Besides using low-end soundcards, most laptops typically use a piezo-type speaker, which can squawk and reproduce highs and some mids while taking up very little space inside the laptop chassis. They also favor piezos because they don't use a magnet, which would wreak havoc with the hard-drive. Fidelity is not their objective, it's to make a beeping sound for the computer's alert tones in the most compact size possible.

The key thing here is, if by some miracle you found a way to make the bass sound stellar on laptop speakers, it would sound like garbage on everything else. (waaaaay too much bass) Your goal is to make mixes that sound good across a wide variety of devices. Not everyone will be listening on great speakers, not everyone will be listening on crappy speakers. Your job is to make a mix that sounds great through great speakers, and good on everything else. This is why even multi-million dollar mixing/mastering engineers will still use consumer gear for reference (boombox, car stereo, small bookshelf speakers). Even though they have the most accurate speakers and listening environment, they want it to sound good no matter what the consumer is using for playback.

If this is something you want to pursue, start by searching the forum for some suggestions on reasonably priced monitors - and start saving up. Then your next step will be to make your listening area as accurate as possible. The room you're mixing in can/WILL exaggerate the highs, or lows (and anything in-between) if it isn't acoustically treated in just the right way. So even the best monitors in the world won't improve your mixes unless the room is every bit as well-designed. These are the things professional studios get paid for. These days anybody can hook a mic up to something digital and record - but what separates the pack is all that other stuff it takes to make a radio-ready recording.

In the meantime, you would be further ahead with a good sounding pair of headphones plugged into your laptop. It's not ideal, but it's going to put you in a lot better position to make mix-decisions than laptop speakers.

Good luck, I hope that helps.

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