can it be phase issues with the rest of the recordings?
try listening the recording mono

cripster wrote: Hi there

I'm a total newbie to recording and mixing but I find it really exciting. Well I have a question (of course) about this track I'm trying to mix. It seems the bass guitar is kind of bouncing between the left and right guitar tracks. It does'nt do this if I solo the track. I can't figure this one out.

Thanks

That mean's there's frequencies in the bass track that are conflicting with frequencies in the guitar tracks and causing phase cancellations....thus the movements your talking about.....

I'd suggest high pass filtering the guitars......or notching out the freq's in the bass guitar that are causing the movements.......

Is your bass track recorded in stereo? If so, you'd be better off using just one side of the track and panning it to the middle.

The bass was recorded in mono. Phase cancellations seems to be the problem, thanks.

If your mixing/mastering software allows it, try summing the bass freq's below 150 (or something similar) to mono. Since lo bass tends to be omni directional, it's not really going to affect the panning on the rest of your mix (The upper Freqs, that is..)

Summing the very low end to mono will subtly tighten up the overall image, and add a little bit more "punch" to everything. Your speakers (and sub) will work better together, and you'll have a more stable bottom end to build the rest of the mix on.

With all due respect to Randy's suggestion, I think that before I Hi Pass filtered the guitars I might try some time based alterations to the bass... dropping it back a couple ms into the groove can add a very cool 'funk' to the song while clearing up phase issues [might cause other issues, but usually if you keep the delay/track shift under 10ms you'll keep the tightness without significantly altering the groove... though it will add a little chicken grease to the presentation].

Best of luck with it.

Summing lows to mono...well that sounds interesting. But how would I go about doing this? I do all my mixing inside Cubase SX. I already tried delaying the bass about 10ms but that does'nt seem to get rid of the panning problem. Should I cut ALL the lows out of the rhytm guitars (4 of them)?

Hi
solo the bass and confirm that it stays up the middle. Then add(by soloing) one track at a time until you find out which track or tracks are causing problems.
I don't have a solution but at least this way you will find out where the problen is coming from and won't butcher innocent tracks trying to solve the problem.
cheers

Fletcher wrote: With all due respect to Randy's suggestion, I think that before I Hi Pass filtered the guitars I might try some time based alterations to the bass... dropping it back a couple ms into the groove can add a very cool 'funk' to the song while clearing up phase issues [might cause other issues, but usually if you keep the delay/track shift under 10ms you'll keep the tightness without significantly altering the groove... though it will add a little chicken grease to the presentation].

Best of luck with it.

Great suggestion....and I'm always learning..thanks Fletcher.