Bass Seems Too Loud Or Something Else Does

[srm2888]

I have multitude layers in songs, trying to put  the songs on an album and im trying to average the sound of them.  Some of them seem to have too much bass and what not.  On head phones they sound fine, in ubuntu it sounds like the bass is too high, in windows the bass gets cut sometimes, in the car iot sounds fine, etc.

 

I have to use free software maybe ill pay a little for adobe audition for a month. 

 

I know i can normalize all the tracks in Audacity but when I do the bass still seems too loud or the quality gets lossed. 

Anyone know a solution to this so one track doesn't sound higher than the other?

 

Anything else besides audacity's normalize.

 

Thanks for the help.

 

oh heres a link to the music so you can see what im talking about :

 

https://soundcloud.com/realityiscandy

 

Thanks again

Edited September 16, 2014 by srm2888

[AmirMaor]

Sound very good + good mixing well done

[srm2888]

This tutorial, and others at this site, may be of interest to you.  It seems that you can do some fairly good mastering using Audacity with some additional free plugins.

 

http://www.audiorecording.me/audio-mastering-with-audacity-using-c3-multiband-compressor-tutorial.html

 

I didn't google it, sorry.  But youre a life, ear drum, and time saver.  I owe you one for this.  Thanks so muchsean

 

s

[starise]

One rule of thumb when mixing/mastering an album is to pick one track that you would call your best mixed track, this would be the track that you measure up against a track that you like from the same genre. Lots of producers use a reference track that has the characteristics they like. 

 

After you mix that one track, mix the others to match it or at least get close to the sound it has.

 

Most importantly though it seems as if you need a good set of reference monitors. These are speakers designed to get a good mix that should translate well across other systems. Not all reference monitors are the same. Some of them have bumps in bass or treble.In this case you need to learn what those deficiencies are to mix well on them. One unscientific way to determine if you have a decent set of monitors is to see what results you get across other systems. Too much bass means that you're not hearing enough bass on your monitors and this causes you to mix the bass too heavy. Usually though the opposite is true and mixes done in small rooms  have a lot of bass standing waves and this fools a producer into thinking that the bass is heavy, so they mix the bass less...the result being that in other systems the bass will not be enough. It isn't just the bass volume but standing waves also skew the bass frequencies causing other bad mixing decisions.

 

I would never mix only on headphones as that's probably the only thing the mix will sound good on. Always a good idea to mix on monitors and headphones and also to listen to the mix in mono because many systems that are in stereo will only be heard from one side.

 

Normalizing simply evens out the whole audio track bass and all. The better thing to do is concentrate just on the bass if that seems to be the problem. Bass is one of the the most common mixing problems in small home recording studios partly because of the standing wave problem. It doesn't surprise me that you're having issues with bass.

 

I'm probably a software snob, but I would never try to mix in Audacity. I would probably download Reaper if I didn't have anything else to use.Get some free vst plug-in and go from there.

[Glenn Allen]

This sounds pretty good considering that you're using Audacity.  What you're looking for is a little limiting/compression on the master track.

 

At Berklee I took a course on production where we had several instruments at once and we cut different frequencies out of different instruments to stop them from conflicting and drowning each other out. once we did that, we could mix the volumes of each instrument much more easily.  The bass sat much better in the mix without getting too loud.

 

The only criticism I would make is that the hi-hat in your beats could use a little high-frequency dampening.  Theirs a lot of upper highs, which is uncomfortable at high volumes.  This is tough for most people to notice when mixing, especially if they've listened to too much loud music over their life - the ability to hear the top end of the highs goes first.

 

 My dad and I are both drummers, and one thing I've learned from him is to protect your hearing-he never wore ear plugs during gigs. Now when he listens to music, he has to boost the highs on his sound system to an uncomfortable level because he lost most of his hearing in the upper frequencies from years of drumming.     

 

Anyway, your music is well balanced and panned, but you should bring your vocals more to the front, you have a unique voice-I really like it.  There's a few ways to do this, one way is to boost the 3-5khz frequencies around 3-6 decibels.  See if this brings your voice up front in the mix just a little. the other is to cut those same frequencies from your synths by a few decibels.

Edited November 6, 2014 by Glenn Allen

[srm2888]

One rule of thumb when mixing/mastering an album is to pick one track that you would call your best mixed track, this would be the track that you measure up against a track that you like from the same genre. Lots of producers use a reference track that has the characteristics they like. 

 

After you mix that one track, mix the others to match it or at least get close to the sound it has.

 

Most importantly though it seems as if you need a good set of reference monitors. These are speakers designed to get a good mix that should translate well across other systems. Not all reference monitors are the same. Some of them have bumps in bass or treble.In this case you need to learn what those deficiencies are to mix well on them. One unscientific way to determine if you have a decent set of monitors is to see what results you get across other systems. Too much bass means that you're not hearing enough bass on your monitors and this causes you to mix the bass too heavy. Usually though the opposite is true and mixes done in small rooms  have a lot of bass standing waves and this fools a producer into thinking that the bass is heavy, so they mix the bass less...the result being that in other systems the bass will not be enough. It isn't just the bass volume but standing waves also skew the bass frequencies causing other bad mixing decisions.

 

I would never mix only on headphones as that's probably the only thing the mix will sound good on. Always a good idea to mix on monitors and headphones and also to listen to the mix in mono because many systems that are in stereo will only be heard from one side.

 

Normalizing simply evens out the whole audio track bass and all. The better thing to do is concentrate just on the bass if that seems to be the problem. Bass is one of the the most common mixing problems in small home recording studios partly because of the standing wave problem. It doesn't surprise me that you're having issues with bass.

 

I'm probably a software snob, but I would never try to mix in Audacity. I would probably download Reaper if I didn't have anything else to use.Get some free vst plug-in and go from there.

 

 

Thanks a lot for the long reply.  The master track to mix everything to is a great idea.  I got cubae now so its not much of a problem as it was inaudacity but i had my last album done on audacity.  I can now afford reaper and cubase, but at the tie  i couldm't

Reaper has a little problem with midi so i got cubase over reaper. Thanks starise.

[srm2888]

This sounds pretty good considering that you're using Audacity.  What you're looking for is a little limiting/compression on the master track.

 

At Berklee I took a course on production where we had several instruments at once and we cut different frequencies out of different instruments to stop them from conflicting and drowning each other out. once we did that, we could mix the volumes of each instrument much more easily.  The bass sat much better in the mix without getting too loud.

 

The only criticism I would make is that the hi-hat in your beats could use a little high-frequency dampening.  Theirs a lot of upper highs, which is uncomfortable at high volumes.  This is tough for most people to notice when mixing, especially if they've listened to too much loud music over their life - the ability to hear the top end of the highs goes first.

 

 My dad and I are both drummers, and one thing I've learned from him is to protect your hearing-he never wore ear plugs during gigs. Now when he listens to music, he has to boost the highs on his sound system to an uncomfortable level because he lost most of his hearing in the upper frequencies from years of drumming.     

 

Anyway, your music is well balanced and panned, but you should bring your vocals more to the front, you have a unique voice-I really like it.  There's a few ways to do this, one way is to boost the 3-5khz frequencies around 3-6 decibels.  See if this brings your voice up front in the mix just a little. the other is to cut those same frequencies from your synths by a few decibels.

I put the bass down, brought the vocals up, i lowered the synths.  I don't understand hte ratio of compression enough to make my vocals come up with the 3.5 khzs frequencies.  The mastering plugin asks for a compression ratio, but I did master the track and it sounds better.  Thanks a lot for your reply adn the copliments.  Audacity was all I had at the time.  Now I have Cubase.