How much sub is enough?

[Paulie]

I just picked up a cheap sub woofer (really meant for PC/gaming) and it certainly makes a difference in my monitoring situation. How do you mix the sub monitor level with your neaefields, as in when do you know you have the sub level right? Is it purely a "by ear" thing?

[mojobone]

For me, it's a measurements thing; if I had a challenging small space that needed a three-point system I'd shoot the room with an analyzer and work on placement to get the best balance and the smoothest possible transition through the crossover point and I wouldn't necessarily trust the speaker manufacturer's specs-every room is different, anyway.

My room's large enough, I can use monitors with 8 in woofers and I'm slowly getting comfortable enough with my guesswork, that I've started dumping sub bass, because on most speakers, it's just wasted energy that's not being reproduced, and people with subs? They tend to run 'em way too hot, anyhow, and dumping everything below about 40Hz really surprisingly firms the bottom and opens up the top and midrange in dense mixes.

[ochaim]

heres a trick to balance the sub and kick, a foundation you can use to build up the rest of the track. its a visual trick but you have the advantage of checking what that sounds and feels like now.

https://youtu.be/ECRx4WF3pcc

an engineer i used to hire only turned on the sub to check whats going on in those low frequencies, to make sure the tone is clean, and there are no phase issues for whatever reason.

[Len911]

an engineer i used to hire only turned on the sub to check whats going on in those low frequencies, to make sure the tone is clean, and there are no phase issues for whatever reason.

Sounds wise to me! If it was on all the time, might end up with a really thin sounding mix on most other equipment.

[mojobone]

an engineer i used to hire only turned on the sub to check whats going on in those low frequencies, to make sure the tone is clean, and there are no phase issues for whatever reason.

Sounds wise to me! If it was on all the time, might end up with a really thin sounding mix on most other equipment.

In the early days of home studios, this is what a sub was for; just to make sure you hadn't made any mistakes with the bottom octave.

[mojobone]

This is maybe a little tangential, but you might want to have a look at this thread on monitor environments, calibration, room treatment and...Sonarworks.

http://vi-control.net/community/threads ... wow.58189/

[Len911]

Here's what I don't understand. Why would someone mixing virtual instruments go to extremes on a mixing environment? It really puzzles me. Were the samples recorded in a poor room?

I can only speculate. They don't use their near field monitors nearfield, they blast them in an inferior acoustic space, and have to adjust their eq's to extreme to sound good in a crappy environment. Then when they move to a superior acoustic space it sounds really terrible. When if they would have left the eq alone, the sound would have been fine. The tail seems to be wagging the dog,lol!

The purpose of monitors aren't to adjust to the room. They are to adjust instruments to each other in the mix.

Of course instruments recorded in a poor environment might need adjustments, but samples? Buy better samples.

[Kolstad]

Well you want to know how your mixes translate with the sub, so when you are checking your mixes outside the studio, you can turn up the sub if your mix is too bass heavy, and turn it down if the mixes are lacking bass.

The logic Is the rule of compensation, if you are hearing less bass, you will try to dial more in, and if you are hearing too much bass, you will try to reduce it.

You want to reach a sweet spot, where you compensate just the right amt for the mixes to translate well, when you are using your ears.

You can use a nice reference mix to get going. Pick a song or track you admire, and use it to adjust the starting levels. That way you take your room into account.

Tony Maserati is well known to mix r&b and hip hop with a Sub, maybe use some of his mixes as a kick off http://www.allmusic.com/artist/tony-mas ... 35/credits

[mojobone]

Probably the most practical thing you can do is listen to lots of music that you're intimately familiar with (either stuff you mixed or stuff you've heard on a gazillion systems) while turning the sub off and on and making adjustments at intervals to try to achieve the smoothest response.

[Telefunkin]

How much sub is enough? I think nuclear is probably sufficient.

I recently tried to mix a track that contained a sub-bass sound on my 5.5 inch near fields (and not the most expensive ones). I thought I'd done OK.....until it came to getting the final levels right and conversion to mp3. I found that the additional compression and limiting of the whole mix followed by mp3 conversion really screwed up the sound. The bass itself seemed OK but the high frequencies (most noticeably the hi-hats) really started to suffer). I'd never had such problems before, and muting the sub track eliminated it. I was mixing to the sounds I could hear, but there was probably far too much energy in the lower frequencies that I just couldn't hear, so it serves me right for trying - lesson learned! Low pass filtering helps, but what's the point of the sub bass sound if you chop it all away? I don't think I'll try it again without a monitoring system capable of giving me a better indication of everything that's going on down there. It did make me wonder about getting a sub speaker, but then I'd have been asking the same question as you Paulie. The replies are interesting!