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What is “Splitting the Bass”? Well, if I told you that when I first discovered the frequency splitting technique – it improved the sound of every recording I created after – would you believe me? Would you be interested?

If you are like me, you have slaved away over mixes in your younger years, unable to get them sounding very… nice. The trouble is, no matter how hard you try, the mix just seems to be sloppy.

I am a firm believer that this technique is for EVERYONE, however, there are definitely people that will benefit more than others! Here’s why; if you predominantly use samples, then they have usually already been compressed and EQd to relative perfection for most people to tweak from there, whereas this technique is definitely weighted to recording the instrument, whether electric, acoustic, DI, amp, re-amped or miked.

If you are recording a bass guitar, this is a note you will want to take.

 

Why does splitting the bass into frequencies make such a big difference?

The bass guitar us a very dynamic instrument, and unless you are an amazing player, with amazing control of the string and how hard you play them, it can be a bit, unwieldy, to say the least. And the problem is, when we listen to our favourite artists, we tend to hold ourselves to that high multimillion-recording-studio standard, that that is of-course, daft.

The audio we hear and aspire to in those recordings has gone through more processing than a hot dog.

First of all, we want to tame the beast that is the bass, but we also want to be able to hear the details that we want, without it sounding too processed, and that is the beauty of this technique.

 

Can you not do that without splitting the bass?

Yes, you can. There are plugins out there that can do essentially the same thing, without splitting the bass up into separate tracks, but most of those cost money and still don’t do much more than we can do with this technique for free. And yes, though I am using Logic Pro X in this example, it can be done with GarageBand and the built-in plugins. It should be able to be done with any DAW, even free ones, without the need to buy plugins.

 

Even out the Bass, easier to mix