How to tame double bass pizzicato?
- Thread starter Everratic
- Start date
JohnG
Senior Member
First of all -- you have plenty of company. I've done string dates with as many as 30 strings and only one or two basses playing pizz can really fill the room. Consequently, if you have a pizz sample with, say, 9 basses on it, it's easy to get a lot more action in the low end than you want.
Diagnosis
If you don't have a sub speaker, it's pretty hard to tell what's going on and the results may not translate to other systems / speaker configurations. Put another way, if your listening system doesn't "really" cover that low end, you may be frustrated because what's happening in that frequency may not be fully audible. Even a dirt cheap sub can help with this; you don't need to spend a lot of money to help yourself hear what you're missing.
Solution
I'm assuming you are talking about samples? If so, consider putting the pizz bass (actually arco bass too) on a separate audio stem with either no reverb at all, or at a minimum with a high pass EQ on the send bus. The idea is to keep any really low frequencies away from your reverb. At the risk of over-explaining, you insert the EQ before any signal from the bass hits your reverb, and shape the high pass so little or nothing in the low range hits the reverb. [edit: I am NOT proposing that you put a high pass EQ on an insert on the entire contrabass track, only on the send to the reverb]
It's not always that easy to fix and sometimes you really have to print the bass to audio and zero in on any notes that "bloom" too much.
Good luck!
John
Diagnosis
If you don't have a sub speaker, it's pretty hard to tell what's going on and the results may not translate to other systems / speaker configurations. Put another way, if your listening system doesn't "really" cover that low end, you may be frustrated because what's happening in that frequency may not be fully audible. Even a dirt cheap sub can help with this; you don't need to spend a lot of money to help yourself hear what you're missing.
Solution
I'm assuming you are talking about samples? If so, consider putting the pizz bass (actually arco bass too) on a separate audio stem with either no reverb at all, or at a minimum with a high pass EQ on the send bus. The idea is to keep any really low frequencies away from your reverb. At the risk of over-explaining, you insert the EQ before any signal from the bass hits your reverb, and shape the high pass so little or nothing in the low range hits the reverb. [edit: I am NOT proposing that you put a high pass EQ on an insert on the entire contrabass track, only on the send to the reverb]
It's not always that easy to fix and sometimes you really have to print the bass to audio and zero in on any notes that "bloom" too much.
Good luck!
John
Last edited:
Joël Dollié
Active Member
Soothe on bass works pretty well, just try not to flatten the pizz too much
PeterN
བོད་
Recently I had the chance to talk to a mixing-mastering engineer, whos been in business 30 years, so I asked him how I should cut the transients.
"dont cut them transients are good!"
uhm,ok.
FireGS
Senior Member
Spiff is better
SyMTiK
Chris Brocato
Bass pizz are always a bit of a pain to get sounding right, especially with samples. Whenever it comes to working with samples I almost always try to address the problem in the programming first. I tend to find that sticking to low to mid velocities with any plucked instrument libraries tend to work and sound way more natural and better than using higher velocities. Then carefully finding the right velocities. With bass pizz as little as a 5 velocity difference can be the difference between the pizz being inaudible, and the pizz blowing your speakers out hahaha. I tend to go through really methodically and find the perfect velocity range for each note where it feels just right.
As for fixing it with mixing, dynamic eq is your friend. rolling off some of the highs and dipping between 1-2k can get rid of some of the harshness of the pluck of the pizz, then setting a dynamic shelf from 200 hz down. low cut anything below 40. Then as others have said, send to a reverb and cut the lows before the reverb. I would not go too crazy with processing however, as it can quickly strip the life out of your samples and sound very unnatural very quickly. I would always check my arrangement and programming first and do everything I can to fix the issue there before I try to tweak it in the mix. I think a lot of composers mixes suffer because too much focus is put into fixing things in the mix, when really the arrangement or programming would fix the problem. I think many would be surprised how little processing some amazing sounding orchestral mixes have!
As for fixing it with mixing, dynamic eq is your friend. rolling off some of the highs and dipping between 1-2k can get rid of some of the harshness of the pluck of the pizz, then setting a dynamic shelf from 200 hz down. low cut anything below 40. Then as others have said, send to a reverb and cut the lows before the reverb. I would not go too crazy with processing however, as it can quickly strip the life out of your samples and sound very unnatural very quickly. I would always check my arrangement and programming first and do everything I can to fix the issue there before I try to tweak it in the mix. I think a lot of composers mixes suffer because too much focus is put into fixing things in the mix, when really the arrangement or programming would fix the problem. I think many would be surprised how little processing some amazing sounding orchestral mixes have!
Joël Dollié
Active Member
Maybe that's the secret to stay in business, leave the transients
wing
Active Member
What kind of compressors did you try, and what settings? A good compressor should be able to handle the task but the settings have to be dialed right. Same with a dynamic EQ.
Alternatively there's this interesting plugin called SurferEQ, where you can set notches (or peaks or whatever) and have it track pitches based on midi input (or I think pitch detection). I believe you can even set specific EQ nodes for individual pitches so they get affected differently. If you don't want to spend the money on that, you could also always automate most EQ nodes manually (more helpful if you have an EQ like ProQ with an analyzer and keyboard view, so you could roughly automate nodes to exact pitches of your fundamental frequency).
Or bounce your pizzicato to audio and manually edit the region into smaller regions (with crossfades) and adjust clip gain on each so it's levelled out more evenly (or turn down only the ones which get too hot). Mixing engineers commonly do this for vocal performances to precisely level everything out before hitting compression. Time-consuming but if you have time it can sound better than having EQs or compressor algorithms over- or under-react.
