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hello there
ive had a good search on the forum and cant find an answer, so i hope i dont get a bollickin for asking about sub bass again! here goes:

i have a recurring problem with (sub) bass in my own music, that doesnt seem to be present in music that i listen to.

lets say im using a pure sine wave for my sub. certain notes produce a much quieter sound than others, despite being played at the exact same amplitude. they also dont resonate and cant be felt like the slightly higher notes. yes these 'dud' notes are lower notes than the ones i hear loudly, but they are definitely still well above the human audio cutoff.

in other peoples tunes i can clearly hear and feel sub bass just as low and lower than the ones i have trouble with. but there seems to be some threshold in my own music, or maybe with my room (happened in my old room too though). i have tried adding some fm so they have a bit of bite, which helps a little. but it also compromises the sound. and anyway with sub you should be feeling the sound as much as hearing. shouldnt a pure sine wave be consistently present and powerful down to about 30 or 40hz? anyone know what im doing wrong?

cheers.

I'm still very new to producing but I have also been having the same problem as you. I believe a way to fix it would be to find those notes that are "duds" and tweak the patch until they don't sound like duds anymore, then bounce them out to audio. That way you could have all the notes that you're using as audio, and they all sound nice and loud. Again, I'm still very new and I've been streaming a ridiculous amount of tutorials into my brain in the past few weeks, but I believe I heard that in some masterclass I was watching. Hopefully this is helpful!

It could well be your room lying to you. A normal room's frequency response is all over the place, especially in the low end. Certain notes disappear completely, certain notes come out much louder. Other tracks might not hit the exact problem spots as yours.

Two things;

Do you get this on headphones as well as speakers?

Have you tried sitting in your listening position and running a slow sine wave sweep (say from 1 to 300Hz), and seeing how uneven it sounds?

Ok... These notes aren't 'duds', they are just basically too low to hear. There are certain notes that resonate more, it has a name but it escapes me now...

Anyway, the 'human audio cut off' isn't as low as you would think. Guaranteed you would feel something on the right set up, but there is such a thing as being too low... to the point where there is no 'oomph' to the note being played (I actually had a similar thing happen to me last night where I copied a sub bass region, and it sounded crap... turned out where I had pitch bent the region I was copying from, it had left the pitch at it's lowest point, hence it sounded flat as a pancake on my set up).

Keeping everything in tune, try moving the notes around until you find the sweet spot. It sounds to me that you are maybe going too low? Otherwise, do you have anything else playing in the same frequency range? Perhaps some issue with other elements impacting on your sub?

Alternatively, check your pitch bend is set right

my bet is its your monitors/speakers. most monitors go down to about 45hz, and most consumer sub woofers like logitech go to about 40hz but severely drop in volume below that and are much louder at about 75hz.

my guess is the notes you are trying to play are about 35hz or so and your speakers can just not reproduce them at all or as loud as say 50+ hz

the human ear hears down to about 20hz. which is pretty low, but i would think we would be able to hear lower. at 20hz the speaker should look like its flapping pretty damn slow though.

edit: and yeah most obviously room acoustics. my room is terrible for dropping my lows and peaking around 75hz. sounds terrible.

sounds like a problem with your room acoustics. You should also problem read up on 'Fletcher Munson', it should help you understand what is happening a bit more.

Sinisterbeats wrote:sounds like a problem with your room acoustics. You should also problem read up on 'Fletcher Munson', it should help you understand what is happening a bit more.

And read about room modes.