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I would be very grateful if somebody could explain this:

Why doesn't boosting bass frequencies with EQ in professional tracks cause distortion?

I looked at Knife Party's track through spectrum analyzer yesterday, just to remind me how really flat and professional sounding mix sounds on my headphones (AKG K240 MK2). When I added low-cut at 50Hz and high-cut at 100Hz to observe just the kick which was hitting at about 80Hz, I noticed that even if I boost any low frequencies (let's say anything under 200Hz), it doesn't cause horrible distortion or take off the punch of the kick, just adds more weight to that area. I tried the same thing with the kick I made: even 3dB boost made it sound distorted. I also did this with two other kicks and even pure sine wave synth kick, and in result I again had just warmer and more colored kick with less weight.

I went to extreme limits with Knife Party's track and added 12dB boost to 80Hz, after that it started sound shit at some point. Settings were the same for both tracks: HP at 50Hz, LP at 100Hz and after that gain set so that remaining stuff hits at -12dB.

I haven't tried this test with tracks from other big artists, but i would guess the same thing would happen (or to be exact not happen). Is it something about compression that prevents sound to distort when boosting with eq afterwards or what? I hope this stuff makes any sense...

Was the track playing at 0 db in your DAW or way less?

Genevieve wrote:Was the track playing at 0 db in your DAW or way less?

-12dB, so not even near 0dB.

-Agu- wrote:

Genevieve wrote:Was the track playing at 0 db in your DAW or way less?

-12dB, so not even near 0dB.

That's why it doesn't distort. EQs are basically multi-frequency band volume faders and distortion occurs when you boost a sound's volume past 0 db. Since you boosted when it was far below 0 db, it didn't clip the way it would if it had to fit all these frequencies in a box that caps off at 0 db.

Genevieve wrote:

-Agu- wrote:

Genevieve wrote:Was the track playing at 0 db in your DAW or way less?

-12dB, so not even near 0dB.

That's why it doesn't distort. EQs are basically multi-frequency band volume faders and distortion occurs when you boost a sound's volume past 0 db. Since you boosted when it was far below 0 db, it didn't clip the way it would if it had to fit all these frequencies in a box that caps off at 0 db.

Correct me if I'm wrong: It shouldn't be clipping at all in either of these cases (my stuff or comparison track) because BOTH were playing under 0dB?

Knife party tracks are arranged well, EQed good and have a filled spectrum throughout their songs (compared to the other cliche EDM tracks).
The mix as an entire is usually decent (im taking stereo field etc in accordance here too) so when distorting the song/adding or attenuating from it, it's still going to sound alright unless you go pretty far.

Thing is with that track, you aren't just hearing a kick drum you are hearing a finished product. something that has not only had many many hours spent getting the mix to sound just right but also mastered to sound great across different systems and enhance the mix further.

Put a boost down where you say you did and it won't sound too bad because the mix is solid and because you have headroom for it not to clip.

Now if you do the same on your own kick it depends on the context what' going to happen to it.

If it's in an arrangement and you try to apply a boost that makes it fit worse then it will sound bad.

If it's on it's own and has no context and you apply a boost then it may or may not sound worse, it's hard to tell in this situation as you are essentially thinking in terms of presenting a kick drum as a finished product as opposed to part of a mix. (this is an extremely rare case and I've not heard it yet but I'm sure somebody could point me in the direction of a single kick drum composition! )

The last question to ask is what headroom has your kick got? is that at -12db as well? have you got metering on your EQ to tell you if that has clipped?

Not really sure about this sort of stuff, but you said you had your kick and the track both at -12db? If that's so, the kick in the track probably doesnt hit -12db but less, and you need to boost more before it distorts than the kick you had. Also, if you had the mixer channels on -12, then the processing will still go over 0db inside the eq if both samples are normalized, and the mixer channel will just bring the result of this down, no?

Nothing was going over 0dbfs, so there's no distortion.
If you boost a slight amount of low end on a mastered track it will distort 95% of the time, as most tracks are limited to be around -0.3dbfs all the time.

In your scenario you take a full spectrum, limited mix, but you cut 80% of it. At that point it's not going to peak as high as the full thing did of course. The sum of everything was probably hitting 0.3, just that kick band might well be at -12.