I’ve realized that a lot of you guys are having trouble with the bass in your studios, making mixing the low end feel like a guessing game sometimes.
Believe me, I’ve been there.
One time in particular is burned into my memory. I tried to show off this sick tune I was working on to my friends a few years back. I had slaved away on it for hours! This was gonna KILL. I just knew it.
So we’re sitting there, listening to some DJ mix, when I decide the moment is right. I start the track, the intro passes, into the first break, as it builds up to the drop I’m thinking “I can’t wait to see the look on their faces!!”
OH GLORY TO THE KICK ASS PRODUCER OF THIS SICKEST OF ALL DROPS!!
And then…
Nada. Silch. Nothing.
No bass at all…
What the hell???
It PALED in comparison to the DJ mix we were listening to before!! But how could that be..? It completely wrecked my speakers when I was listening to it back home!!
WTF?
Of course, no glory…
Damn.
That experience started me on a journey that hasn’t ended to this day…
The Hunt For The Perfect Bass
Now, many years later, with hundreds of mixes under my belt, regularly hitting the Top10 charts, tracks that generate millions of plays for my clients, designing sound systems for one of Berlin’s most prestigious clubs, studying book after book after book, and many, many home studios measured, designed and treated, I finally have a method that I know I can trust.
A system that allows me to get the bass right from the start, that I never have to second guess.
I understand the underlying principles, that repeat themselves every time, no matter what room I work with, it doesn’t matter what shape or size.
But what’s most important is how it made me feel about my work.
No more insecurities about thinking I got it right, only to find out on my kitchen stereo that the kick is super boomy, or the bass suddenly disappears.
No more going back to the studio and making tweaks that ‘should’ fix the problem but I can’t actually hear the change while I’m making it.
No more awkward conversations with my clients about if I deliberately made the mix so light in the low end.
Whenever I go in the studio, I know I can mix the low end without having to think about it. It WILL translate. To hit that perfect sweet spot between punch and body while making my mixes sound loud, open and detailed.
You can get that too!
It all starts with hearing the low end properly. To find that spot in your room where the low end comes together in just the right way to tell you what you need to know.
The sonic balance that allows you to intuitively make the right decisions.
It’s sort of like building the foundation of a house. Build it right, and your house will stand strong in wind and rain for years to come. But build it wrong, and you’ll constantly be fixing cracks, holes and dampness with expensive repairs.
It’s the room acoustics equivalent of “get it right at the source”.
So I thought I’d share this little trick I’ve developed over the years, treating rooms in various shapes and sizes.
It’s what I always do first thing when treating a studio, and always creates a big „woah“ response from my clients.
All it takes is your ears and about an hour of your time.
It’ll work in both treated and untreated rooms, although if you have bass traps, it’s best to have those installed already.
I call it the Bass Hunter Technique:
Pick three songs that you know in and out, in different keys, covering the entire low end spectrum.
Put one (!) of your speakers in the corner of your room on the floor close to where your setup will hopefully end up. Set all the EQ settings on the speaker to flat. Disconnect the other speaker.
Play through the songs multiple times, switching between them. Set the volume at a comfortable level so you can hear the low end properly.
The Idea Is To Find The Spot In The Room That Has The Best Compromise In The Low End Between All The Songs
- Sit in your chair. It helps if it has wheels. Make sure your head is at the same height you typically work at.
- Move to the longest center axis of your room so you are half way between the left and right walls.
- Now roll slowly along this axis all the way from one end of the room to the other. Close your eyes and pay attention to the low end only. The mids and highs won’t sound great, but that doesn’t matter at this point.
- Listen to the balance between the kick and the bass while you are moving, pay attention to how it changes.
- Where in the room is bass missing? Where is there too much? Is it too punchy? Or too subby?
- Really take your time with this, it’s where the meat of the matter lies. Experiment, dig deep. Try and get as detailed an understanding of the low end as possible.
- Move right up to the walls with your face, that’s what over-pronounced sub sounds like! Now, as you move back into the room, where do you still hear that sub, but the punch comes back in?
- For each track, make a mental note of where the low end sounds the best to you. Be accurate, half a foot or 10 cm can make a huge difference!
- Once you’ve identified the ideal spot, mark it on the floor with tape. This is the position where your head will end up as you work.
- Now do the standard equilateral speaker placement around this spot. Basically you want to build your entire setup around this position. I’ll go through the details of stereo optimization in the near future, but for now there’s a great article on SoundOnSound that will get you 80% there.
A Few Notes to Be Aware Of
It is very possible that you’ll end up with a spot very close to the wall, especially in small rooms. This is perfectly normal. It might also be somewhere completely different than you expected, or just a foot from where you’ve been sitting so far.
WELL, NOW YOU KNOW. ?
IF THAT’S WHAT IT TAKES, MAKE IT HAPPEN!
If you can’t find a spot that sounds particularly great on your chosen axis, pick another and try again. Is your room is simply too irregularly shaped? Start experimenting by moving off the center axis. You’ll compromise left to right symmetry, but that is easier to fix than an unbalanced low end.
In any case, I can assure you, there will be a spot in your room that offers a good compromise between all the songs.
And if you’re wondering about using a sub, that same spot will also give you the ideal location to tie that in. I’ll cover that in detail later, for now you can follow the process described here.
The reason this procedure works so well is that you are effectively optimizing your position within the standing wave pattern of your particular room. Not the theoretical one predicted by simple geometry, but the actual physical manifestation. Including all the quirks that tend to mess up predictions. Windows, crooked walls, materials etc. It also takes into account your personal taste, so it’s sort of like EQing your speakers at the same time.
DOUBLE WHAMMY!
Placing the speaker in the corner during the procedure has the effect of exciting all the standing waves maximally. It’s like a worst case scenario. Or best case, depending on who you ask. ?
More importantly it will ensure that you don’t end up placing your sweet spot in a massive cancellation hole of one of the standing waves.
Of course ultimately the speaker won’t remain in the corner and won’t end up exciting all the room’s modes maximally. The interaction between the two speakers also has a dampening effect on certain modes. But neither of these are as consequential as is getting the full effect of sitting in a cancellation node.
Basically a mode that isn’t excited can neither have a strong additive peak nor a strong cancellation null and so its effect will be benign at best.
There are other factors that will mess with your low end, like reflection induced comb filtering (sometimes called SBIR, floor bounce, etc). But these are better addressed by means of careful absorption and subwoofers.
Little known fact: This actually becomes easier to do the closer your speakers are to a wall, since the effect moves up in frequency. So there’s actually a benefit to setting up closer to a wall!
But ultimately, if you don’t get the position of your sweet spot right from the start within the standing wave pattern of your room, you’re going to have a hard time fixing your low end with acoustic treatment.
It’s The Foundation On Which You Build Your Low End Response. It’s Where The Big Wins Are.
Ever heard of the Carl Tatz’ Phantom Focus System? He implements the same idea, just with a ton of technology behind it.
You may actually find that you don’t need all that much bass trapping once you’re sitting in the right spot. Our brains are remarkably good at adapting to a certain frequency response.
Once it’s in the ball park, your brain will do the rest.
So the next time the low end in your mix is once again going haywire, maybe what you should be asking yourself is this:
Am I really sitting in the best possible spot in my room?
It may be that you are literally only a few inches away from success.
Now to make it easier to follow, I’ve collected the steps of the Bass Hunter technique in a single page PDF for you. I’ve also included a few more tips on how deal with asymmetrical rooms and what a “good” low end actually sounds like.
Just leave your name and email below and I’ll send it right over.
Hi Jesco!
Very interesting and my sweetspot improved! What are your thoughts on digital room correction? In my case, using this rectangular room and system mainly for Hifi and listening, I have cancellations along the whole mid axis. It improves using ARC Genesis through my Martin Logan Unison. It would be interesting to hear your thoughts on the subject.
Cheers
Patrik
Both will work. Although I recommend using a full range monitor and not a sub for the test.
Hi Jesco
Thank you for your article. It’s really a nice insight. I was wondering if i should use my A monitors (heavy as hell) of if i could use, or if i could use the sub of the B monitors.
I would guess as long as the speakers goes down low enough i should be fine?
Greetings
Alexander
Awesome, nicely done!
this is amazing. I was playing with your method and ended up giving it a twist:
1.- calculate room modes in amroc
2.- see which are the most damaging. In my case 40hz length wise and 51hz on the width of the room.
3.- Use REW Generator to sweep from 40hz to 60hz slowly.
4.- Choose an axis and sit on my chair and move along it.
4.- Pay attention to the effects of the room modes (volume goes up and down).
5.- Find a spot where that variation in volume is minimal. Thats the sweet spot.
After doing it for both axis, I ended up chosing to sit facing the long wall, since that’s where the 51hz room mode pressure is and the sweet spot ended up being as far as that wall as need to be so that the volume wouldn’t change (also not at the center of the room where it disappears). By doing so I also noticed that by sitting facing the small wall, i would be in the dead center of the 51hz room mode!
Afterwards I tried with music and compared the sound with my headphones (senn hd600) which are supposed to be well balanced. Sound matched expectations.
Let me know what you think!
Thanks!
Definitely interested in your tips for an asymmetrical room, especially one with two different steep slopes in the celling, an open back wall, very long in one dimension compared to the other, and a slope down to about 3 ft above floor on the front wall. (It’s a loft).
Thanks for the article!
Accurate AF. About to embark on building some diffusers to impress clients. Found the sweetspot by luck in the past, now I have a new room and I’m dreading setting up as I know it took me months to dig in to my mixes last time. Will be trying this method. I usually reference about 50 songs I know well to get comfy in how much bass I should expect from my mix in the same environment. Eats time, but not as much time as the back and forth doubt pattern.
MAN THAT 1st paragraph is funny as hell.
Mad relatable. Thanks for putting those moments
of “ours” on blast.
Salute
Hey Damien, you got that exactly right, you want to do the Bass Hunter test with the wall installed.
Putting furniture in the room shouldn’t change the result of the test very much (unless it’s really BIG, like a few meters across, and actually significantly changes the dimensions of the room), so you can do the test in the empty room.
If you want to be really safe:
Do the test once in the room empty. That will determine which side you should be facing, which won’t change with furniture. Then plan the layout of the room around your sweet spot, put the furniture in, and do the test again to fine tune around the spot you identified in the first run.
Does that make sense?
J.
Hey Jesco, Im planning on setting up a studio in my garage soon. Like Steffan I am planning on building a temporary wall for storage and also to cut off from the actual garage door. First off, when I am setting up I plan on using the bass hunter technique with my temp wall installed, I assume this would be the best way to do this test (even though the wall wont be fully sealed to the house), as that will be my final room dimemsions.
The second part of this is, am I better off doing this with the room completely empty or with some furniture in it? I was planning on doing it completely empty, just want to be sure that once I add furniture to the room it wont affect my sweet spot.
Cheers
Hey Adam,
the short answer is: no need to keep hunting, you found the best spot for your listening position in your room! Even if it’s facing the long wall.
The reason why it is usually recommended to set up facing the short wall is because of the assumption that in a perfectly rectangular room, the pattern of the “length” room mode, that’s the one between your front and back wall, has the most balanced energy at roughly the 38% mark of its length, where you should consequently get the most even frequency response. So you should set up facing the short wall.
Of course all of that breaks apart IF….: The assumption is wrong and you actually have a completely different pattern of room modes in your room. And that, interestingly, is pretty much always the case in rooms not built for the purpose, like your typical spare bedroom, basement, garage or attic. Everything in the room affects the pattern of room modes. The doors and windows, the materials the walls are built out of, and of course the fact that most rooms aren’t perfect rectangles. Most typical home and project studio rooms have a pattern of room modes that is completely unpredictable, and so all the typical rules of thumb that get thrown around don’t usually work.
So setting up facing the short wall is good advice, until it isn’t.
The only way to find out where you should set up for optimum bass is to test the room. Which is what you did with the Bass Hunter technique.
Now you know. 🙂
I have done this hunter technique twice now, and the best position is not using the room “long ways” – my speakers are now against the longest wall where I’ve been told to keep the speakers on the shortest wall to allow as much air for sound waves to develop before hitting 1st reflection point. But it reallt seems to sound best against the longest wall , should I keep “hunting”?
Hey Steffen,
that should be ok.
J.
Hi. Great!!!! Im gonna try this in my new building.
Im gonna need to build a wall in the room on one side of my mix position.
A wall of 16cm traps with a 1,5-2m air/storage behind it. The small room/storage will serve as entrance and light storrage.
My thoughts are that the wall and room will serve as main bass trap of my room and 1st reflektion absorber. On the opposit wall i will hang a 1st reflection absorber as well But NOT with as much air behind (10cm. )
Can you see a problem doing this and tiltning the absorbtion towards one side with the bigger air gap?
Hey Teddy.
You don’t need to worry too much about phase when you place your sub, as long as it’s roughly the same distance away from your ears as your monitors. At the wavelengths of the crossover frequency, a phase mismatch will only start to become a problem when you really miss the mark.
Hope that helps!
J.
Amazing article! Is there a good way to figure out where to place a single sub in relation to the monitors / room so that it’s in phase with the monitors?
Hey Peter,
the position you identify will be optimal to tie in a sub as well. But you don’t need to use the sub for the test. I don’t. But if you want to try, just put both in the corner, the speaker right on top of the sub so they disperse energy from the same position. Make sure to match the volume as best as possible before you begin.
Does that make sense?
J.
Hi.
How to do this with a 2.1 monitoring system..? Use the sub for this test..?
Cheers.
This is great, made night and day difference with my setup!
Oh, And thank you very much!
I’m gonna try this at the stu! 😀