The bass dual track mixing technique

 

Hello everyone and welcome to this week's article!

Today we're going to check our more in depth one of the techniques already explained in our more general "how to mix a good rock/metal bass" article, the most popular one: the dual track mixing technique.

This technique consists basically in having 2 tracks of the same bass take, they can be either the recording of a bass d.i. duplicated in 2 independent tracks, or 2 microphoned tracks, pointing to different parts of the cabinet (one needs to capture the high end and one the low end of the bass tone).

On the individual tracks, narrow down the eq of the low-end track by using a lo-pass filter from 500hz down (you can use also a hi-pass from 40hz up if you feel like you need to clean also some low end rumble), and on the high-end track use a low pass filter from 7khz down and a high pass from 500hz up.

Now that we have our 2 tracks nice and separated in terms of eq we can use any type of distortion we want in the high end track, for example an amp simulator (some also like to use very nasty metal amp sims for guitar to add grit to this track), and in the low-end track we should add a nice broadband compression to start making the low end stable, by reducing 2/3db of gain.

Once the 2 tracks are properly processed it's time to balance them in volume (it's likely that we will have to put the high end track quite lower than the low end one, because of its capacity of be more ear-piercing.

Now that the 2 tracks are well blended together is time to route them into a group track and load in this track an eq to sculpt the sound, if we need it (for example some like to cut a bit around the 300hz area to remove a bit of low-mids mud and to boost a bit around 920hz to add some nasal tone), then we can load a multiband compressor, with 2 bands that should be matching the frequency areas of the 2 tracks, so that we can shave off some other unwanted fluctuation in dynamics without changing the general tone, because if we would use the same compression settings for both tracks there's a chance that what sound good for one of the 2 tracks would have unwanted results for the other.
Bear in mind that the low end track already has a bit of compression, so we should keep it in mind when applying this second compression to the low end track (so let's be less aggressive with the gain reduction than we would if there was just one compressor), and that in the distorted track the gain as well acts a bit as compressor.

Finally we need to make the bass tone rock solid, stable on its railway in which it needs to stay in terms of volume and dynamics, and in order to do so we nee to load a limiter (or a maximizer) and push it until we reach 3db of gain reduction (click here for an article on how to keep the Bass stable with a Limiter).
Once you find the right setting to keep the bass track tamed and stable all the time, you can basically use the output ceiling of your limiter as volume knob, and in order to dial the right level it's important to connect it with the kick drum, as explained in this article.

I hope this was helpful!

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