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Hi!
I posted this in reply to the MPX clips of the freakday, but i think it’s better to make a new topic about it, to discuss about it.
Breakaway is great (as said before 😉) but i’m tweaking on the low ends some weeks now, and i don’t get that smooth, round, warm bass i hear in for example the 8500, it’s more like a ‘PRRTT’ bass than a ‘BOWWWW’ bass.. know what i mean? Even when playing with the bass efx and impact/clunk plugins.. Is it possible to make a preset/plugin or option to get that warm, deep bass? Not to punchy, just a ‘soft’, not dominating, deep, round warm bass sound.
I really think this can give a processor that ‘magic feeling’ where a station is always looking for.
I hope i’m clear enough 😉
I’ve had the same thought myself. There’s a station in my area with perfect, resonant bass, and I wanted to send Leif a recording so he could advise on how to replicate it. But he only accepts MPX recordings for that purpose and I don’t have the right equipment.
That special "resonant" bass quality is something I’m still seeking in my BBP setup.
Howdy!
Indeed, without MPX it’s real hard to do anything useful.
The first time I heard an 8500, I was very impressed with the bass. Huge, fat, round bass indeed!
However, after a while I started noticing how the bass would disappear whenever there was midrange, and how bass kicks would make the bottom fall out of the voice as well.
So, I started trying to tweak the preset to get rid of these artifacts. It was very strange though — I didn’t see anything on the meters that would indicate bass or wideband pumping!
After trying just about everything else, I found the bass clipping switch (hard/medium/soft).. It was set to Medium. I switched it to Hard, and all the pumping and other actifacts went away, but so did the big fat bass sound! All of a sudden it sounded a lot like an 8200.
So, that bass comes at a price. You may not hear it at first, but once you do, it gets real annoying — and I believe it may fatigue people subconsciously, even if they’re not consciously aware of it.
To me, it sounds like it’s some kind of compressor, covering midrange and downwards.. It pumps up the bass when there’s room for it, and squashes it down when there’s not.
Breakaway actually has something not too dissimilar, but in a more refined, less obvious manner. You can see it quite clearly if you select the Plutonium preset, and set the oscilloscopes to De-emph Left or Right, and then play "Push" by Madonna, from the "Confessions on a dance floor" album. In the very beginning you’ll see the bass almost going full scale, and then when the high frequency bells come in, you’ll see the bass waveform being clipped deeper, to make room for the treble.
The difference in these to approaches is that the 8500 appears to use extra compression for the bass (causing pumping), and Breakaway does it all by clipping, which avoids pumping but indeed gives the bass a "fartier" sound when there’s just no room to do anything else. The fartiness is very well filtered in Breakaway though — the tops are flat but the edges aren’t sharp. The advantage is that pumping is completely avoided.
I do know what you mean about the 8500s bass sound. It has a very attractive quality at first. However, once I started hearing the artifacts it causes, I just couldn’t get past it anymore — it didn’t sound acceptable to my ears, and for that resaon, I did it differently in Breakaway, even if it can’t make the bass quite as (sometimes) big as the 8500. If I was forced to use an 8500 for a station, I would have had to set it to Hard bass clipping, to avoid this problem.
It just confirms the rule that there’s no such thing as a free lunch in Broadcast Processing. Man, I wish there was though! Would make my life so much easier… 😉
Best,
///LeifLeif,
Thanks for answering!
I understand your opinion, but what sounds unattractive to you, can sound attractive to other people 😉
Here in Holland, a lot stations have some ‘effects’ in there sound, controlled pumping effects too.Maybe it is an idea to let the decision/tradeoff to the end user in a future version? Like a parameter to switch between 2 (or maybe more) ‘bass types’? I really think that a bass sound like this is something a lot people want, it can also be a tool to define your own sound for your station
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