I think you're right. It very likely is causing all kinds of headaches. Basically what you're doing is playing a bass patch and then trying to take all the bass out of it. Completely and utterly counterproductive IMO. I don't necessarily have an issue with putting a sub under it - it's exactly what you often do on any synth to beef up a bass patch, but you certainly don't fart around with the upper octave like that. A majority of analogue synths ever made offer a suboscillator to beef up bass. Plenty of them pump out meaty bass sounds that until fairly recently (IMO) weren't emulated that well with s/w. And you know...I can't think of a single one that lets you hipass the top octave like that. Basically because it's not useful or helpful. You wouldn't buy a Moog etc and then complain about poor basslines because you can't hipass the top octave. What you'd do is marvel at the lovely squelchy phat bass you're getting from the unEq'd bass and sub combined. (Actually I don't much like Moogs, but that's a dufferent rant...recursive one wrote:kritikon, I usually hipass my bass at about 100 Hz and layer a sine patch playing at 30-100 Hz. I'm doing so in order to have separate control over the sub and the body of my bass.
Some random dude in teh internetz told me to do so.
I just figured out that this is another possible source of my mixing problems. I have decent headfones, in wich I at least do hear sub, but my speakers and room conditions are not so good to properly control the sub level. May be, relying on bass patches made by good sound designers with better listeing conditions will be better in my situation.
)IMO just use a simple synth bass patch with the sub as part of it, put it in the track, mix as well as you can and Eq the subs in the whole mix. I'm firmly of the belief that too many people obsess about basslines as an individual channel. Mostly it's fixable in the mix. Whebn you mix without compressors etc, basslines invariably sound weak. Ignore it. It will come up when you compress (and few people aren't going to conpress).
TBH, most true bass patches are likely to need some bass Eqing out of it, not adding. And splitting it into different layers is just unnecessarily complicating it. It's no different to perfecting your lead supersaw, then splitting ityinto 8 different channels so you can process each one individually. Yes, you can do it, but A): It'll drive you mad, B) The end results probably won't be any better than leaving it alone.
If your bass patch is sounding wrong in the mix that badly that you have to do that, then...probably your bass patch is just wrong. Don't force it in - use a different one that actually works. Save yourself a headache and hard work. Sometimes the easiest path is not only the quickest, but the best.
Really I do think you're overthinking it and overcomplicating it. I think plenty of web ideas about mixing are the same.