Alternative to Renaissance Bass

VST, AU, AAX, CLAP, etc. Plugin Virtual Effects Discussion
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Loair from Waves sounds great IMO also.
MXLinux21, 16 Gig RAM, Intel i7 Quad 3.9, Reaper 6.42, Behringer 204HD or Win7 Steinberg MR816x

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How do you use RBass on your mixes guys?

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Few of them in series on stereo bus, makes bad mix instantly horrible. :hihi:
This entire forum is wading through predictions, opinions, barely formed thoughts, drama, and whining. If you don't enjoy that, why are you here? :D ShawnG

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I use MDA Loudness for this.

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Debutante wrote:Thanks for all the replies. I didn't realize the 50HzKicker was such a baddass... It has(d) the following controls

Detector - sidechain frequency to prompt boost
Frequency - to boost
Length - to envelope
Wet and Dry knobs

I wish this guy was still developing.
Ah_Dziz wrote:... I've been trying to have to rely on these things less and just getting the sounds right from the getgo...
It's almost impossible unless in your own material you keep going back into the original file - when time comes to serious mixing, you'll probably want to alter a thing or two... and imagine someone else gives you something to mix. It's not possible.
Yeah. I mostly use them when working with other peoples recordings/ tracks. I use the subharmonic synthesis in MBassador for sound design stuff often.
Don't F**K with Mr. Zero.

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Liero wrote:There have been a dozen or so threads about Rbass/MaxxBass replacements.

The sad fact is that no other plugin does exactly the thing that MaxxBass does, it is unique. Most of the plugins mentioned here do something completely different than Waves, but people don't seem to understand that MaxxBass is not just a bass frequencies compressor/distorter/synth/EQ/whatever.
What is it?
Don't F**K with Mr. Zero.

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Magic :hihi:
This entire forum is wading through predictions, opinions, barely formed thoughts, drama, and whining. If you don't enjoy that, why are you here? :D ShawnG

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Specifically, many of the suggestions here are sub enhancers that add subs to a signal. This can make the track sound worse on small speakers by eating headroom with frequencies they struggle to reproduce.

MaxxBass/RenBass add higher-frequency material which creates the impression that there must be more low-end present. This can improve the perceived low-end of small speakers.

To approximate the effect, create a parallel/send buss. On that buss add
  • low-pass filter
  • gentle saturation
  • high-pass filter
The filters should be set as a crossover, so that the signal left at the end the chain mostly consists of new harmonics generated by the saturation. This signal can now be carefully mixed in with the original to create the impression of increased low-end.

Reading the patent, Waves use a bit of extra logic to "loudness match" the harmonics to the filtered sub and recombine these. This probably makes it harder to dial in a bad setting.

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imrae wrote:Specifically, many of the suggestions here are sub enhancers that add subs to a signal. This can make the track sound worse on small speakers by eating headroom with frequencies they struggle to reproduce.

MaxxBass/RenBass add higher-frequency material which creates the impression that there must be more low-end present. This can improve the perceived low-end of small speakers.

To approximate the effect, create a parallel/send buss. On that buss add
  • low-pass filter
  • gentle saturation
  • high-pass filter
The filters should be set as a crossover, so that the signal left at the end the chain mostly consists of new harmonics generated by the saturation. This signal can now be carefully mixed in with the original to create the impression of increased low-end.

Reading the patent, Waves use a bit of extra logic to "loudness match" the harmonics to the filtered sub and recombine these. This probably makes it harder to dial in a bad setting.
Yeah I agree. Sub enhancement is different to upper harmonic enhancement, especially for the plugins designed to psychoacoustically enhance the lower frequencies by adding higher frequencies.

I’m not entirely sure what they are doing there, but I think I have a pretty good idea.

A trick on the old B3 organs was that if you wanted to give the illusion of dropping your sound an octave without actually doing so and using the bottom brown 16’ drawbar, maybe because it would be too low and heavy, would be to use the other brown drawbar next to it, the 5 1/3’.

I believe it’s because it generates the 3rd harmonic from the 16’, but it actually doesn’t have a harmonic relationship with the drawbar that generates a harmonic an octave higher, the 8’. This is supposedly why it gives the illusion of the lower harmonic being present.

If we translate this idea across to bass frequencies in a mix, supposedly if we can generate the the third harmonic from an octave down and add that back into the mix, it should give the illusion of a richer bass sound, without actually needing to use that subharmonic.

Going by this theory, to generate such a harmonic we would need to take a copy of the signal, drop it an octave, filter out as much high and low as possible, synthesise the third harmonic based on that signal via a distortion geared at doing 3rd harmonic distortions, and blend that distortion back in with the original tone... adjusting to taste.

I have successfully done this before and it does appear to work, though I haven’t actually compared it against Ren Bass or MaxxBass. All you really need is a distortion that does harmonics and some kind of pitch octaver. Or you could simply do the latter by using your DAWs pitch correction algorithms on, say, the kick and bass tracks.

One plugin that does third harmonics is VSM, though I suspect a Trash and Saturn should be able to do that as well. If you find the right guitar pedal, maybe that could work as well.

Experiment.

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simon.a.billington wrote:A trick on the old B3 organs was that if you wanted to give the illusion of dropping your sound an octave without actually doing so and using the bottom brown 16’ drawbar, maybe because it would be too low and heavy, would be to use the other brown drawbar next to it, the 5 1/3’.
Coloured brown as a reminder of what might happen if you use it :scared:

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el-bo (formerly ebow) wrote:
simon.a.billington wrote:A trick on the old B3 organs was that if you wanted to give the illusion of dropping your sound an octave without actually doing so and using the bottom brown 16’ drawbar, maybe because it would be too low and heavy, would be to use the other brown drawbar next to it, the 5 1/3’.
Coloured brown as a reminder of what might happen if you use it :scared:
Haha!!

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On guitar it can be interesting to play with root-5th power chords. They don't sound very nice clean but with a lot of gain 557 sounds "lower" than 002 because of that phantom low D.

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Brainworx bx_subsynth can provide both the filtering/saturation and the subharmonic synthesis to get results similar to a combination of RenBass/MaxxBass and LoAir. (You might try the free bx_subfilter for the filtering functionality.)

Melda MBassador is also capable of approximating the results of both RenBass/MaxxBass and LoAir. I find the detailed control available through the Melda interface more useful than the Waves plugins.

Voxengo LF Max Punch is another good tool.

For subharmonic synthesis only, another interesting tool is reFuse Lowender.

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