Should I use linear phase eqs when mixing kick and bass?

[cturner]

i think at the point where the bass overlaps with kick tail the precise timing may be repsonsible for presence/absence of phase cancellation.

Certainly. If the kick and bass happen to be at the same frequency, timing (which equals the relative phase of the two signals) will cause cancellation.

Here are two files for you: http://vze26m98.net/kvr/saturn/sines.zip ~380Kb DL

Both are two sines mixed together. One sine is fixed at 250Hz, the other sweeps from 350-150Hz. In one file the signals are in phase with one another, in the other they are approx. 90 degrees out of phase.

They reach the same frequency at the middle of the file. If you can view them in a waveform editor, you'll see a huge dip in volume. It's also pretty audible.

HTH

[recursive one]

Thanks a ton, cturner!

Downloaded, will look/listen when I'm at home

[cturner]

Thanks a ton, cturner!

You're welcome! There's a slightly more detailed discussion of parallel EQ in the Acustica Navy update thread on GS:

https://www.gearslutz.com/board/product ... l?u=130865

That link just finds my posts, but I'm sure with a bit of bookmarking, you could enlarge that to the whole discussion plus the usual GS whining.

I forget whether I have some stuff on linear EQ pre-ringing. I explored this when MasteringtheMix's Bassroom plug came out, but I forget whether I posted it or not. I'll post what I can collect this weekend.

HTH

[cturner]

Actually, WRT to pre-ringing, it was easier to simply produce some new screenshots rather than hunt around.

Signal below is a 20ms square pulse, which has a fundamental frequency of ~25Hz. To make things easy, I used FF Q3 with a peak filter set at 60Hz, +6dB, 0 Q.

Here's the raw signal without EQ:


Here's Q3's "zero latency" mode:


Here's Q3's "linear, medium":


So you can see there's post-ringing with zero latency, but both pre- and post-ringing with linear mode. Of course, what's not illustrated here is the phase shift from the raw signal, which is why you'd make a choice between these two modes.

HTH

[recursive one]

Thanks again, well it seems I now better understand what is pre-rigning and what causes it. Also found a nice article
https://cravedsp.com/blog/linear-phase-eq-explained

Now the quesion is - when should I actually use a linear phase eq on individual channels, and should I be doing this at all? Smearing transients is definitely very undesirable when it comes to kick and bass.

Psytrance kick/bass is typically a "kbbb" patten (steady 16ths, k is for kick, b is for bass). The kick tail overlaps with the first bass note and this is where I must observe the kick/bass phase relationships in order not to lose punch and not to kill sub due to phase cancellation. The psytrance bass is typically one oscillator and its starting phase may be controlled within the synth. In oder to make sure that the phase of the bass, once dialed in the synth, is not affected by equalization I decided use linear phase equalizer but if it is so damaging for the transients, maybe I should use a normal (minimum phase) equalizer and just insert a phase alignment plugin at the end of the processing chain?

Edited the topic title since the question doesn't relate to timing anymore.

[riddim83]

Thanks for the interesting discussion everyone!

I can assemble a groove with perfect timing/phase of that, but when working on the rest of the mix I can decide that the kick and/or bass needs additional equalization to cut through better or to make room for the synths. I use lin phase in order not to ruin the kick/bass phase alignment but then I have to worry about the timing.

I eliminated this issue almost entirely by enforcing a stricter hierarchy among my sounds. I do the following, more or less:

A) Establish a rough hierarchy of importance for the sounds in my mix - not strictly related to their importance in the arrangement (though of course that ends up affecting this indirectly in various ways) but more from a sound design/mixing perspective - which usually goes something like:
1. Kick
2. Bass*
3. Anything else with significant bass*
4. Everything else
5. Except hi-hats

*These get swapped sometimes

B) Ensure, in order of importance, that each sound sounds the way I want. The order is especially important for the top three, where I never break it.

C) Send anything with important stuff below 80 Hz or so to its own bus. This is usually just the kick and bass, and the main purpose is compressing that <80 content.

D) High-pass filter the (internal) sidechain of my master bus compressor to match what is going on in C. This can take a little tweaking back and forth between the two compressors to get right.

Of course the process isn't really quite this linear, the absolutes above are not really absolutes, and this is all very much a your-mileage-might-vary kind of thing. It works very well for me, though.

[recursive one]

Thanks for the interesting discussion everyone!

I can assemble a groove with perfect timing/phase of that, but when working on the rest of the mix I can decide that the kick and/or bass needs additional equalization to cut through better or to make room for the synths. I use lin phase in order not to ruin the kick/bass phase alignment but then I have to worry about the timing.

I eliminated this issue almost entirely by enforcing a stricter hierarchy among my sounds. I do the following, more or less:

A) Establish a rough hierarchy of importance for the sounds in my mix - not strictly related to their importance in the arrangement (though of course that ends up affecting this indirectly in various ways) but more from a sound design/mixing perspective - which usually goes something like:
1. Kick
2. Bass*
3. Anything else with significant bass*
4. Everything else
5. Except hi-hats

*These get swapped sometimes

B) Ensure, in order of importance, that each sound sounds the way I want. The order is especially important for the top three, where I never break it.

C) Send anything with important stuff below 80 Hz or so to its own bus. This is usually just the kick and bass, and the main purpose is compressing that <80 content.

D) High-pass filter the (internal) sidechain of my master bus compressor to match what is going on in C. This can take a little tweaking back and forth between the two compressors to get right.

Of course the process isn't really quite this linear, the absolutes above are not really absolutes, and this is all very much a your-mileage-might-vary kind of thing. It works very well for me, though.

Thanks for your input, this pretty much resembles my own process - especially the channel grouping/bussing logic , except that I don't do any compression on the master bus (this is left to the mastering stage).

Overall I found that the kick and bass combo must be got 99% ready and locked at the very early steps of arranging. I used to start with some sort of "draft" kick/bass and then tweak them along the way together with the other elements of the mix but this seems to be a bad practice at least for the genres like psytrance where kick+bass is the most important element.

[Mushy Mushy]

cturner, what are you using to generate those excellent waveform visuals?

I have many tools that serve as oscilloscopes but none that are as clear as that.

[DJ Warmonger]

As pictured, it's the best just to use oscilloscope so you can see phase relationship between the two all the time.

[recursive one]

As pictured, it's the best just to use oscilloscope so you can see phase relationship between the two all the time.

Sure, I always have Smexoscope on my k/b bus.

[Tj Shredder]

Is this thread about using your eyes instead of your ears for mixing?

[Mushy Mushy]

Is this thread about using your eyes instead of your ears for mixing?

No.

[Tj Shredder]

But then the answer is use your ears to decide and thats it. For each track this might lead to a different solution...
As a side note, why do you think those phase flip buttons are in the better consoles? Way faster than switching plugins...; - )

[recursive one]

Is this thread about using your eyes instead of your ears for mixing?

Where did you read "instead"?

Phase correlation between different waveforms may be easily visualized and this may be a very helpful tool, especially when mixing lower frequencies which can't accurately monitored in most bedroom studios.

[cturner]

what are you using to generate those excellent waveform visuals?

That’s Blue Cat’s Oscilloscope Multi. Not cheap, but fabulous. Be aware it’s time slice is no longer than 1 second. For larger spans of time, I like DMG’s TrackMeter, which can sync to times in the range of 1 beat to 16 bars.