Mixing low end (inverting phase on tracks)

[EfreetiSultan]

Hi,

I've seen some sound engineer mixing EDM and she would sometimes take a kick or a bass and use the "gain" utility in Logic to invert the phase on that track.

I know what phase cancellation is but I wonder when to do that, how to look for any issues?

Thanks

you already answered it yourself. ((they)) flip phase so instead of cancellation it might be coherent. so instead of losing dbs, you may gain some instead. its just that simple.

[_al_]

I think it easy to overdo do rumble though. I don't think it needs to be too loud, or too bassy. If you want bass do bass.

Truth.
And warehouses and clubs add their own rumble by default, lol.
For me the rumble should be 80-120hz or higher area, with some sub, but not so much that it competes with the kick sub. That way, you can still feel the rumble's power, but still get the full body punch from the kick.

Lately though, I haven't been ducking the rumble's volume for the kick.
Instead, I'm 'ducking' with a highpass in Shaperbox to keep the kick's full energy in it's zone, and in turn, leave a bit of the rumble's 100hz in the kick, to give them some similarity (glue).
Still use volume shaping, but it's not so important when the highpass is already taking care of phase cancellation.

Works great for HardTechno, but probably not so much for minimal or something

Gotta say though... Shaperbox just lives on my bass bus, every track now.

[Xbucket]

Regarding the phase shift you can use several plugins. Waves inphase, ssl xphase, voxengo pha, maat phase shifter, time align by eventide, there are also options in the daw or some automatic tools. You should always check if flipping works and makes you feel more bass or not. It’s also useful in layering sounds not just kick and bass. For example different kicksamples or blending guitar cabs. It’s really worth getting into this as you’ll miss a lot when not doing it and it’s good to be able to find possible errors in your sound which you can solve and make it sound thicker.