Transients versus bass, a common misconception

If you've ever had any form of audio engineering training, you will have almost certainly have come across the perceived wisdom that bass sounds take up the largest room in the mix. You will have been told to cut any sounds with presence below a certain point, unless they are bass instruments. You will likely then have gone home and tried this and wondered why your mix suddenly sounds like it has no life and no body to it and isn't really that much easier to master or mix. The truth is that bass is not always the culprit for db headroom. The largest eater of headroom is often transients.

Loud sounds often have a very pronounced spike in their soundwave, usually right at the start of the sound. This is called a transient. This can often be very loud in comparison to the nature of the rest of the sound, leading to it spiking out meters and limiters, while the rest of the mix is nowhere near that volume. So why aren't these just picked off by the limiter? The problem lies in the fact that all the parts of a mix intermingle at the same time and within the same frequency space. Limiting that snare drum's transient might end up taking down that hi hat with it if you just slap a limiter across the mix. Some win can be had from using a multiband limiter and isolating the frequency of the transient in question but i've found this to be a mixed results endeavour. Personally I find it more effective to limit or compress the part in question, prior to the final mixdown.

So how does this relate to bass? Well the nature of transients is that they are usually quite fast, hence the name transient, and as such are less likely to be made up of bass content. Bass takes time to develop (in the context of millisecond measurements) and is therefore not normally the cause of the problem. Bass instruments turned up abnormally loud can also cause issues with headroom, as the whole sound then becomes louder than other peaks, but generally speaking they are just more likely to muddy the mix and make the low end less defined.

The way I often go about detecting this transient issue is to slowly build up my mix, hitting it off a limiter with a readout of the gain reduction, and see what instruments lead to audible and visible dips in the meter. The most common culprit for me is the snare drum. That initial 'whack' of the snare can generate a transient that is so obnoxiously high above the rest of the music, it makes it impossible to master without ducking everything else at that point. The trick is not to even attempt to hit the whole mix with a compressor/limiter until we'v dealt with that snare separately, as discussed above.

So in conclusion i'm all for cutting bass in instruments if they are causing a build up or an unfocussed, muddy, low end. If, however, you just want to give yourself more headroom and more volume in mastering, i'd look to transients on individual instruments.

If you would like to see a worked example, I've done a video on it which you can see below

Work passion balance : What does it mean?

People often talk about work life balance. I think this is a great thing and very important but I often also like to consider work passion balance. This is the balance between things that you do for employment and things that you are passionate about, but are not necessarily the same as your day job. I find that this balance is equally as important to keeping yourself comfortable as your creativity is often fed more strongly by passions. I believe there is also a valid balance to be sought between work, passion, family and recreation/relaxation. This gives a sort of 5 way balancing act that the original "work life balance" doesn't really adequately address. Its also the reason that I think so many people end up in a mess. They think that because they can get a basic 50/50 work to "everything else" ratio they will be okay. Personally this doesn't work for me. I have a lot more things going on that I need to address on a daily basis.

The difference between work and passion for me boils down to money, but in a subtly different way to what I guess most people see money as in relation themselves. I work hard in both pursuits and to the naked eye it would look like both are really just work. The difference is that work is something that someone pays me for but my passions are things i'd pay to do. This is significant because in this way money affects my motivations. If I wasn't being paid, I wouldn't go to work. The lack of any monetary incentive in my passion, however, is not discouraging. This isn't to say you can't have both but I don't think its as simple as monetising your passions and expecting it all to fall into place.

I think that people who manage to create a situation where their passion becomes their employment have to be very careful to keep the money side of things away from the general creative process. Its also one of the reasons that I don't believe you can buy truly creative people into an organisation and have it work. You have to provide people something else or it just won't work for them.

As an aside I also believe this is one of the reasons that having vastly different salaries between people who work in the same organisation, with relatively similar jobs, doesn't work. The minute you start defining success and progression as £ signs you remove focus from what's important. You also start artificially creating hierarchies and reinforcing rules that might not be appropriate. If you pay everyone roughly the same and find other, more effective, ways to incentivise your staff you stand a better chance of having a successful organisation.