UNDERSTANDING
The lowest of the low frequencies are what gives a club track its power – that notorious, chest rattling bass pressure. But subs can be notoriously hard to monitor, and even harder to mix. Let’s explore the production techniques behind nailing a high-class low end…
Dealing with sub bass frequencies can be one of the trickier aspects of music production. A sub bass part can be elusive – tough to properly monitor in a home setup, often not reproduced at all by smaller speakers – and they can be very hard work to mix. But, particularly when it comes to dance music designed for a powerful sound system, nailing your sub can be what makes or breaks your track.
Put simply, sub bass is anything that happens in the lower end of the bass frequency spectrum. The exact definition of sub bass tends to change depending on who you ask, but it’s generally considered to be anything below around 60Hz-80Hz, reaching down to 20Hz, which is the lowest frequency audible to the human ear. For context, the lowest note of a bass guitar is around 41Hz, and the lowest note on a piano is around 27.5Hz.
Sub bass frequencies are often felt more than they are heard, but that doesn’t mean you can disregard what’s going on down there. It’s in this range that most synthesised basslines have their fundamental frequencies (commonly around 40Hz-80Hz). The sub frequencies also define the power and weight of a track – too little and a mix can feel weak and underpowered, too much and things can quickly become overblown and overpowered.
Over the years, sub bass has become increasingly important in dance music, since these are electronic genres largely designed to be heard on powerful club systems that bring these frequencies to the forefront. Back in the ’90s, jungle and drum & bass producers would use the Akai S-Series sampler’s sine waveform ‘test tone’ played back on a low octave to create sub basslines. In hip-hop production, a sampled and pitched version of an 808 kick has become a pretty much ubiquitous method for creating powerful, sub-focused basslines.
The focus on subs probably reached its peak with dubstep – we’re talking about the earlier, UK-centric genre here, as opposed to the US-exported EDM version – which combined spacious, half-time beats and dub-like effects with huge, chest-rattling bass designed to be experienced on a powerful club sound system.
While these purely sub-focused sounds have arguably receded a little in the past decade, sub frequencies remain a huge part of dance music production. Modern techno, for example, makes use of sub-heavy kicks and low-end ‘rumble’ to create an overall dark and powerful sound.
One key problem when it comes to working with sub elements is how poorly they’re reproduced away from club sound systems. Those early jungle and DnB tracks we mentioned before, for example, seem to lose thei
