This is called a standing wave, and it has everything to do with acoustics of your room, not with the generated sound.
I presume you have a synth for the bass, not a sample (which can cause a problem like this on some occasions).
Listen to it with some good headphones and you probably won't tell the difference...

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make a note of what frequency it is, so you dont try to compensate for it in your mix

You could try using a different bass patch. Certain patches will simply be much louder at certain frequencies, while some will be nice and consistent throughout the range. If the patch has delay or room verb applied to it, this can cause some inconsistencies.

If the whole texture of the patch goes to heck on that note, that's really all I can suggest. Otherwise I'd personally just notch eq the problem frequency.

(And yes, check if your listening enviroment has a particular problem at that frequency. I'd assume not, if you just noticed it now, with only one particular bass. Try a few different bass patches playing the same notes and you'll be able to tell if it's the sound or your listening environment)

Another possibility is that the loud note is around the cutoff frequency of the filter and there is high resonance on the filter... Cue sine like sound at one frequency..

If the instrument allows filter tracking for the filter tweak that and the filter settings to get the filter to track evenly up and down the keyboard. Or sample a "Good" sounding note and play samples of the bass part, or give up and try another sound...

i red somewhere that if u use sampled basslines and pitch them up and down u wont get extreme freq changes....

trilogy would be an example...

quote:

Originally posted by jey i red somewhere that if u use sampled basslines and pitch them up and down u wont get extreme freq changes.... trilogy would be an example...

it only helps when the whole sound path is sampled. trilogy adds his own filter so it wouldn't help with those problems.
but if use something like kontakt and don't add anything you would be fine with this.

to the OP i would check your room acoustics. generate a slowly sweeping sine from ~40 hz to 20 kHz. now play it back and if you hear a jump in the loudness you've found a frequency where your room isn't perfect. a "perfect" room would sweep very linear. it would fade in slowly and fade out slowly too.

Isnt this a very general problem ?

Isnt it better to just find a basspatch/sample, that fits on the notes you are going to use ?

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quote:

Originally posted by G-Con Say you have a bass pattern hitting different notes but when it hits one partcular note, it becomes very loud and sounds incredibly siney and boomy. I suppose I could compress the bass to even out the loudness throughout but when it hits the problem note, I can't even hear the texture of the bass. All I can hear is a sinewave booming at me. How do I solve this?

You mean the bass is doing this by itself? I usually only get that kind of thing when the bass and kick are playing at the same time, and are around the same frequency.

Sometimes if a bass uses 2 voices, slightly detuned from one another, and the oscillation hits it's peak, it's get too loud. I usually mute one of the voices, but that really changes the sound of the synth of course. Compression can help sometimes, but not all. Sampling does seem a possible way to go, but it never sounds right to me for bass. Try making multiple recordings of just one bar of the bass, and use the one that doesn't have the loud bass note in it. Odds are, it's only reaching it's peak every 4 bars or so.

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Also to clarify, is it just that patch that does this (even with the bass soloed) or is is ANY bass wit that note?

If it's any bass then you have an accoustics problem (Time for that search function for lots of discusison about that ;-).

If it's just that patch, and it does it even when isolated with nothing else playing then dollars to donuts it's the filter cut-off frequency with too much resonance and no/incorrectly set filter tracking (Also known as Key tracking).

Thanks for the tips. Plenty for me to try out. I havent got access to my home pc at the moment but when I do, I'll try what you've all suggested. It happens even when the bass is solo'd only on the one note.

I havent tried different patches yet. I think I spent time with the filter/resonance but I'll have another look and tweak the key tracking as well.

Pretty sure with all your suggestions, I'll be able to crack the problem...

Thanks Again

Greg

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yep this is why people resample bass.

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