Danny Wyatt here. Thanks for the awesome responses to the survey! Lots of great questions and thoughts, and a flood of topics for me to cover. I wanted to start with one of the more common questions.
Have you bought a bunch of plugins but your mixes and masters still aren’t sounding right? I want to help you get that pro sound from your own computer. Technology is changing fast, and I’ve spent the past year developing all-new techniques to layer in with my time-tested approach (I’ve been doing this for over 30 years). So let’s get started with the…
First question: “How do you fatten and widen your bass”?
Answer: Fatness really comes from layers of fattening, rather than one plug-in or one technique. A typical bass channel starts with a layer of tape saturation, followed by a musical compressor (usually an LA-2A with just a small amount of gain reduction), followed by a “technical” compressor like the Fabfilter Pro-C, followed by a multiband sidechain tool like FabFilter Pro-MB, and a small amount of digital limiting like an Izotope Alloy 2 or FabFilter Pro-L.
In between the technical compression and the digital limiter, I usually insert a multiband saturator like Izotope Trash 2 or the Universal Audio VSM-3. The idea with the multiband saturation is to brighten up the midrange of the bass in order to increase its presence.
Finally for width, the coolest thing is to go multiband again for the widening. For bass sounds, we typically want to keep the signal mono below 300-400 Hz. However, above that range it is fair game to generate and push some “difference” with some mid-side widening and some Haas effect. The best tool for the job is Izotope Ozone’s multiband imager. It’s also nice to put some stereo reverb on “top” of the bass, from about 700 Hz on up to create some stereo “bigness.”.
People think they need expensive equipment and years of experience, or that there’s some “hidden secret” knowledge, but it’s easy to get great results at home. Especially with the new digital tools that let you see how the frequencies are interacting. Plus I’m here to answer your questions as you try these techniques out on your own music.
Thanks again to everyone who let me know their two main questions about mixing and mastering! I hope I’ve given you some good stuff to work with here. I’ll be posting another quick tip and answering more questions in a few days.
In the meantime please hit me up with comments or questions, or join my email list. Talk soon!
Thanks!
danny
daniel wyatt
ceo/founder
mixmaster wyatt academy
