panning bass ?

[akseltone]

so im a bit confused by some productions that i heard lately. heard this one track on soundcloud from pretty decent label and it had this pretty low bass that was panning. so how does it affect the Dance floor if it does? should i just mono everything below 100ish?. Trying to understand if i should bother w that. AND how does it affect if its being cut to vinyl for example?

hope to hear something, thanks!

[maks]

if your aiming for a vinyl release then you should be aware of mono'ing bass or it will automatically be done (most probably not to your liking)..if its a digital release , who cares with the public who mainly listens on iPods if your really going for it, be watchful for bass and phase. most likely what you heard was a layered sound above the bass which gave the illusion of the bass panned or maybe it was

[AK]

What he said but also you can also try this out for yourself by experimenting with various techniques. One of which is to either copy the bass part across to a couple of tracks, keep one in mono at a cut off point you feel works and gives solidity, then effect the further copies. Or using a plugin which lets you ( Blue Cat doe one ) slipt the frequency into a selection of bands and load up vst plugins INSIDE of the plugin per band. So you could for example, split the band into 3 and keep the low end mono, add a bit of chorusing to say 300 to 500 hz, then a bit of room reverb in the higher band - or whatever you see fit. I think it's a linear phase thing too.

A lot of DnB and bass guys do a lot of splitting bass signals, it's not something I bother with myself and I always think the low end sounds better in mono, a bit of chorusing can help or whatever but I prefer it higher up the spectrum.

[Toloache]

Thing is, when heard from a speaker you can't pinpoint where the bass comes from, so panning them doesn't do much, specially if it's really low freqs. The exact frequency where you start hearing some directionality depends from woofer size and room dimensions, but for all practical purposes vinyl cuts have everything mono below 200, sometimes even 400 hz depending on the track to be safe.

What you hear if they do the effects right and the track has a bass with some mid/high freq content, are the higher bass overtones panned, but usually low are kept mono. Personally i don't like it much even if it's done right, i find that the bass lose focus, and you are at risk of introducing phase problems with those frequency splitting techniques if you aren't careful.

Sometimes in mastering, if the compressor or limiter has stereo unlinking, and you have loud transients coming from one channel, the stereo image briefly shifts around because one channel is more compressed than the other causing volume differences. Pair this with a stereo saturator that saturate only over a certain threshold and you have a cool and not really talked much technique to widen your stereo image.

But imho the best practice is to do your mixing the best way you can and leave those tricks to the mastering engineer.

Cheers