Vital 2231 (version 'aa')

With Vital 2230 and Vital 2231 I've been seeing how far I can push the sub-bass and compression to get things to sound bassy and loud. It may have been excessive but I think they still sound 'good' so maybe it's fine.

For the sub-bass, I used a trick that I learned from this How to Deep House video (which might be the only useful thing I learned from it; I wasn't real impressed with the guy's result), which is to place your sawtooth bass at a frequency where it sounds nice, not worrying about sub-bass, and then to put a nice clean sine wave one octave below it, and adjust the gain on that as needed. This gives you way more control over the sound than if you try to make the sawtooth (or whatever) also provide that low frequency. "Can't get my bass deep enough" is something I struggled with that for like 15 years.

Picking root notes that make the bass sound good at the beginning of composition also seems to be a good strategy.

Using headphones that actually reproduce those low frequencies is vital for making any of this work at all! I have been using George's PreSonus HD7, which reproduce frequencies down to about 38Hz, fading out to near silence at 20Hz. This is a huge improvement over the random assortments of speakers and headphones that I had used in the past.

This track also uses an effect rack that I made called "soundgoodifier" that simply boosts a couple of frequencies and then puts everything through a multiband compressor and then a normal compressor. It feels cheap but seems to work!

I used Deadmau5 - Some Chords as the reference track, especially while designing the bass sound on Vital 2230. Some Chords has a lot of noise in the upper mids, so sounds louder overall, but pushes the subbass to about -6dB as indicated by Ableton Live's spectrum, which I was able to match using the new subbass technique combined with the 'rather pushy' equalizer → multiband compressor → compressor → limiter setup.

Having learned some new tricks, it might be worthwhile to try remastering Vital 2140, now.

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