My bass rattled the windows but didn’t move the dancefloor

I check my mixes on a pair of speakers at home and on headphones. With my upcoming single, the low end bothered me in the second half of the song, and I described it like this: the bass is somewhere in the distance and makes the windows tremble, but it doesn’t decide the rhythm.

It was loud enough. It just didn’t make you move.

What was going on

Measured over one bar, the sub in that section hardly moved: only 5 to 8 dB between its loudest and quietest moment. In the chorus, which did groove, that was about 25 dB.

The reason: three basses at the same time. A long, sustained sub, short stabs from a second bass, and the funky bass line from the rest of the song. Together they filled every gap. That’s a wall, not a rhythm.

The fix: one bass, short, between the kicks

From that point on in the song there is one bass, and it plays short notes on the offbeat: on every “and”, between the kicks. The long sub is gone.

Now the low end dips by about 10 dB on each beat, which leaves room for the kick, and peaks in between. Kick, bass, kick, bass. That’s what your body follows.

The rule I took from it: rattling windows comes from long sub notes; a dancing crowd comes from short bass notes between the kicks.

More pump? Pump the bass, not the song

Earlier, when the song felt too flat, the first fix was to add layers. That made it bombastic, not bouncy. Then I tried making the choir and strings duck on every kick. It sounded like someone playing with the volume knob.

What works: let only the bass pump on the kick. Melodic layers stay steady. The groove comes from the low end; the melody can float on top of it.

When the low end turns into explosions

At one point I heard “explosions in a row” that sounded wrong. Two things caused it: a short pickup note two octaves up, heavily distorted, right after each offbeat, and a bass I had just turned up a lot. Together they peaked well above the kick.

• The pickup note went.
• The mid bass got a high-pass at about 110 Hz. The deep end belongs to the kick and the sub, not to everything.
• The kick sat in a drum-bus compressor that kept pushing it down, so turning its fader up did almost nothing. Taking the kick out of that bus did.

Check it on a phone

A clean sub is close to a pure sine wave, and phone speakers can’t reproduce it. On a phone, a perfect sub is simply gone. Adding a distorted copy of the sub an octave higher gives the bass line a voice between roughly 120 and 300 Hz, where a phone can play it. Since most short videos are watched on phones, this matters more than any club system.

Quick checklist

• One bass at a time in your main section.
• Short notes between the kicks for groove; long notes only for pressure.
• Pump the bass, keep melodic layers steady.
• High-pass everything that isn’t kick or sub.
• If a fader does nothing, check what compressor it’s feeding.
• Listen on a phone before you call it done.