Nolly from PERIPHERY dials in a bass tone

Wanna know the dirty secret of mixing metal? Here it is: 75% of “guitar tone” = bass tone

Guitar tone is obviously a huge part of part of mixing metal, and you’ve probably spent many, many hours chasing “that” tone. What’s not so obvious to many beginning mixers is that a huge part of what you think is “guitar tone” is actually bass tone. When you think of the punch, thickness and attack of a great guitar tone, that’s probably coming from the bass. And it’s not just the low end– the right bass tone usually has some distortion in it that fills in some areas where the guitars are weak.

But as you probably know, getting that bass tone is easier said than done. It’s very, very easy to go overboard with the low end, turning your mix into a soupy mess. And while distortion adds the presence and grit that’s key to a good bass tone, it will also kill the low end. So, how do you get both low end and distortion, since these two things don’t want to get along?

The solution is that most metal mixers use two layers of bass: one clean layer for low end (high passed), and a distorted layer for grit (low passed)– some people even add a third layer for sub-bass.

In the below video, Nolly from Periphery shows a really elegant alternative to the above, recreated the amazing bass tone on their most recent album “Select Difficulty” using a DI track, Fabfilter’s Saturn and Slate VMR. If you’re like most of us, you were wowed by the incredible bass tone Nolly got on the album, so you probably want to take notes on this (and try to find a bassist who plays as well as Nolly… good luck with that).

Pay special attention to the multi-band saturation trick at around 4:30, which uses Saturn as an alternative to splitting your bass track into clean + distorted layers– very slick solution that we haven’t seen too often!

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