Is Mono Bass DESTROYING Your Low End?

★ SKIP TO SOMETHIN’ ★

0:00 Intro
1:20 The big questions about bass mono
2:00 Why are we told you need to mono the low end?
2:57 Test 1: Making space for the kick and sub - is sides info masking?
5:08 Test 2: Does cutting sides give you more headroom?
8:53 Test 3: Does bass mono improve correlation?
12:25 How to mono your low end / bass correctly
16:23 Does this vary at all by genre? Is this relevant for you?
17:26 Outro

★ STAY IN TOUCH ★

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[warpacademy]

Hey everyone. Thanks to you all for watching and supporting the channel. This video has spurred on a very active discussion. 10, 000 views in the first 48 hours with very active comments (even saw Dan Worral joined in the discussion).

I wanted to offer some additional information that I feel is of benefit:

1) This doesn’t apply to vinyl. I should have mentioned this in the video, but TBH my clients have never asked for a vinyl-compatible master. When mastering for vinyl you’d definitely use an elliptical filter to remove sides information in the lows. Thanks to the folks who pointed out this oversight. Good catch!

Hope that’s helpful. Happy music making!

[patrickanthony]

I used to mono bass until relatively recently. I started meticulously referencing low end on some of my favourite tracks and seen the side information on the low-end. It was a lightbulb moment and went against so much of the assumptions that are held as Gospel in much literature. I am never mono-folding the low-end now. I create reggae and dub.

[Khamydrian]

Man, this is something I wish the tutorials I watched back then have actually clarified whenever a muddy mix was the main subject.
They go on and on about cutting the lows to fix muddy mixes but never elaborate on the effects of MID low freq VS SIDE low freq.
Only after a long time I realized that it's not a matter of whether the low end is mono at all. like all things in music production, is about finding balance, not about following rules.

I only started paying a lot more attention to how important it is to have these side low freq's in there once I approached the production of orchestral music and needed those heavy impactful and wide drum sounds, it's a true eye opener that made me realize I was mindlessly following rules and concepts that were never fully explained to me the way they should.

These days the only rules I have stablished to myself are directly tied to my production workflow and the mixing rack I built in Ableton.

>Compressor | Take care of dynamics as needed.
>EQ Three | Simplify the first approach to 3 knobs and follow my ears.
> FabFilter Pro-Q | Take a closer look at problem frequencies and MID|SIDE.
>Utility | Generally good to have.
>SPAN Plus on my master, of course.

Get the main functions mapped across 16 macro knobs and from there, just go with the flow.

[joseluisrevelo]

Been noticing these songs for years. Stopped caring about mono-ing my bass a long time ago. Thanks for this.

[modallias]

I've finally got a decent explanation after tons of "you always mono your bass" and "don't always do it" but no decent explanation of why so. Thank you!

[pixelbender]

This is my "ah-a" moment after seeing THIS revelation of wisdom. I watched a bunch of EQ videos without challenging the overall feel of the track. Thanks a million - sides is a completely new concept for me now!

[FxPs]

Turns out, the reason why my tunes aren't in the top 100 is because there is a conspiracy theory from the top telling me to mono my low end! 🤣😂🤣😂🤣😂

[yael_valle]

I always set my bass to mono, but that's only because all of my songs feature bass neutral tones, I think the main difference that pushed your point is that your using bass synths which that feature a lot of information across the frequency spectrum. I also think that 200Hz is aggressive for a cut, the most I ever go is 60Hz because at the end of the day I just want my bass and kick to be as neutral as possible

[BurgardRecords]

Really insightful and that part where you say at 18:07 - 18:26 "strong beliefs loosely held" where you explain a little bit about its meaning. Really describes a family member who struggles to just take that incomplete knowledge and just go for it. He's caught in a loop of never ending education, and I am glad you said it this way because when I am tuned out because of way in which my tone of my voice is widely muted a lot I feel like you're approach can reach people in a way that I have been trying for decades. I also learned a lot I had no idea the phase was pushing the gain higher I always thought something was going on and now I know thanks Vespers!

[tomwatson]

Coming from a DnB background I was always taught to keep your bass mono to avoid issues pressing to vinyl as lots of stereo bass energy causes the needle to move too much

[afrohawk]

You can hear the subby stereo on all EDM tracks, if you listen close. We have been taught that this can't be but stereo information is absolutely present and it is audible when played in stereo format. The phasing issue of filters was extremely enlightening. I use a dynamic EQ shelf on the low end sidechained to the kick now instead of filtering. I thought it sounded better and you pointed out why with the phasing issue. Great video!

[osmark]

funnily enough I just got metric A/B yesterday to do referencing of my own mix against a Bonobo track and I noticed this exact thing. I decided to undo the monoing of certain elements in the sub regions and the mix just sounded better. But this was a real aha moment for me, so thought it was even more perfect that this video popped up in my yt feed today XD.

[rayr]

I've been looking up and down how to get crazy big wide bass like Phace and this was the only way I could do it. Now my tracks stand out. insane, thank you.

[We_Run_Up_Hills]

Im pretty sure clipping/limiting makes stuff less mono! (Clipping causes dustortion throught the entire spectrum, so im pretty sure its just reflecting the mid/side signal down!!) I usually mono stuff, and after my master it becomes less mono! Instead of fighting it i just roll with it, abd put my final stereo shaper just before my final limiter (not after b/c eq phase shift loses mr headroom)

[paulbradshawguitar]

my old history teacher used to always say, no matter what i hope you keep a critical mind and question what's in front of you
i've totally been doing this with mono'ing the bass/low end here, really great points here and i'll be taking this on board going forward, thanks a lot 🙏

[softworkz]

About Club Sound Systems having Mono Bass
This is often done indeed, but it's worth looking a bit in the details. First of all, this is not about avoiding noise cancellation. Noise cancellation in a listening room is caused by speaker positioning, listener position and room acoustics. If you hear noise cancellation while walking through your room, you can't fix it by making the bass range mono. Or actually it may fix it for that position but that would only move it to happen at different positions. To avoid this in club installations, the subwoofers are often moved together to form a single block of bass origin.
This would still allow to drive it in stereo and sometimes even sound better and make you feel more "surrounded" by bass, but that's something which depends a lot on the anatomy of the bass range of the individual tracks being played and thus creating mixed results. Making it mono (in the sound system setup) ensures a more constant pressure bass experience that is less dependent on the source audio.

What's important regarding the line "bass is mono in clubs" is the question of what kind of "bass" this is actually about, i.e. which range in the low end?
One of the biggest and most famous clubs (Space Ibiza) had a Funktion One sound system which had subwoofers operating from 25 to 85Hz. Since the owner and name change (HI Ibiza) it has an L-Audio system which has subs from 20 to 60Hz (unless customized).
And this explains the wide-spread misunderstanding when people say you would need to "make your bass mono". That's definitely wrong and I also totally agree to what's stated in the video that monoing is not necessary at all to have the bass sound well in clubs (as long as correlation is fine).

But I think there's still a good reason to care about this. But by "this", I mean having the ultra-low range in mono - but not "the bass" and surely not the bass instrument.
While a little side information doesn't hurt, it's still a difference to club playback and if that's the target, you may want to be as close as possible when producing and mixing.

And when looking closely at the popular track examples, one can see that they have little to no side information in that ultra low range.

[Rhekluse]

I always figured if the Side information is greater than the Mid information in the low end; the Sides need to be addressed. I never understood why the Sides needed to be eliminated completely. Vinyl & Genre are definitely a deciding factor. I tested a bunch of Bass & Electronic music tracks that were pressed to vinyl and almost all of them have the sides removed around 100 - 200Hz. I would assume that there are exceptions to the rule. Great video, Drew. Something to think about anyway. Bless.

[GoGoGoRunRunRun]

That was a nice video. Shows nicely how important it is to stay open minded about how to approach a track and mix. I remember when monoing bass was pretty much all over youtube and I was kinda suprised to see where you were going in this video. Cudos to you for admitting that you also recommended it when everyone was raving about it.

[zyxyuv]

One reason people mono the bass is because it's easier to avoid phase cancellation issues without accidentally making something that sounds good but cancels too much when in mono. But this can be addressed by checking the mix from time to time with mono bass and then turning it off. Listening to the whole mix in mono is too painful for extended sessions. Sometimes I use mono bass for a whole day then shut it off the next day.

[tubeo]

Wow! The mono low end is one of the last “rules” i always follow when making songs. This opens so much