Bass enhancement plugins

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Bass enhancers

I´ve had a bunch of bass enhancers in my toolbox for a while, but never really gave them much thought. These type of processer can however be very useful so I decided to try them all out to se what I´m been missing out on.

The line up:
  • Waves RBass
  • Waves MaxxBass
  • Waves Lo-Air
  • PSP Mixbass
  • BX_subsynth
I also decided to through in a saturation in the form of  Waves Vitaminic plus a sample using the Cubase stock EQ to see if I could achieve similar results with them.

Test setup

All the channels were normalized to about the same audio level using a metering plugin, but the perceived loudness, as you´ll see, still varies a lot.

I used a small DI bass-loop to test the various plugins, and more or less just called up the default preset on the plugin and tried to push the level until I hit the same audio level as the other plugins (again using metering).

I tested them on both electric bass and an electric guitar, see audio samples below. Audio examples are available at the end of this post.

Waves MaxxBass

According to Waves, "MaxxBass® uses psycho-acoustics to calculate precise harmonics that are related to the fundamental tones of sound". This technology has been licensed to many third parties, and my Dell laptop uses this technology to get more bass from the built-in laptop speakers.

It´s actually not adding bass, but rather harmonics related to bass frequencies present, and hence it won´t use ,uch of your your precious headroom.

Maxxbass has a good visual representation of what´s going on and I found MaxxBass to be a bit more subtle than the sister plugin Rennaissance bass. This was my favorite for gently creating a slightly fuller low end..


Waves Renaissance bass

Waves Rbass is basically a refined and updated version of Maxxbass, and was a bit effective in generating (perceived) low end.

The interface is dead simple and Rbass provides a very full and round low-end tone. I found the result a tad muddy on the bass but I may have overcooked it. It does exactly what it says on the tin and I can understand why this is a modern classic.




PSP Mixbass

PSP Mixbass uses a combination of compression and harmonics generation to push the low end.
This plugin was probably the hardest to dial in, and it wasn't entirely clear what all the various parameters did, so some playing around might be required. I did however find this plugin to very natural sounding and I´ll be coming back to this one going forward.




BX_Subsynth

BX_Subsynth from plugin-alliance is a different beast altogether. It´s based on the dbx 120XP hardware unit and basically uses synthesis to generate new bass content. It's also offers saturation and filtering which I didn't use in this example.

The plugin offers more control of the low end than the other ones, and overall I found the workflow to be fairly straight forward.

This plugin adds a quite obvious synthesized tone and doesn't sounds as natural as the others, but this isn't necessarily a bad thing, and it would probably work very well on a synt or as an effect.
The sound reminded me of a classic bass octaver effect pedal. This would be my favorite if I was going for a more obvious effect, or for post production.


Waves lo-air

Waves lo-air is very similar to BX_Subsynth and also uses synthesis, but offers less control over low end frequencies. Overall this plugin is very easy to use and the result was very similar to BX_subsynth, perhaps a tad softer and rounder on bass.



Vitaminic

Last I decided to thrown in a saturation style plugin as a comparison, and after testing a few I settled on Waves Vitaminic as it provided multi-band control which allowed me to focus on the bass.

Vitaminic can be a very useful tool when mixing, but it didn´t perform well on bass. The results was very uneven and frankly unusable. It worked better on guitar but overall it made the guitar sound muddy. Traditional saturation, or at least the Vitamin plugin, wont get used much for bass enhancement around here.


Stock EQ

Last but not least I decided to try the Cubase stock EQ to see if I could end up with something similar as a control test. 

One important thing to point out here is that an EQ can only boost what is already there. You´ll need a synthesizer based plugins to add new low-end content.

As you can hear, the EQ actually worked quite well on the bass, but wasn't as effective on the guitar which was expected.


Summary

It´s well worth experimenting with bass enhancement plugins on different sources like kick drums, synts, voices, strings or anything that could benefit from some extra low end. These type of plugins would also be very effective in a post scenario to add oumph to thunderstorms, explosions and the like. I would however not use it on a mix as it would affect every source simultaneously.

It´s well well worth experimenting but a little goes a long way.

It´s interesting how different they all sounded, and going forward I think have a better idea of what could work in a specific scenario. I hope this was as useful to you!

Audio examples



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