Waves R-Bass effect using stock plugins

[Erik DuijsParticipant]

Hello all!

I haven't been active here for quite some time, but I intend to visit here more often again to enjoy this amazing community 🙂

But anyway, a useful bass enhancement effect for bass is the Waves R-Bass plugin. Here's a way to create something like that, only using stock plugins that I found actually much more flexible than the real thing, and I have actually set up in my mix template now:

• Create a send effects channel
• Add 3 inserts on this fx channel (and in this order):
  • EQ
  • Distortion
  • EQ
• On the first EQ insert, low-pass the signal. For example at around 50-100Hz. Only the bottom-end should pass here.
• The distortion can be basically any distortion you like, and you can be quite heavy handed with this. The purpose is to add harmonics to (only) the low-end of the track that you send into this effects channel.
• On the last EQ, low-pass the signal again but at a higher frequency, for example at 1000Hz. Usually (almost always) I also high-pass the signal, for example at 60Hz to not cloud the bottom-end too much. The low-pass is to not make the effect sound too grungy and dirty. The high-pass is to leave the clean bottom-end alone of the track you send into this effects channel.
• Send for example your bass guitar track to this, and play with the output level of the send effect, play with EQ-settings and play with the distortion.

So the idea here is to add harmonics to (only) the low-end of your bass-track, which creates this psycho-acoustic effect that there seems to be more bottom-end than there actually is. I believe that is the basic idea behind the original Waves R-Bass too.

What I found effective is to be quite heavy-handed with the amount of distortion, but be a bit subtle with the amount of the effect that you mix in.

Maybe there's a better way to do this, but for me this works quite well 🙂

Cheers,

Erik

 

[Russell Cameron ThomasParticipant]

Thanks for this, Eric.  Just a few weeks ago I was asking whether such an emulation technique existed.  Yes I understand your method and I think it could work well in many cases.

I went ahead and bought an alternative to Rbass that essentially uses the method you describe:  Bass XL from Denise Audio.  I have yet to try it.

[jC LoeweParticipant]

Thank you, that's a great idea. I haven't been thrilled with RBass myself, my alternate chains didn't work so well. I'll try this technique.

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