Help your bass sounds speak better with harmonic boosts

Something I am navigating constantly is how to get bass to speak better on phone speakers. Not just to be audible, but to be warm, or punchy, or aggressive, or whatever the bass needs to be doing in the song at hand.

(As a side note: you would be shocked — shocked! — if you knew how much time I spend mixing through the speakers in my phone. I have a plugin that allows me to stream to my phone from my DAW in real time, meaning that I can work with the mix as I listen to it through my phone, or my laptop, or anything that my phone can connect to. This plugin is easily the single best investment I’ve made in studio gear in the last many years.)

Here is a little cheat sheet for helping your bass speak better on small speakers:

• Warmth: 150 Hz

• Presence: 300 Hz

• Poke: 600 Hz

• Articulation: 1,200 Hz

I will almost always use a boost at one (or multiple!) of these places on my bass sounds to help them speak better. I generally do a narrow Q of between 2 and 4 — we’re just trying to get a specific area boosted, not a wide boost that will swamp out other instruments.

This might be a fairly significant boost — it’s not at all unusual for me to do +6 dB at one of these places, if that’s what the sound needs to do the job it needs to do on small speakers.

The nice thing is that there is so much harmonic richness in bass sounds that it’s usually pretty easy to find a place to boost that isn’t in the way of some other key element in your song.

If the bass isn’t working on the phone, your mix isn’t working — jamie