I long struggled with with ensuring that my bass frequencies sat and sounded good in a mix, and for the most part it was alright however I always felt it could be better. I had made my bass sounds mono with splitting frequencies and then using the utility plugin from Ableton to make the bass frequencies mono, but I never felt like splitting frequencies like that made things sound great. Or at least when I tried it.
In Ableton 10, the Utility plugin had a “Bass Mono” feature added as well as a frequency dial to modify the frequency at which to begin making the stereo image mono The reason you would do this is because a lot of times when making club music, the club system is going to be in mono, and the overall sound becomes thicker and more stable so that you don’t have any phasing happening in the <120hz range.
This trick works great when you have a bass with a lot of upper frequency harmonics with a wide stereo field but you want the low frequencies to come through in mono. There are other ways of getting a mono bass. By utilizing iZotope Ozone’s Imager plugin you can set different stereo bands and control how wide or narrow each band is.
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