Sub Bass - How to get that visceral, booty shaking sound live?

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OK - I played my first ever gig performing my own material last Thursday, and it went pretty well. The headlining act were some live junglists, live in the sense that they had a male and female MC and an insanely funky french drummer. Everything else was triggered/played from a mac laptop running Cubase. Now, our act love bass, oh yes, and we would dearly love to get the gut-wrenching sub-bass-thang sorted live, but despite being played through exactly the same PA as the headliners, our bass sounded puny and thin as all hell.

The point being that their sub-bass sound was physically awesome.
I love dub and have only gradually begun to understand the fundamental importance of bass in the kind of music I create, I and therefore would appreciate any sensible advice on how to achieve the kind of live bass sound that makes you physically ill.

In terms of sound generation tools, we have a crappy bass guitar, a coupla KC550s, an SM57, a MicroKorg and a Nord Modular running into a 16 track mixer and thence to Cubase SX.

― chris sallis, Wednesday, 4 January 2006 18:25 (nineteen years ago)

I think it might be a case of the PA and FOH engineer you're working with?

― ratty, Wednesday, 4 January 2006 21:21 (nineteen years ago)

it helps to be the headliner vis a vis PA sound

― detoxyDancer (sexyDancer), Wednesday, 4 January 2006 22:12 (nineteen years ago)

ain't that the truth.

― ratty, Thursday, 5 January 2006 02:43 (nineteen years ago)

I've never been very good at this, but one thing that's helped has been layering the central bass sound with a plain sine waves -- create a low-frequency sine note and then match its pattern to your bass line, and you'll at least get some extra depth. Layering helps in general, I think, so long as you can get all elements of it to match their envelopes exactly (and process them all so they sit in the same place).

― nabisco (nabisco), Thursday, 5 January 2006 04:05 (nineteen years ago)

I wonder if compression helps at the FOH... if you can make the bass feel like it's eclipsing the other sounds, maybe that would trick the ear into thinking that it's louder. I do know that someone told me tuning the sine wave to match the room typically helps if you're indoors.

― Jubalique (Jubalique), Monday, 9 January 2006 15:52 (nineteen years ago)

So no-one knows then.

― chris sallis, Thursday, 19 January 2006 22:28 (nineteen years ago)

sound man

― senseiDancer (sexyDancer), Thursday, 19 January 2006 23:29 (nineteen years ago)

two weeks pass...

Subharmonic synthesizer. There are a lot of them on the market by the usual suspects.

― Colin Meeder (Mert), Wednesday, 8 February 2006 18:00 (nineteen years ago)

three years pass...

So what makes sub bass sub bass? Is there a discernable point where it stops being really low bass and is officially sub bass?

― EDB, Wednesday, 1 July 2009 16:39 (sixteen years ago)

Yeah, there's a very specific frequency cutoff. Dammit, gonna have to go on a production forum I frequent and get the old frequency chart...

― Violent In Design (Masonic Boom), Wednesday, 1 July 2009 16:50 (sixteen years ago)

Sub bass is under 60 Hz (what I thought, but I had to check)

Frequency range chart here:

http://www.independentrecording.net/irn/resources/freqchart/main_display.htm

― Violent In Design (Masonic Boom), Wednesday, 1 July 2009 16:53 (sixteen years ago)

Thanks a lot, that's a useful chart too.

― EDB, Wednesday, 1 July 2009 17:00 (sixteen years ago)

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