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Author Topic: Reducing Bass  (Read 2127 times)

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Offline Wayne Kisbee

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Reducing Bass
« on: February 14, 2014, 04:41:02 AM »
I have a recording I made that is a little bass heavy and I want to know how I reduce bass using Audacity?

Can anyone offer some advice?

Cheers
Roland R-05 recorder with SP-CMC-8 (AT943) mics and SP-SPSB-7 battery module

Offline danny3

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Re: Reducing Bass
« Reply #1 on: February 14, 2014, 09:34:07 AM »
I am no expert, and recently used the equalization tools in audacity for the first time, but it was easy to do, and has helped me salvage some recordings. One example had too much bass like yours. It also magically helped to bring up the bass in a stage mic recording. Amazing results.
Others will no doubt have more hands on expertise, and know more about Hz levels than I, but here is what I did. Select the track you want to fix and select Duplicate from the Edit menu. This will place a copy of the track at the bottom of your project window. Select that track, and select Equalization from the Effects menu. From here on (until you get more informed advice) experiment to see what gives the best results. I used Graphic EQ, B-spline, and move the sliders appropriately. I recommend saving and naming each effort (Save/Manage Curves and rename.)
Just a suggestion to get you going – I am looking forward to more educated replies on this topic.

Offline Wayne Kisbee

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Re: Reducing Bass
« Reply #2 on: February 14, 2014, 10:33:04 AM »
Cheers Danny. I'll give that a go   ;)
Roland R-05 recorder with SP-CMC-8 (AT943) mics and SP-SPSB-7 battery module

Offline mr qpl

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Re: Reducing Bass
« Reply #3 on: February 14, 2014, 11:53:46 AM »
copy your unedited file first, save the original without edits in case you later decide you don't like what you did. As a caution, listen to the unedited one and the bass reduced version using different playback systems, there's a lot of difference between what you hear thru soundcard and earbuds on a pc vs what you hear thru decent amp/speakers or headphones.

Offline Ultfris101

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Re: Reducing Bass
« Reply #4 on: February 14, 2014, 12:10:54 PM »
Definitely make a duplicate of the track. easier to back out, but also really nice to compare by muting and soloing to see if you indeed got the result you wanted and like it.

Another thing to try would be the High-Pass filter. select the track and then go to this under effects. Set the frequency to start at 150 or 100 and try it out with 6db per octave. Maybe use a small section first so it doesn't take as long before you can see if it does what you want. This will progressively reduce the amount of frequencies below that starting point.

This is an area where Audacity isn't the best as it's much easier to work in a DAW that allows you to apply EQ in real time as track is playing to adjust. If you know exactly what you want to do you can plug it into Audacity but if you're like me and not entirely sure what impact all the settings will have it's nice to get immediate feedback on what is changing. Take a look at Reaper maybe if you want to go this route.

A lot of people use both Audacity and another tool depending on what they need to do.
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