I have a recording of live music (I know what a concept!) that came out well, but there is a lot of bass in it. I normally run my recordings through Audacity high pass filter at 80Hz 6db. In this case, there was still a lot of undesirable bass left. I should mention that I record in 24/48.
What I did next was to create a 10 minute sample from the above recording down-sampled to 16 bits and with the above high pass filter already applied. Then I used values from 90 - 160 (counting by tens) for the cut off and saved the results. So in the end I had a sample with a HPF at 90Hz 6db, another one at 100hz 6db. etc. I burn these to disk and listen in my car where I can hear how they sound (headphones are good, but for bass I really need to hear it through speakers. My car system is very high end, so it is a good test of how it sounds.
My question is, am I going about this correctly? For instance, should I be lowering the db slope (for instance from 6 to 12 or even lower than that) before I raise the frequency? If you have wrestled in the past with excessive bass and have any advice, I would appreciate it immensely. Thanks!
Listening in different environments is key to getting bass levels right. Bass can be the toughest challenge.
Slope and corner frequency adjustments might not work sometimes, especially indoors.
Notch eq-ing a resonant room frequency into non-existence can be a good approach.
I would also recommend not using the high-pass filter and instead being a bit more targeted about EQ. I use the 30-band usually, but there's also the slope one called "equalization" I think. I find HPF is a bit too much of a blunt instrument.