Topic: Using Audicity to roll off bass

[genesisoh]

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!

[capnhook]

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.

[acidjack]

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.