6. Bass and guitars: the final fit
How bass coexists with the wall of guitars, the rhythm bus, the mono and small-speaker checks, and the balance that closes the mix.
The bass is already shared with the kick, levelled and audible. What’s left is the other neighbor: the wall of guitars. In rock and metal, high-gain guitars have enormous energy in the low-mids — right where the bass puts its body and its growl — and that’s where it’s decided whether the song sounds big or sounds cluttered.
Sharing with the guitars
Same logic as with the kick, a bit higher up the spectrum:
Who gets what
- Below 100 Hz: exclusive territory of bass and kick. The guitars have no business here — which is why the guitar mixing stage puts a high-pass at 80–120 Hz on them.
- 100–250 Hz: the disputed zone. It’s the bass’s body and also the guitars’ “weight”. If both are maxed out, this is where clutter is born.
- 700 Hz – 2.5 kHz: the bass growl coexists with the guitars’ mid body. If the bass doesn’t draw itself, a gentle cut on the guitars around 800 Hz – 1 kHz opens room for it.
The mono check: the decisive test
Bass is the instrument that suffers the most in mono, because that’s where every low-end cancellation shows up. And mono isn’t a rare case: it’s a phone speaker, a bar, a TV, a bluetooth earbud.
- Sum the mix to mono with a Mixtoolstock on the main bus (or with your monitoring’s mono button).
- Listen for whether the bass loses weight compared to stereo. If it drops a lot, there’s cancellation: check that the bass is centered, that both layers are in phase, and the polarity against the kick.
- Switch back and forth between stereo and mono several times. The bass has to still be there in both.
A low-end cancellation in mono makes the bass disappear on half the systems in the world, and it doesn't sound like a problem in stereo. It's a two-minute check that saves you from finding out once the song is already published.
The rhythm bus (optional)
If you want drums, bass and guitars to sound like one single band instead of three separate elements, you can route them to a rhythm bus and apply very gentle shared compression.
The balance: how much bass
Bass volume is the last decision, and it’s best made with references:
- Load a commercial track in the style you’re after, at the same volume, and switch between them. You’ll notice right away whether your bass is short or long.
- Listen at low volume: at low levels the ear is less sensitive to low frequencies, and if the bass reads well there, it’s well placed. At high volume everything sounds huge and it’s easy to get it wrong.
- Check on three systems: monitors, headphones and a small speaker. Bass is the instrument that changes the most between systems.
Common mistakes
What you should NOT chase yet
Verse bass + guitars (for the fit demo)Pending — this one is on you
To show clutter and its solution I need two files from the guide song in
prodmus_frontend/public/audio/bajo/: the verse guitars submix (stereo, already panned) and the
verse bass, the same bars. WAV 24/48. With those I’ll build an A/B of unshared against
shared (high-pass on the guitars + body cut), which is the most requested example of this stage.
Quick route — closing the bass mix
Quick path
- Check that the guitars have a high-pass at 80–120 Hz.
- If the bass doesn't draw itself, gentle cut on the guitars around 800 Hz – 1 kHz.
- Mono check: the bass must not lose weight. If it drops, check centering, phase between layers and polarity with the kick.
- Optional: rhythm bus with 1–2 dB of shared compression.
- Set the bass fader by comparing against a reference track, at low volume.
- Check on monitors, headphones and a small speaker before calling the mix done.
Expected result
Expected result
The bass integrated: it owns its place below 100 Hz, coexists with the guitars without clutter, survives the switch to mono without losing weight, and is audible on all three systems you tested. With this, the bass mix is closed: clean signal, shared with the kick, levelled, audible on small speakers, stable in the low end and integrated with the guitars. What follows are the mastering notions applied to bass.