“You need to mono your low end to sound good in the club bro…” Wrong.
You’ve been lied to, and here’s your evidence. Watch our recent Youtube video titled “Is Mono Bass DESTROYING Your Low End?”
If there’s someone who knows what they’re doing in the subs it’s TroyBoi. His music is made for huge festival PA systems (which have their subs set up in mono) and it sounds fantastic. Yet, when you look at it (this is from his song Favorite) you can see lots of sides information on the master right down below 40 Hz. Shocking, considering most of us have been taught to totally strip out (with a sides HP filter or “bass mono” function) anything below 100 Hz or so.
This is a trend I’ve been seeing over and over again when I analyze songs. If you think the top producers and engineers in the world are all monoing their low end, think again. Get the songs, and run them through a mid-side spectrum analyzer.
When you fold this song down to mono, it doesn’t (substantially) phase cancel. He’s using techniques that are very mono compatible. Meaning they sound great in stereo and you don’t lose all the low end in mono fold down.
But if you listened to the outdated advice to automatically mono your low end on autopilot, you’d be removing a key part of what makes this song sound huge, full, and 3D.
Part of this old advice comes from the needs of vinyl mastering where you could not have very much sides information in the bass. So are you mastering for vinyl? If so, do a vinyl-specific master, and then treat your modern digital master separately.
When you fold down the bottom end in this song to mono you get a very slight level drop. This is because he’s left some very loud sides information in there (a bit more than I’d leave in, personally). There is a small amount of phase cancellation, but he’s obviously considered this trade off and made his decision.
Or perhaps he’s made this master specifically for streaming platforms like Spotify and Apple Music where having stereo information in the low end sounds great for end listeners who are using AirPods and headphones.
Food for thought…
