Creating a great bass sound is of course only part of the production picture, but let’s ask ourselves exactly why this is, and why it is a very wise idea to try and help the bottom end of your track? If you’ve ever been in the vicinity of a large PA system at a gig, or some form of subwoofer/bass bin, you don’t need us to tell you that bass frequencies are potent.
The problem is, from the perspective of production and mixing, placing similar bass frequencies in close proximity, across channels or instruments, is likely to at best manifest confusion in the bottom end, and at worst over-inflate the bottom end of your track. Hence, it has become a time-honoured feature of commercial tracks to scoop out the very bottom end of your drum track, where your bass drum or kick partly resides, in order to populate this point in the frequency spectrum with a greater degree of frequencies from your bass sound. We are typically talking about frequencies from around 80 to 200Hz, and with practice, this subtle and easy solution can provide a far more coherent bottom end of your track, with the mere addition of a little bit of EQ.