Mastering The Mix BASSROOM gets your bottom end in shape
Balancing the low end in a mix can be a hit-or-miss affair, especially for less experienced engineers. Mastering The Mix BASSROOM is a new mix and mastering plug-in designed to help you achieve a tight, well-balanced low end. It’s a specialized, tweakable bass EQ with an innovative user interface.
Bassroom is not a bass enhancer like the newly released Waves Submarine or Brainworx Subsynth. Instead, it’s an equalizer that specializes in making precise adjustments in narrow frequency bands within the bass range. Mastering The Mix says that Bassroom comes with a wide range of target presets. To create these, the developers analyzed “the best mixes in various genres”. The presets are meant as a starting point, from which you can tweak the settings to suit your mix.
5 frequency bands
Bassroom divides the low end into five frequency bands, which can be adjusted individually. The crossover points are 20Hz, 40Hz, 80Hz, and 160Hz, with the upper band extending up to 320Hz. Mastering The Mix claims that Bassroom’s filters have very low phase distortion and transient distortion. According to the developers, this ensures that the punch and bite of the low end remains intact and uncompromised.
For tweaking, the five EQ bands are visualized in a virtual room, where height represents frequency, and the depth of the room represents gain. The makers say that this provides an immersive mixing experience and “helps you visualize how you’re adjusting the low end”. I can see how this kind of display could indeed feel more immersive than a traditional EQ curve, and I think I have to try it myself.
Target presets
On the “walls” of Bassroom, you’ll find the target settings from the selected preset. According to the developers, these represent “genre-specific EQ adjustments a great audio engineer in a world-class studio would make”. The settings are reportedly based on a complex algorithm which represents the way the human ear perceives low frequencies. Without having tried Bassroom for myself, I’m not sure yet what to make of this. But I’m reading a lot of positive comments by users of Bassroom, so it seems to work quite well.
Compatibility and price
Mastering The Mix Bassroom is available for macOS (VST, VST3, AU, AAX) and Windows (VST, VST3, AAX, 32/64 bit). The plug-in costs £49.00. A 15-day demo version is available from the Mastering The Mix website.
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