It is not, for the most part, the bad ears that ruin bass music when they are mastered. What it does not succeed is because of assumptions ingrained from other genres. These are the ones that keep on showing up.
One is to aggregate the low end and treat it like one block. However, even producers and mastering engineers will EQ the sub range as a single wide adjustment covering 20Hz to 150Hz; boost or cut and they are finished with it. Such static approach might work for pure melodic genres, but well, bass heavy genres does not happen like this. The 808 or reese bass sitting at 40Hz requires a different type of treatment than the kick punch situated at 80Hz, and putting them all in together is how tracks end up either boomy or thin with nothing in between.
2nd mistake– Not Consider Mono Compatibility This one comes up constantly. In a treated studio on full range monitors, it can sound huge, and then the second it strives through a device that sums to mono, that is an excessive amount of phones, bluetooth audio system or even some membership rigs - it loses all its backside stop. Generally, sub content below about 100Hz should be in mono by default. One of the quickest paths to a one-room-master is skipping that check.
Chasing loudness before getting the low end under control is third. Bass music culture promotes loud masters and that pressure pushes people to squash a limiter against an uncontrolled low end. The result is a track that hits high on an SPL meter but collapses under its own weight, losing punch and clarity in the exact areas of the genre it needs most. The solution is sequencing: sculpt the sub and bass with multiband compression first, then reach for the limiter once there is headroom to spare.
Fourth (and probably the most prevalent) is mastering your mix as a remedy for a poorly-constructed translation. Kick and bass masking one another, arrangements where we leave no room in the low end for anything to live, elements fighting for that 60 to 100Hz window. No. A mastering engineer can shape and polish, but there is no remedy for bad separation that should have been fixed in the mix.
Most of what sets apart a plug generic master from one that actually translates on the sort of sound system, in cars and smartphones at once is the avoiding of these four mistakes. Which is also partly why genre specific experience counts for such a lot in this little corner of production. With that in mind, Orange Polygon leverages the solution to these issues during bass music mastering, with a deliberate and genre aware approach to that low end in contrast to it being an automatic choice.
If your masters sound good in one spot, but fall apart everywhere else, the low end is not uncommonly where the answer lies.
