How to Get Your Low End Right Before You Master

I get tracks in with no weight below 80Hz. The kick has no body, the bass has no foundation, the whole mix sounds like it was made on laptop speakers. That's harder to fix than a mix with too much low end.

Too much I can manage. I can cut, I can tighten, I can reshape. Too little, I'm working with nothing. There is no low end hiding in the file waiting to be brought out. If it wasn't in the mix, it won't be in the master.

Most producers who send mixes with no low end aren't doing it on purpose. They're working on speakers or headphones that flatter the top end and lie about the bottom. If your monitoring setup makes your mix sound full and warm when it has nothing below 100Hz, you won't know until it plays on a real system.

The fix is simple. Reference other tracks in your genre while you're mixing. Play your mix on headphones, then in a car, then on a phone speaker. If the low end disappears completely on anything other than your studio monitors, it's not in the mix.

I tend to mono everything below 80Hz, most of the time. Stereo low end sounds wide in headphones and sounds like nothing on a club system. Mono low end punches through.

From 80 to 125Hz there's some flexibility — some stereo in that range can sound nice and it does translate. Above 125Hz is where stereo width lives.

If your kick or bass has wide stereo information below 80Hz, you're wasting energy. Mono it. You'll get more weight and more punch.

They need space between them. If your kick and bass are both sitting in the same frequency zone and fighting for the same space, neither of them will land. On a big system that will sound like low-end mush, not low-end weight.

This is also one of the main reasons producers book stem mastering. If the relationship between kick and bass isn't right, I have more tools to deal with it on stems than I do on a stereo file. Worth knowing before you book.

Always send a reference track when you submit for mastering. Something in the same genre, on the same kind of label, with the kind of low end you're going for. That gives me a target and tells me what you're hearing in your head. It saves time and gets you a better result.