can u tell me

if i have the Kick in the center

and bass on 100% left or 100% right.

(assuming they share important frequencies)

are they clashing or not?

basically i'm trying to understand if panning one of them (100% left or 100% right) solves the issue completely or not

thanks

EDIT: this is not just for kick and bass

ASSUME VOCALS + GUITAR OR SYNTHS better

so does panning Guitars and Synths 100% left and 100% right for example solve the masking problem with the vocals (if vocals are in the center?)

 

Last edited: Sep 3, 2022

Oh, where to begin in order to break it down?
Kick and bass are placed in the mid/mono channel for the most part. They are also usually panned center, even if they might have some spatial information in the Sides channel. This means they are sharing the frequency range of the Mid channel.

Some kicks have pitch envelope and sweep down in frequency (just like physical kickdrums on drumkits), making the occasional kick as the instigator. The kick "rings out" into the bass so to speak, making them dance together as one (in time). The percieved impression is a tonal kick (as used everywhere in trap, for example). General rule is that kicks have more "punch" in the lower mids and bass have more energy in the bass and sub frequencies.

Besides the frequency aspect you also have the time aspect, where the bass can duck under the kick, whenever the kick hits. That way they don't overlap/mask too much.

 

Last edited: Sep 2, 2022

The bass frequencies are everywhere, always.
You can pan them, but you'll hear them everywhere anyways.
No, it does not make any sense to pan the bass frequencies.

The fundamental misunderstanding people have in this regard is, that they misinterpret the bass drum in it's function as a primary instrument, while it actually should behave more in the background.

The problems with frequency "clashing" mostly appear in electronic music. And that is because of bad sound design.
The acoustic bass drum usually never clashes with the bass instrument, because the characteristic differs on a very fundamental basis.
In electronic music, people have chosen to not differ that much anymore, because the bass drum and bass synths are extremely saturated today. Then those frequencies clash and understandably, the characteristical difference get's very marginal.
Acoustic bass drum fundamentals are at ~40-60Hz, while acoustic bass frequencies are at ~80-100Hz.

So, it's basically a sound design problem. Not a panning problem.

 

Last edited: Sep 2, 2022

The lower you go in frequency, the less directional it is to our ears and brain. That is why there is little point in panning low freqency range sounds and so kick and bass are usually panned to the middle (equal vol usually, in stereo speakers or a sub can be put almost anywhere convenient away from walls etc).
Bass frequencies can clash and double or null. A lot depends on your room or setup. For that reason a very loud low frequency is often a bad idea in a song. Played in the wrong gear or in a bad room it can sound shit.

As said above you can double bass with kick or separate them by time and ducking. Suck it and see.

A lot of electronic music is fd up by trying to range over too much spectrum in the bass. As said above there are the fundamentals but each instrument also has overtones in much of the frequency range. bass may run from ~80 cycles to ~5khz or much higher for harmonics and pick sounds.
The trick is to make room so that there may be clashes but each instrument can breathe. Dynamics or ranges in volume are really important and sadly lacking. Nirvana made an artform of dynamics.

 

Last edited: Sep 2, 2022

No

 

You could always resort to side-chaining your Bass guitar channel to your Kick drum channel or even synths and vocals etc. Every time the kick hits, it'll duck your bass guitar volume by a few db's depending on your settings. It all depends on what you are trying to achieve.

Be careful about panning your bass guitar to the sides, they could cancel out in mono.

 

Speaking strictly about masking, no. You'll get a different type of masking (Not really, but it beheaves differently) compared to what you get if everything was in the same side.

To put it on veeery broad terms, frequency and time masking can be either ipsilateral (if sound comes from the same side) or contralateral (if sound comes from opposite sides). To keep things simple (because i don't know enough about it to go too deep), contralateral is sharper, meaning frequencies need to be closer for masking to happen, but it can still happen.

Now, that might make a difference in headphones, since you probably won't have to deal with as much masking as if everything was on one side, but outside headphones left and right channels are kind of iffy and at any given moment that contralateral masking can become ipsilateral, so it's probably best to play it safe and treat it as ipsilateral from the beggining (which is one of the things you get when you check in mono).

Speaking outside of masking also no, but everyone else already commented on that.

 

my guessing game entry is that it depends where the subtractive eq is done then, and when you bounce. on the channel strip of your mixer it would be pre-pan. so your eq is what is removing any overlapping/clashing frequencies. if you pan it and bounce, without any reductive eq'ing done; your stereo pan may have a chance to affect this first. This also assumes a relatively low pitched vocal source in the first place, or no masking is going to occur with your 60khz sine wave sub and so on.

 

Last edited: Sep 3, 2022

hi there
good question

when you have a signal in center with no stereo information (mono) it is playing on right and left speakers equally which means it will mask(clash) any other signal that have same frequency on right or left (right speaker signal will be masked if you pan 100% right and...), whether they are 100% right or 100% left.

some problems can be solved by using Side-chain in Multiband compressor or Dynamic EQs .
if your work does not contain many layers of instruments or sounds I suggest using simple EQ to avoid masking the overlapped frequencies.

Best Luck
enjoy Creating Music

 

To be honest I don't really care much about frequency masking.

 

Last edited: Sep 3, 2022

Best bet for me was so far sidechaining the bass with the kick drum.
EQ/Compression also works wonders not much else that can be done about that.