Greetings. I’m looking for a simple “bass boost” module or method. A common workflow is I create a kickass techno piece, and the bass drum just… needs more floor-shaking bass. Mindmeld Bassmaster only adds a tiny bit. And EQ modules seem to “take away” frequencies, not “add” them. I COULD do this with just EQs, but seems like overkill, when all I want to do is boost the bass of an audio signal.
Does this exist?
I feel like I may be missing something obvious.
Thanks!
Look up “ducking” - this is probably the most common use case for that technique. It suppresses the volume of other voices (especially used on bass lines) while the kick is sounding, thus making a more “kickass” kick.
There are lots of video tutorials available on this technique, including VCV specific tutorials.
Ducking is great advice, i use the Flag Oppressor side chain compressor to do this with basses ducked by the kick drum. Often there is so much “room” made for the kick I can turn it down greatly without losing its impact, very nice for other things popping out when the kick is actually turned down but easy to hear. When the kick is still anemic, I have started using DocB CLP to boost and distort the kick to taste. When the kick is just a dull thud it can be pretty boring, if the module you are using has pitch control, consider adding more envelope movement to the pitch by triggering an AD ( well just really decay) with the kick and feed to the pitch cv enough to get a big dive on the hits. Best of luck getting a thump.
EQ modules seem to “take away” frequencies
That may be phase-cancellation between the bands. Try single-band EQs such as these from RPJ:
Sometimes with a kick drum you can get a lot of mileage out of a compressor. Fast attack to reduce sharp transients or slow attack to increase perceptual punchiness, lower the threshold just a few dB below the peaks, ratio at default or slightly higher (1:4 - 1:8 range), hard knee, play around with with release.
My favorite bass-boosting module is The Preheater which is a paid plugin from Woldemar but really it’s just saturation and a low-shelf in the same interface so nothing you can’t get with other modules. Vult Debriatus is a nice saturator.
Another compressor trick is like the reverse of ducking, instead use the kick to trigger a noise gate that lets through a sine sub in the key of your track:
Thanks all. These are GREAT ideas, and I’m going to try them out! But I was looking for something… slightly different. I want to add more bass to ANY patch, just not beat-based. For example, I have some ambient pieces which include a nice bass drone, and again… the final mix just doesn’t have enough bass. The volume of the bass is fine, just not… “deep” enough. I COULD just add a sub-drone, or EQ the bass, but I was looking for just a “bass boost” to apply to the entire patch (or to 1 element, sometimes.) It may not really exist, but thought I’d ask around. I guess i could get by with EQ and Mindmeld BassMaster. I have good speakers, yet it’s can be a challenge to get VCV to “fill out” the rumbling sub-bass frequencies (if appropriate for the patch) I should think of this more during the composition - adding sub-drones and ducking compressing etc, but what happens is I forget, then the piece turns out perfect… except not enough bass. A better workflow would help. Thanks for the replies, everyone!
Hmm, a couple of thoughts.
If you solo your bass channel, does it sound/look the way you want? You really can’t make it any more bassy than what you have to start with.
You have referred to BassMaster a few times – I think maybe you are hoping it can do something that it can’t. It really just does two things: make sure the bass is in mono, and offer volume knobs for the two bands of the crossover. So if you have the crossover somewhere typical like 80-110 hz, which is sensible for the mono function, and then you turn the bass band up, then if your bass is anemic with very little signal below 40 hz, you are just turning up the 40-80 hz region and possibly changing the tone in the opposite direction for what you want.
Of course you could daisy chain 2 instances of bassmaster, or add another simple crossover ( I like StudioSixPlusOne LalaStereo) just to boost the sub bass. But again, if there’s no information down there, no amount of low boost will help.
“Fix it at the source” is often the best recipe, so if there isn’t enough sub energy on the bass channel, I add another oscillator an octave down there, or a pitch shifter.
Here’s one other technique I use, which might not apply to your drone situation if it’s truly a static drone for the length of the piece. My bass ‘drones’ tend to bounce around note-wise, so I just apply a simple algorithm to the cv: if the note cv is above -1.6v (or whatever) then add a -1 offset. This can be done many ways – for me, I use Submarine A0-101 to do the logic.
Might be worth looking into the concept of the “missing fundamental”. It’s a psychoacoustic phenomenon in which crafting harmonic structures in the lower midrange can suggest a desired lower fundamental.
There is a lot of information out there, you could e.g. start at:
Nice advice. Also from a mixing perspective, I think its good to always high pass instruments at the lowest fundamental, even the kick and bass. There is often a lot going on down there which is useless, especially around 20-30hz. Mixing bass is a challenge on its own, because the wavelengths are longer, and phase interference is more prominent.
High passing bass can introduce phase cancellation where there wasn’t any before so I would be careful with that. I don’t high pass anything intended for the low frequencies anymore.
That’s unconventional advice. Phase cancelation between what and what? I’m guessing between the filtered bass and some unfiltered bass?
Yes you are right, high passing causes phase shifts, which can cause frequency cancellation especially at low frequencies so better to use linear phase filters. I only meant that there is often unwanted info which clouds up the low end, making it harder to mix. But yes, use with caution.
It doesn’t help to boost bass if its a mess down there, but you can boost a clean sine wave until your walls start crumbling.
I’m not entirely sure between what and what but it’s demonstrated for example in episode 17 of Baphometrix’s Mixing Loud with CTZ on Youtube. Since my setup is not ideal for monitoring extreme low range I avoid high passing anything down there so as to not end up with unintended consequences.
Listening now… Boy! 5 minutes of defensive stuff! Haven’t gotten to content yet! Giving up - but I believe it. I’m guessing it’s phase on one instrument canceling out some other inst? Anyway can’t argue with “don’t do this unless you can hear what’s going on down there”.
I can. 
It’s often really hard to hear noise at 30Hz and lower, but it will eat up headroom and mess with other stuff. You can see it on a spectrum analyzer, and if you filter it out and can’t hear or see any negative consequences from the filtering, I would say yes do it.
And I would not advice using linear-phase filters for this. In almost every case, the phase shift is a vanishingly small problem, whereas the pre-ringing of a linear-phase filter can sometimes muddy things up pretty bad. Sure, if you have two copies of your bass and you’re highpassing one but not the other, you would have a phase problem. But when is that gonna happen? Just filter out what you don’t need and boost what you do.
At the risk of stating the obvious, if you want more low end in your patches, you need to generate more low end in the patch. That’s probably not very helpful! 
It’s difficult to add frequencies that don’t exist in the source material, but the only way I can think of is to buy the Host-FX module and use a plugin. Brainworx make one called subsynth I think, which is meant to add sine waves an octave down to beef up bass drums etc. I have no idea if it works as advertised.
Edit: here’s a link…
https://www.plugin-alliance.com/en/products/bx_subsynth.html
There are similar effects in the Airwindows suite, BassKit is one of them that adds a sub.
Good call, that’s worth a try for free. You do need to be careful with sub though, as someone else said if you can’t hear it and boost it too much, it ends up bringing down the volume of the rest of the mix.
Something I have found very useful is DF-CLIP 2 from Drumforge. As a VST plugin, you would need to use VST Host, but I think you will find it well worth the effort.
A single oscillator squarwave will give the phatest bass!
…. maybe also try out the fixed filter banks (bogaudio for example) or a notch-filter, get rid of some lower mids and push volume, if it is getting too quiet…. Cheers, dDom
