The Battle Against Phone Speakers

With the run up to Christmas being ever busier, I have made sure to use up what ever little free time iv had for little creative ideas. I like to finish ideas so I can export them locally or send them to SoundCloud even if here isn't much too them. Doing this has two benefits for me, firstly it gives me a nice little bank of inspiration for when I need them and secondly it stops me from keeping tones of half baked projects that clog up my computer memory. When doing these uploads I try to ensure the mix is optimized for phone speakers as this is what I will most likely go back to them on. This brings me to the actual point of this post... phone speakers!

The last demo I worked on had a particular focus on the bassline which I soon found out wouldn't play nicely with phone speakers. The channel in question was a pretty clean bass guitar DI that was running through the stock Ableton amplifier. While it sounded pretty punchy through my monitors, in reality it sat in a place that just wasn't being picked up in a phones frequency response. My first thought to fix this was a simple volume increase... this imminently drowned out the rest of the mix. It was clear I had to learn how to better fix the issue so I did some research and found out some interesting stuff.

The most important thing I learned was that phones frequency response looks a little bit like this. This means that anything sitting below around 600Hz is getting cut pretty substantially. This isn't good news for a bass guitar sitting at around 300Hz. At this point I realized that my solution wasn't volume but frequency. That's where saturation came in. Instead of just making the bass louder, i found out that I could instead create more resonant frequencies in the channel so the bass sound could start to creep its was up the frequency spectrum. In testing it would seem that even a small about of resonance can make a big difference to perceived volume in the low end.

In addition to bringing to bass into a more prominent frequency range. I also learnt about the importance of controlling what is allowed to use those prominent frequencies. The more elements that fill the 600 - 6kHz range the more muddy a mix can feel. By being aware of what I want the driving force of a track to be I can tailor the EQ of each track appropriately. In the case of my track it would be allowing more space around 600 - 700Hz for the bass to creep in. Overall I feel like this made a difference to the track I was working on this week. If you want to see for yourself, here it is!