Audacity Forum

...remove a little excess bass in a recording?

Would it be a low pass filter? E.Q. the recording? Any suggestions out there?

I am editing a concert that I recorded and the bass sounds a tad bit overwhelming. Or is there no way out of this one?

What I probably should've done was to turn on the low cut on the Edirol R09HR, but that's too late for this particular recording.

Assuming a rock concert, then yes, the audience gets weapon's grade bass from the large cabinets and it usually drives recordings nuts.

If all you have is high bass, you should be able to use Effect > Equalization > Graphic Eq. Flatten it if it isn't already. Pull down sliders to the left starting with a high of about 250Hz. Apply it and listen to what you did. Filters don't work in real time.

You can select a portion of very heavy bass and Analyze > Plot Spectrum. The purple haystack on the left side should give you a good idea how to configure the sliders. Pull the spectrum view wide and tall and it will give you more and more information and detail. Select higher and higher Sizes for yet more detail.
It's possible to have too much detail. The equalizer isn't perfect.

What normally happens in unprotected rock concerts is the bass overloads the channel and causes crunching, clicking and popping. That's the end of the show. You can't easily recover from that. If you crash the Edirol R09HR capsuls, no downstream bass attenuator is going to help. That's why you want a dynamic microphone and hardware attenuators for a concert.

Koz

darshun wrote:...remove a little excess bass in a recording?

Would it be a low pass filter? E.Q. the recording? Any suggestions out there?

EQ the recording (Effect menu > Equalization)
Move the low frequency sliders to a lower level - low frequency sliders are on the left, high frequencies on the right. http://manual.audacityteam.org/man/Equalization
This will work provided that the recording did not overload and cause "clipping" distortion.

A "low pass" filter is the wrong direction - it "passes" low frequencies and blocks high frequencies.