Mixing In Pro Tools - A Beginner's Guide

Now let's look at the bass guitar. I recorded this bass guitar (a Fender Jazz Bass) directly plugged into a Vintech 1272 preamp; as such, it's got a fairly hot natural signal. Let's start by adding a compressor in the inserts box again; this time, choose the "Basic Bass" preset. Bring up the bass until you like how it sounds against the kick and snare.

Now here's one thing to notice: do the kick and bass sit in a pocket together, or do they sound on top of one another? In this recording, I can clearly hear that the kick drum is dominating some of the low-end frequencies that the bass guitar should be giving you. Let's take this into consideration, and go back to our kick drum track. We'll need to add some equalization - a processor that adds or subtracts certain frequencies to help with the overall sound of a track.

In your inserts area on the kick drum, let's insert a 4-band equalizer (in Pro Tools 6.9 and below, the 4-band equalizer is a more simple interface; just follow the same settings and you'll get the same results). Pull down the low end around 80hz until you hear the bass starting to mesh with the kick drum instead of laying on top of it. Then, bring back some of the high-mids around 1.8Khz. You'll hear everything in the rhythm section coming harmoniously into place.

Now let's move onto the vocals.