How to hear your bass on an iPhone

Hey Nerdz! With all the advancements in speaker, headphone and Bluetooth technology, it’s sad how many people listen to music on their iPhones. I just listened to a song yesterday on a phone speaker. So maybe we should pay attention to how songs sound on these.

Here’s how you get bass present in the mix when listening on an iPhone or tablet.

It’s all about the harmonics. Most tablets have very little, or no output below 300hz. The Strings of a bass guitar are tuned from 41 hz on the low E to 98 hz on the G. So there’s pretty much no hope hearing any of the root notes.

When you record a bass guitar DI, it’s quite bland. There’s no tone really, it’s mostly just the root. They sound plain intentionally so that they can be like a clean slate to create the tone you want. Traditionally , a bass guitar gets plugged into an amplifier which gets overloaded into distortion, and that distortion creates nice harmonics. These harmonics are not random, they are mathematically related to the frequency of the root note. So if you take the root note away, you still have the tone from the harmonics, and your brain will fill the rest in a little bit.

So to get the harmonics, don’t just boost the higher frequencies with an eq. You can’t boost what isn’t there, and if you try to force it, it will be muddy. Use a amp plug-in, or a saturation plug-in to generate tone in the 300-1000 hz range. Then you can boost it with an eq if you want… but be careful not to overdo it in this frequency range, because it can get overloaded really quickly.