In the broadcasting world, the lower register of a voice is essential for conveying power which, subconsciously or not, the listener picks up on. For those in radio broadcasting, podcasting, or any profession where someone talks for a living, the more low end range you can bring out in a voice, the fuller and consequently better that voice sounds. Whether you’re approaching this from a singing vocal or a speaking voice angle, let’s talk how to add bass to a voice.
How to Add Bass to a Voice
Before we get into EQ and adding bass to an existing recording, let me just reference something I’ve covered before which helps to bring out more inherent bass in a voice on the recording.
As I covered in my overview of the proximity effect, the closer you get to a microphone while singing or speaking, the more bass which will be picked up. Conversely, the farther you get away, the thinner the voice will become, not to mention you’ll get more of the room reflections and less of a dry recording.
I mentioned this in that resource, but if you’ve ever seen a video of Howard Stern doing his show, he’s rarely more than an inch away from his microphone in order to capture the full richness and depth of the bass of his voice.
It’s also important that you use a microphone with a frequency response capable of capturing the full low end of your voice.
I recently did an entire overview of the best vocal mic for every budget and occasion. While I didn’t recommend the SM7B for vocals because of some limitations on the higher end, this is the industry standard for relatively affordable microphones for recording voice:
Unfortunately the cheapest microphones are typically liabilities and have blind spots on the low end, but I did recommend a number of solid affordable options in that vocal mic guide for bringing out the bass in your voice naturally.
Now let’s take a look at actually adding bass to a voice after the recording, beginning with EQ.
EQ
The 200-300Hz range is where the body of the voice, meaning its practical bass, resides.
As I covered in my voice EQ cheat sheet, a small boost in this range will add bass to a voice through that body:
For male voices, I would recommend creating a band at 200Hz and adjust the Q setting to reach 100Hz on either side.
For female voices, I would aim slightly higher at around 250-275Hz with that same 100Hz cushion.
How much you boost will obviously affect the amount of bass you’re bringing out of the voice.
I recommend capping the boost at 2dB AT MOST. Once you go beyond that, you’re no longer naturally boosting what’s there but yielding a disproportionate amount of low end relative to everything else. In a word, the voice will begin to sound awkward and unnatural the more you go beyond that point.
Regardless of how much you boost here to add bass to the voice, I recommend a dynamic EQ cut at 150Hz.
As I show in the graphic above, the “popping” sounds you get from the voice on hard “P” consonants exist at roughly 150Hz.
These are referred to as plosives, and are understandably very distracting to the listener.
If you’re boosting in that voice or vocal body range, you’re more likely to be boosting the plosives right along side them.
A dynamic EQ cut ensures that they exclusively get pulled down on those rare occasions of a plosive in the recording to mitigate their visibility in the mix, but that band isn’t being attenuated otherwise.
This is especially important when you’re also boosting just above that frequency like I mentioned to bring out more voice bass, so keep that in mind.
I talk more about how to do this in my overview of how to remove plosives from vocals, so refer to that for more information.
Saturation
Saturation typically targets the mids but a band specific saturator like FabFilter’s Saturn can be used to target the bass frequencies of your voice and add frequency information which wasn’t there before:
The above settings are nice when I need to thicken out and add bass to a voice and EQ isn’t quite doing the trick.
Band
Band specific saturators like Saturn are nice as they allow you to focus the saturation to a specific frequency range, leaving the rest untouched.
While this can sound a bit unnatural when use three or more bands, at least if you’re aggressive with the rest of the parameters, this works well on isolating the low end as I did by creating a band at 300Hz. Note that the second, higher band which encompasses the rest of the mix is unaffected by the saturation altogether.
Freq.
When you want to add bass to a voice for a male voice specifically, I target 175Hz, but conversely for a female voice I’d aim for 220-225Hz.
Drive
The “Drive” is what really… well, drives the sound of the saturation. This is the amount of the distortion which is getting blended into that frequency band we’re targeting. I find an admittedly aggressive 50-60% can work well, particularly on lower vocal parts or a speaking voice in general for bringing out more of that bass and body.
Feedback
Feedback is just that; add too much and you’ll create a loop. You can leave this at 0 to be safe, but I find a touch (under 2%) helps thicken the band out.
Tone
Note that whether or not you dedicate the saturation to a specific band, the tone controls allow you to add gain and focus the influence from the other parameters to a specific range of what you’re targeting.
Because I isolated this band to 300Hz and lower, the “treble” and “presence” gain controls won’t have much effect (unless you max them out which… yeah don’t do that).
But the “bass” gain control is perfect for configuring the sound you want to taste. I have it set to roughly 5dB in this example, but the perfect amount will vary from track to track and listener to listener.
The subtle warming distortion you get from these settings on the low end specific targeting saturation is effective for adding bass to a voice which didn’t have enough of it from the recording itself.
Whether the vocalist was too far away from the microphone, the microphone didn’t have an adequate low end response, or some combination of the two, a bit of targeted band saturation can sound wonderful for anchoring that body and to add bass to a voice when used properly.
