Tags: posts polarity-music Bitwig Tutorial Mixing

Debunking Low-Cut Myths and Phase Alignment in Kick and Bass Mixing

Tutorial | Dez 04, 2025

Many audio tutorials promote fixed rules like always using low-cuts, sidechaining, or resonance removal, but these can mislead beginners because every sound and mix context is different. The real key to effective music production is problem-solving: listen, identify issues relevant to your track, and apply processing purposefully based on the specific situation rather than following trends blindly.

You can watch the Video on Youtube

Short Overview

I wanted to talk about some common audio production trends like always using low cuts, obsessing over side-chaining, or putting resonance removers on everything. These rules are often taken out of context and don’t always apply; every mix is different and you have to make decisions based on what actually serves the sound. There’s no universal process that works for all situations, and sometimes the techniques people are warning against can actually solve specific problems if you know why and when to use them. Good production is really about listening, understanding the issue, and solving it in a way that makes sense for your track.

I want to talk honestly about some popular trends in the audio and social media production worlds, and get a few things off my chest. There’s a lot of advice being circulated, sometimes with a one-size-fits-all attitude that doesn’t fit the real art of mixing and problem-solving.

The Problem With Blanket Advice in Audio Production

There are several extreme “rules” that keep getting repeated, like never using a low-cut filter on certain sounds or that every single track must have heavy side-chaining. Another trend was to put resonance-removal plugins like Soothe on everything, which supposedly “cleans up” a mix, and before that, it was all about putting low-cuts on everything for cleaner headroom.

But here’s the truth: none of these are universally right or wrong. There is no static process or set-it-and-forget-it rule that should be slapped on every mix regardless of context. Every decision in mixing is about context, trade-offs, and the specific problems you want to solve.

Mixing Is Problem-Solving

Making music is fundamentally about problem-solving. You need to ask what your sounds are doing and what you’re aiming for. Then you consider the trade-offs, what do you lose or gain by applying a particular process? Is the trade-off acceptable, or should you try something else? That’s how you make intelligent decisions.

Deconstructing the Kick and Bass "Phase Problem"

Let me illustrate this with a constructed example. Imagine a typical kick drum on the first track and a bass on the second, visualized in an oscilloscope. A lot of tutorials warn that if your kick and bass tail overlap in frequency and aren’t phase-aligned, you get cancellation, loss of low end and volume.

But to even create this “problem” I had to go out of my way. In most real music, kick drums are not perfectly tuned to match the bass. Even if they are, it’s usually a rare and deliberate case. Most of the time, I make my kicks very short, especially in genres like drum and bass, to avoid this whole issue. I often use a little side-chaining to duck the bass, but usually only in areas where the sounds actually overlap.

Contexts Where Frequency and Phase Clash Might Matter

For this problem to seriously matter, several conditions have to line up: the kick drum needs to be unusually long, the tail of the kick has to be tuned exactly to the bass, both must play at the same time, and your bass never changes note. This is rare in modern music and especially rare in situations where electronic music producers work mostly with samples and not live drum recordings.

Low-Cutting as a Tool, Not a Rule

Many tutorials claim you should never use a low-cut because it messes up phase alignment. This is misleading, if you understand what the EQ is doing, you can actually use a low-cut to correct phase issues. A low-cut moves the phase, and in some perfectly constructed situations, this can help align the kick and bass rather than make it worse.

For example, there’s a myth that low-cutting always ruins the phase, but in my demonstration, using a low-cut EQ fixed the phase alignment between kick and bass. It adjusted the waveforms so they lined up better. If you know what’s happening under the hood with your plugins, you can use these tools deliberately rather than blindly avoiding them.

Linear Phase EQ: When and Why It’s Used

Some recommend always using linear phase EQs to avoid phase shifts. But linear phase processing introduces latency and can sound unpleasant on drums due to pre-ringing and attack smearing. These artifacts can make drums sound like poorly encoded MP3s with obvious artifacts and loss of punch. Linear phase EQ is useful in some multi-mic recording scenarios, especially for aligning tracks recorded with different microphones, but that’s a niche problem outside what most electronic producers face.

Multi-Mic Recording vs. Electronic Production Realities

A lot of the absolute advice about phase and low-cutting comes from the world of recorded acoustic instruments, like live drum sets with multiple microphones. If you’re a recording engineer, sure, you’ll want to be careful about phase issues when blending tracks. But for 90 percent of people producing music on computers, this simply isn’t a daily problem. Most of us aren’t recording our own drum kits with multiple mics.

So, What Should You Do?

If you naturally encounter phase problems or frequency clashes, address them as needed. But do not fix problems that you do not actually have. Listen to your music. If you hear something wrong, use your tools and knowledge to identify, and fix, the real problem. Do not apply blanket processes just because some tutorial says so.

In summary, learn what’s actually happening with your sounds and respect the context. Use your ears, understand your tools, and solve actual problems in your mix. Making music is about creative problem-solving, not following dogmatic “rules” that may not even apply to your situation.

Key Concepts Explained

Low-Cut/High-Pass Filter:
A tool that removes frequencies below a certain cutoff point. Useful for cleaning up unnecessary bass energy but can also shift phase, which may or may not be an issue depending on context.

Side-Chaining:
Ducking one sound (usually bass) when another sound (usually kick) plays. Used to create rhythmic movement or avoid frequency masking, but not required by default.

Phase Alignment:
Making sure that two waveforms line up in such a way that their peaks and troughs reinforce, rather than cancel, each other. Problematic mainly in multi-mic recording or deliberately layered samples but not common in most DAW-based production.

Linear Phase EQ:
An EQ mode designed to avoid phase shifts in the frequency spectrum but at the cost of added latency and often pre-ringing artifacts.

Final Thought

Always use your ears and knowledge, not fixed rules. Understand the tools at your disposal and make choices based on the unique needs of each mix. Mixing is about context, problem-solving, and musical goals, not blindly obeying trends or dogma.

Full Video Transcription

This is what im talking about in this video. The text is transcribed by Whisper, so it might not be perfect. If you find any mistakes, please let me know.
You can also click on the timestamps to jump to the right part of the video, which should be helpful.

Click to expand Transcription

[00:00:00] So I need to get something off my chest and it's about low-cutting sounds and the current trend in the audio
[00:00:05] Social media production world is like you should never add a low cut to anything or to
[00:00:11] Certain type of sounds because it messes up your face, which is kind of wrong. It's it's not completely wrong
[00:00:17] and also
[00:00:20] Another trend is like side-shading a lot of beginners are obsessed with side-shading
[00:00:24] I made some videos about this and a lot of people are talking non-stop about side-shading
[00:00:28] It's basically the whole track is only side-chain. So it's but they have like one one track one kick drum one
[00:00:34] Bass drum and then they fiddled around for one hour just to implement a side-chain correctly, right?
[00:00:39] The trend before that was like you have to put a soothe on everything just to remove the resonances which
[00:00:46] Kind of makes no sense because the resonances are the sound you remove the resonances from the sound
[00:00:51] You remove the sound from the sound more or less and you are left with just noise
[00:00:55] So you need to keep some resonances in there and the trend before that was like you should always add
[00:01:02] low-cut on everything just to cut it clean and to
[00:01:05] Free up some headroom to make it louder
[00:01:08] So everything is kind of wrong in my opinion because there's no such thing as a
[00:01:14] Static process that you put on everything all the time and it's like top, right? You need to always look into the context
[00:01:23] What's my sound doing? Where do I want to go?
[00:01:26] What's the trade-off is the trade-off okay for me in this case?
[00:01:30] Do I need to use another process because this trade-off is not okay for me, right? So this is how you make
[00:01:36] decisions and
[00:01:39] Also, it's like problem-solving so making music or music production is like problem-solving all the time
[00:01:45] you need to see what's the current status and where you want to go and
[00:01:50] What's the the way or the goal and where you want to go what you need to do and so on?
[00:01:54] So that's problem-solving and I want to show you here an example
[00:01:59] So this is like your constructed thing
[00:02:02] I have a kick drum here in the first track and a bass on the second track and it looks like this here in the oscilloscope
[00:02:08] I prepared this actually
[00:02:10] So this is the kick drum down here and this is the bass sound so what they usually tell you in these tutorials is like
[00:02:18] Oh, your kick drum here
[00:02:21] Has the same frequency in the tail as the bass sound right when you overlap this here
[00:02:27] You can see oh, they cancel each other out. They are completely opposite, right?
[00:02:31] So this one here cancels this out and then you are left with a lot of quietness or low volume, right?
[00:02:38] So this is how they
[00:02:40] Kind of explain the story
[00:02:43] So here is what I want to tell you first before we go into the details first up
[00:02:47] I really had to construct this to make this problem appearing
[00:02:52] Usually your kick drum is not tuned to your bass
[00:02:56] There are probably tutorials out there to tell you tune your kick drum to your bass and it maybe can have some
[00:03:03] Interesting effects, but it's something you probably don't want to do
[00:03:08] Because you can just cut off here
[00:03:12] The attack of the kick drum and just leave the bass then here coming from the bass
[00:03:18] So you make the kick drum very short and then the tail here from the kick drum is not non-existent
[00:03:24] And you just leave then here does from the bass coming through
[00:03:28] That's what I do in my in most cases on drum bass my kick drums are very short
[00:03:34] So at least 80 milliseconds long
[00:03:37] Not longer and then I have also side chaining to duck the bass away when the kick drum comes in
[00:03:42] even though it's not always needed because here in the
[00:03:46] Pitch drop phase the frequencies are much higher than the bass, right? So they can play
[00:03:52] fine alongside each other and you maybe only need here in this area then a bit of
[00:04:00] Side chaining to duck the bass away. So anyway, so this is always a
[00:04:05] Already a rare case where you have like this long kick drum here
[00:04:09] Which is not happening to me at all in most cases, maybe in hip-hop when you produce hip-hop
[00:04:14] Then also the next case is like that the frequency of the tail is exactly the same as the bass sound which never
[00:04:23] Happens from from nowhere. You have to really tweak your kick drum to reach to these
[00:04:29] bass or bass sound levels
[00:04:33] And then of course another case is that the kick drum plays at the same time
[00:04:39] Of the bass sounds we have always the kick drum playing at the same time when the bass is playing
[00:04:45] And then also that the space sound is never changing
[00:04:49] The note it's always playing on the same note on the same frequency every time in the kick drum place
[00:04:55] Because it can always happen that you have a kick drum laid on and the bass sound goes through right and then
[00:05:00] Yeah, the phase is completely different than the phases here in the beginning, right?
[00:05:04] Then you have another problem. So that's what I want to tell you for the beginning
[00:05:10] So it's already a rare case where the kick drum is tuned to the bass and the bass the kick drum is long enough
[00:05:16] So the tail reaches to the bass
[00:05:19] sound
[00:05:22] Sometimes I have also here a kick drum that goes from the pitch drop here through the frequency
[00:05:28] Of the bass so it goes lower right it starts higher than the bass and then it goes through the bass frequency and then goes
[00:05:35] Below the bass sound so this is all also sometimes happening and yeah aligning near the phase doesn't really do anything
[00:05:44] so
[00:05:47] So we can also here put this on top of each other and can see it's not aligned, right?
[00:05:51] So you can see we have no
[00:05:55] No low cut here actually on anything. It's just a kick drum and the bass nothing else
[00:06:01] There's no EQ or anything on that and it's not aligned, right?
[00:06:05] so out of nowhere the phase doesn't match which is
[00:06:09] Completely natural you can't just take any sound put them together and can see the phases not aligning
[00:06:16] Maybe it's coincidence, but most of the times it's not aligning by default and that's completely fine
[00:06:23] right, so here this would be a problem because the base of the
[00:06:27] Kick drum is exactly the same frequency of the base. So we have a problem here. Okay, so this is a constructed problem for me
[00:06:35] So what we can do now here is we can add an EQ EQ 5
[00:06:42] And remember the phase is not aligned. Okay, so now I put here a low cut this one here and I go lower
[00:06:53] Let's see here
[00:06:55] Okay, you can see
[00:06:59] Maybe a bit lower a bit higher
[00:07:04] You can see the kick drum the tail of the kick drum in the base is now completely aligning right here
[00:07:13] Plus one is plus one at the kick and it's come. It's perfect the aligned
[00:07:18] It's the same frequency and it's completely phase aligned, but we used here a low cut for that
[00:07:23] How can it be most tutorials tell you you should never use a low cut?
[00:07:28] Because it messes up the face
[00:07:32] Here we use more or less this offset the face offset to
[00:07:37] Offset the face of the kick drum to align the kick drum with the base. So it's exactly the opposite
[00:07:44] It's like used as a tool when you know what's happening here with an EQ
[00:07:48] You can use it as a tool and you can correct certain things instead of messing things up
[00:07:54] Okay, if you know what's happening you can always use it as a tool. This is also something and that's very important to know
[00:08:01] So not always by default low cut is a problem
[00:08:05] You can still low cut everything you just need to know what you do in what kind of
[00:08:11] Circumstance or what kind of situation and then it helps you or it makes something worse or bad or
[00:08:16] Whatever you want to call it. Okay
[00:08:19] Okay, so let's see how this actually sounds here
[00:08:22] Yeah, it's not much difference even though it cancels out here you probably lose some loudness here
[00:08:39] But like I said, this kick drum is way too long for my taste. I cut this much shorter
[00:08:45] Well, I would cut this much shorter here
[00:08:49] Maybe use the amplifier here. So my kick would be at least this long right and never reaches really here
[00:08:56] The low frequency of f1
[00:08:59] It's even shorter here, right something like this
[00:09:04] So you have maybe one or two things here
[00:09:07] This is basically here where it starts to match right and this is what you then lose in loudness
[00:09:12] Which is it doesn't matter at all most of the times
[00:09:15] It's not it's not the best to have this of course, but it's also not a big problem like most people make that make
[00:09:25] Tell you this is the biggest problem ever it loses a lot of
[00:09:31] Loudness or whatever it messes up your mix, which is not true at all
[00:09:35] So, yeah, this is like
[00:09:38] The problem with low cut so you can use locate more or less like an offset and you can use it to make you help
[00:09:46] to
[00:09:47] Bring the face in the right position for something if you want to if you want to me or if you need to do this
[00:09:53] Another benefit of this EQ here is that it's completely latency free you can see here on the left side
[00:10:00] There's no latency compensation. So it's real time. It sounds good and
[00:10:04] Yeah, you don't mess up your PDC graph, right?
[00:10:09] You have introduced a lot of latency in every corner of your project, which is not something you want to do
[00:10:14] So usually in these tutorials you get like a tip for using
[00:10:20] Let's use your pro q4
[00:10:26] We have here this linear face mode, right?
[00:10:29] So they use this or give you the tip that you should use this for low cut
[00:10:33] So let's increase here the kick drum again a bit more
[00:10:38] Amplitude can see by default here
[00:10:42] The faces are not aligned, which is okay. And then you bring in here a low cut
[00:10:47] in the linear face mode and
[00:10:50] You can cut this here
[00:10:53] But still the face is not aligned. So there's no face shift
[00:10:57] Introduced here by using the linear face mode. You can do this here with the zero latency mode. Yeah, it's possible
[00:11:05] Maybe bring us back here
[00:11:08] Right so we can align here the face with zero latency linear face not so much
[00:11:14] So the thing with linear face is it introduces
[00:11:20] latency 106
[00:11:23] here
[00:11:24] That's really it's a lot one of the six
[00:11:27] Maybe you can switch this here to natural face, which is just seven point six, but you get the idea you get some latency
[00:11:35] with this
[00:11:37] And also it sounds horrible on drums if you have this here on linear face and cut this here
[00:11:43] Maybe let's listen to the kick drum here
[00:11:51] Can really hear
[00:11:53] You can really hear the pre-ringing it messes up the attack
[00:11:58] And if you put this on it on a drum loop with snares and hi-hats and kick drums, it sounds really horrible
[00:12:04] I would never do this
[00:12:06] Maybe in a few years people tell you it's aesthetics, but
[00:12:11] At the moment, I would say it doesn't sound good. And if you put this on a drum loop in
[00:12:17] In the mix. It's it doesn't sound good. It sounds like something is encoded with an mp3 encoder or something like this
[00:12:25] I
[00:12:26] You know in this direction. I have a lot of artifacts from that. So I would never use this
[00:12:31] In any case so linear face mode is something I use very very very very rarely
[00:12:38] Maybe because I'm not a recording engineer because most of these problems and these
[00:12:45] yeah, kind of solutions come actually from the recording industry where
[00:12:50] Record like multiple sounds you have like a drum set and then you record drum set with multiple microphones
[00:12:58] You have like a kick drum from from this microphone a kick drum from this microphone and you need to put it together in your
[00:13:04] Session and of course if you have the same kick drum and you want to layer the same sounds on top of each other
[00:13:10] You need to align them and this is I think where this kind of problem and this
[00:13:16] all this
[00:13:18] Problem-solving stems from but I would say 90% of my viewers or people that are on YouTube
[00:13:25] watching this
[00:13:27] Never recorded their own drum set or anything like this or muti microphone recordings. No one does this
[00:13:35] Only a few recording engineers and if you do this if you have a studio if you have a drum set if you have multiple
[00:13:42] Multiple microphones and you record a drum set with multiple microphones. You're pretty pretty much aware of this problem already
[00:13:50] So you probably don't need to watch a video
[00:13:53] Of course, I need to yeah. Hmm. That's that's a problem. You need to solve right?
[00:13:59] You know this already if you buy multiple microphones you
[00:14:04] Encounter this at every point that when you put multiple recordings together that you have like phasing issues
[00:14:09] You can hear it already just by putting these sounds together
[00:14:12] so
[00:14:14] Also for people that just want to mix kick and bass most of the times it's also not a problem like I said this
[00:14:21] Problem never really arises. Naturally. You have to really force the kick drum into the frequency range of the bass
[00:14:29] You have to have a very long bass drum
[00:14:32] You also have to play the kick and the bass at the same time and you also need to never change the frequency of the bass sound
[00:14:40] In the patterns, right? It's always on the same position
[00:14:43] And also if you have multiple kick drums at different positions in your pattern and the bass sound at different
[00:14:50] But you need to match everything you have a lot of work to do just to align everything and to make this problem
[00:14:57] This is what I want to tell you in this video. I hope it makes sense to you. I
[00:15:01] Hope it explained it in in a way. You can understand it
[00:15:06] so yeah never
[00:15:09] actually
[00:15:10] Concern about these type of problems just listen and if you hear something that's wrong
[00:15:16] Try to fix it and don't fix anything. That's not a problem and
[00:15:21] Yeah, just just listen to it and learn what's what's going on in your sound and what's messy
[00:15:27] This is up your audio and what's just making your project complex for no reason
[00:15:33] Okay, that's it. Thanks for watching leave a like leave a subscription. See you next video. Bye
[00:15:38] (claps)