Acoustic bass doesn't play sound

• Mar 18, 2017 - 21:05

Acoustic bass doesn't play sound when notated as an instrument in a composition. Other instruments play okay.

Comments

• Mar 18, 2017 - 21:14

Ciao judeeylander, could you attach here your score?
use the "File attachments" option at the bottom of the page, just above the Save and Preview buttons when you're typing your post.

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• Mar 27, 2017 - 21:40

You shouldn't need to do this, unless you are using a non-standard soundfont (somethng other than FluidR3 in View / Sytnthesizer). So something else might be going on here. Like, maybe the file was imported from MIDI, and the velocity information attached to those notes was already set to be very low? it would help if you attached your actual score so we can see. Generally, though, the balance should be pretty realistic. An acoustic bass is a lot quieter than, say, a cannon, or an overdriven electric guitar, so it would be normal for it to be hard to hear.

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• Mar 27, 2017 - 22:35

I am a volunteer for Distributed Proofreaders. We put Public Domain books online for Project Gutenberg. I work on the music team and reproduce often visually unclear scores for the books. We also include midi or mp3 scores for the enjoyment of the audio listener.

This project had guitar voices but was written like a piano score. The only way I could get the voices to sound correctly was to adjust the acoustic bass volume.

This is the link to the Dropbox file. If you would review my choices and give me a better direction, I would appreciate it.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/jlrub2a1drgqqen/El%20Payador.zip?dl=0

Thanks for all your help.

Jude

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• Mar 28, 2017 - 02:05

Are you perchance trying to gauge the balance using cheap computer speakers? They don'
t tend to reproduce bass frequencies well. Listening through decent headphones, the bass is actuaslly very loud in your example 0 much louder than it should be. Also, while I saw two staves in the score I looked at - labelled "Acoustic Guitar" and "Acoustic Bass" - both of them are actually set to acoustic bass as the sound. See for yourself in View / Mixer. So what you are actually hearing is a difference between very high notes and lower notes for acoustic bass, not a difference between acoustic bass and other instruments. If I set the top staff to guitar - which I assume it should have been all along - and play it back, the bottom staff is still too loud compared to the bottom. I then reset all volume controls to the defaults, and now the balance is correct. Again, if you listen through something capable of reproducing those bass frequencies well.

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• Mar 28, 2017 - 03:41

Unfortunately, it's impossible to get a mix that works equally on both bad and good speakers. Artificially pumping up the bass to compensate for bad speakers just penalizes those with better speakers. So that's why most mixing and mastering for professional recordings is done using good studio monitors even though everyone knows most people won't be listening that way. Although sometimes we tweak things just a little to not sound *too* bad on lesser equipment.

Anyhow, you don't need to invest much at all to get a much better idea of the sound. A pair of $15 headphones *over the ear, not earbuds) from a place like Target, Big Lots, etc will already be a huge improvement.

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