What does a mid-bass hump sound like!?

Well, basically, anything with that hard-hitting impact sort of bass, like from a kick drum, will sound louder than normal.  Basically just more bass.  Not the deep, rumbly kind, but the kind that goes "wham."  It doesn't necessarily have to be loud enough to start covering up the other frequencies, but it can get there if you start adding too much.

 

Yeah, things like a bass guitar would sound a little bit louder too, but those are a bit more in the sub-bass realm.  Basically if you turn up an EQ's "bass boost" function that's what a mid-bass hump is.

EQ your headphones for a 100hz hump and see what it sounds like.  ;)

 

My experience with midbass hump was more slap and loudness to drum hits-- both real and fake. Bass guitars and kick drums to me moreso lie in sub-bass.  I also think sub-bass gives more rumble and impact than mid-bass, whereas mid-bass just gives you a little punch, or slap.

Edited by TMRaven - 6/7/11 at 10:43am

Don't know what real instruments would really represent a good midbass hump (other than the kick drum reaching up to that range but often goes a bit deeper though as well), but you could always try EQing, 125Hz slider on a typical 10-band EQ would represent that to bring that range in a more dominating manner.

 

Electronica (especially hardtrance) uses a lot of midbass bassnotes because they hit hard but rather fast decay, here's a good example of midbass without the subbass presenceness (at the intro at least, later on deeper bass is added on top of the midbass notes too) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NpgzpxVk7qU

 

Or you can try headphones with strong midbass hump and subbass roll-off like D1100. :p

Edited by RPGWiZaRD - 6/7/11 at 1:09pm

From a quick youtube listen that sounded very much like upper bass or midrange (lower-midrange if you want to more specificly classify it, there's ofc no written in stone labelling), I'd say somewhere around 200 ~ 350Hz from a quick guess out of the blue. Shortly said midbass should still sound like "bass", take a listen to pure sinewave test samples of different notes or frequency sweeps to locate whereabouts whatever bassnote or instrument you're trying to compare with lies. 

 

Here's one site that hosts a few frequency test tones. http://stage93.com/sound-check/

 

Personally I'd classify the frequency response range as following

 

sub-bass:    0 - 80Hz, 

mid-bass:    80 - 150Hz

upper-bass: 150 - 300Hz

lower-mids:  300Hz - 1000Hz

mids:          1kHz - 2kHz

upper-mids:  2 - 4kHz

lower-highs:  4 - 8kHz

highs:          8 - 12kHz

upper-highs  12kHz+

 

Suppose it's something more unfamiliar for people only listening to real instruments and bass and not trance addicts like me with computer generated bass. :p 

Edited by RPGWiZaRD - 6/7/11 at 3:33pm

There you go, nice midbassy song:

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WQYsGWh_vpE

 

IMO, this is how a midbass hump sounds like. And btw, toms are midbass, snare drums not really.

i love portishead and trip-hop. good stuff.

i like this track as well from a game i recently played(Alan wake)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XJto4kpU3lw


don't know why it's listed as psychedelic pop. defiantly sounds like trip-hop to me and has nice mid bass impact..

Wow I'm puzzled... maybe what I thought to be mid-bass all this time was actually the mids o.0

 

You have 3 beats on that song: 2 lower, sub-bassy ones, then a higher -feels-like-mid to me. So I would guess it's tom-tom-snare? The toms are midbass, and the snare is a mid; or the toms are sub-bass and the snare is mid-bass?

I'm not sure if you can get the full effect off youtube, but Ghostland Observatory's Holy Ghost White Noise has a drumline in which you can eq both the lower-mid bass around 50-60hz and then mid-bass of around 100-120hz to get different emphasis of the synthesized drums in its drumline.  You can do it through the iTunes store, but I'm not sure where else you could do it unless you already have the file.  EQing the midbass will give you more slap, while the lower mid-bass to sub-bass will give you more slam.

On the Portishead song, there's a kick-drum, snare, bass and synth. I picked that song because of the nice, warbling bass line, along the synth.

I don't listen to a lot of electronic music, but for some really nice, slammin' toms, there's always Tool:

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wSyEkrnsvH8