Bass looms large in modern music. It’s nothing new — the classic composers wrote music that included double basses and tubas hundreds of years ago, Leo Fender gave us the marvelous electric bass guitar in the mid 20th century, and eventually Ikutaro Kakehashi of Roland gave us the now ubiquitous TR-808 drum machine, the bass drum component of which has become a virtual standard, particularly in rap, hip hop and R&B. But in more recent history, music of every genre features bass in a much more pronounced way than ever before. This prominence in bass extends to styles of music played in houses of worship, and we must present it in a way that meets the expectations of our musicians, our congregations, and those who oversee and produce our worship services. Let’s dig in to this a bit, and tackle the Million Dollar Question: “How much bass is TOO much bass?”
In January of 2024, my home church recorded a live album, top-to-bottom, with a full congregation in the room. I did not track or produce or mix it, but I was the FOH mixer for the live performance, and the producer asked me to really punch up the low-end in the room. His goal was to get the congregation hyped up, to make a lot of noise and sing along. The amount of bass I dialed up initially was insufficient in his opinion, so he asked me to kick it up several notches. My eyes grew wide, and I gulped and said, “okaaaay.” I kicked it up several notches, and he said, “you’re allllmost there.” I gulped again and kicked it up a couple more notches. He pointed out that the album was never going to have anywhere near this much low-end, but he still wanted it to inspire our congregants to really get into it. And I knew that we could easily filter all this heavy bass out of our congregation mics at mixdown, so I rolled with it.
I looked at the event as an experiment. I would never be allowed to crank the bass this much during regular services, so this would be a “pushing of the boundaries” to observe the effect of a huge amount of low-end in our sanctuary. We have a solid system with two 18” subs fed by plenty of power, so I could dial up an amount of bass that most mixers and professionals would describe as “way too much.” At first, it really did feel like way too much to me, and that’s saying something, because I like a lot of low-end. Yet as the evening wore on, and my ears became a more acclimated to the mix, I warmed up to the additional LF. The overall across-the-spectrum SPL was also substantially more than we usually deliver, so the additional bass did not make the overall output particularly lopsided. This experience qualifies me to address the question of how much is too much, because it was definitely way too much.
Defining Bass
Ask any 10 engineers or musicians what bass is, and you’ll get 20 different responses. It’s kind of a subjective thing. If we divide up the frequency spectrum, bass is obviously the lowest segment, but where does it start and where does it end? Strictly speaking, it starts at 0 Hz, but it doesn’t really start becoming musical until we get up to about 20 Hz. From there on up, it extends to maybe — what — 150 Hz? 200 Hz? You see — that’s the struggle — some people will say 100 Hz, others will say 200 Hz, and yet others might even say as high as around 250 Hz to 300 Hz. So let’s just agree that we’ll never completely agree. For our purposes, let’s focus on the kind of bass that our parishioners feel — say 150 Hz and down. If we have distinct woofers and subwoofers, the woofers will probably take over the spectrum above around 120 Hz-ish and the subs will likely handle everything lower than that.
Bass behaves differently than higher frequencies. Its natural dispersion pattern is, for all practical intents and purposes, omnidirectional. The mids and highs in our spectrum tend to be a lot more directional, and the lower we go, the less directional it becomes. We can assemble subwoofer arrays to increase the directionality of the low-end, but it still wants to go everywhere. And by definition, bass waves are substantially longer than the upper reaches of the spectrum, which means that some of those low waves reach well out into the sanctuary. We need to be aware of this, because some bass notes might sound pretty darn loud in the middle of the room, and if our FOH position is way in the back, we may not be aware of it. In fact, I was recently approached by our producer in the middle of worship at my own church — he said “Hey — the bass is really weird right now — it’s not that loud up front, but it feels like too much in the middle rows.” Resolving this issue with acoustical solutions can be challenging and costly. We can heavily compress the low-end, trying to make it behave more consistently throughout the space, but it’s downright difficult to make it perfectly consistent everywhere in the room.
We also have a debate over whether to bake all the low frequency information into a single master fader or to divide the mix into low and high frequency ranges, each with its own fader. As a mixer, I prefer the latter solution because it gives me more control. At my church, we usually invite our congregants to the front of the room at the end of services to spend time with our prayer team, and the musicians continue to provide a musical backdrop throughout that time. Our subs are right up front, and I’ve found that I need to scale the low-end back 6 -12 dB, so people can converse without shouting at each other. Certainly, reducing the output across the entire spectrum would accomplish the same goal, an approach that’s also valid.
The amount of bass in our FOH mixes should be contingent upon genre. “Wait,” you say, “we only have one genre — religious music!” Ahhh, but that’s a pretty broad descriptor, and indeed, we have numerous sub-genres that vary quite widely in terms of sound. There’s gentle church music played by string quartets; window-rattling heavy metal; and there’s hip hop and rap; so, you get the idea. I’d guess that 75% of music played in church in the current era would be described as pop/rock, and the remaining 25% is comprised of other types. String quartets don’t need earthquake-level subwoofer output, but rap and hiphop do. And metal can require a substantial amount of low-end, although not every time. The aforementioned pop/rock category that dominates the church music domain right now features more bass than the pop/rock of decades past. In fact, at my home church, our worship team frequently deploys a synth bass in lieu of the electric bass guitar in order to get notes down below the E (or B) that most bass guitars deliver. To be completely honest — I truly do love lots of bass, and the lower, the better. It is a powerful and inspirational experience to hear and feel that deep low-end. Bottom line? The genre of music is probably the single most important determinant as to how much bass is presented in the spectral balance of our mix.
That Nagging Question
As we attempt to get a meaningful answer to our Million Dollar Question (how much is too much bass?) I’d say that an appropriate blend of the deep low-end with the rest of the spectrum is a key consideration: We want balance. As a rule of thumb, the more traditional the music, the less low-end we’ll present (with the notable exception of those 32- and 64-foot pipes in the mighty pipe organ!) Most modern worship music should be mixed with essentially the same amount of LF as most secular pop music. Meanwhile, religious rap, hip hop, R&B and EDM will probably present quite a bit more low-end.
But where do we draw the line? I know we all tend to scoff at octogenarian parishioners who complain that “the music is just too darn loud!” but if we start hearing those complaints from a substantial percentage of our congregation (particularly coming from younger people), perhaps the music IS too darn loud. If you have an trusted RTA, you don’t want to see a heavily lopsided display, unless the genre calls for it. Another thing to watch? If our church attendance demographic is beginning to skew younger and younger, that might be a sign that we’re making people uncomfortable with not just low-end, but too much overall SPL. Of course, the notion of “too much bass” is subjective and not scientifically measurable, but it’s important that the amount of low-end is in alignment with the genre of music and isn’t literally frightening people out of our church. The key terms are “genre-appropriate balance,” and “let’s not scare people away!”
John McJunkin is an adjunct professor at Grand Canyon University
