Waves Bass Rider (Download)

Bass is the foundation of most tracks. But mixing bass is a challenge, because low frequencies are hard to reproduce and hear. Heavy compression is a workaround, but it alters the attack, tone, and sustain. Automating levels manually can sound better, but it’s tedious and imprecise.

Bass Rider provides consistent bass levels throughout your track, by controlling the bass’s gain automatically to maintain a steady target level. And because there’s no dynamics processing, the sound quality remains pristine.

Balanced Bass for Better Mixes

Even slight level variations can cause bass to drop out of a mix. Bass Rider monitors your bass track, and raises or lowers its level automatically to keep your bass at a specified target level.

Get the Perfect Bass “Touch”—Automatically

Some bass players lack a pro’s precise, steady “touch” that gives consistent levels. Bass Rider compensates by evening out individual note levels. This balances the overall bass sound, and helps the bass sit better in a mix.

Keep Bass Dynamics: No Over-compression

Engineers often use compression or limiting to solve a bass’s level issues—but such processing can crush the dynamics. With Bass Rider doing the heavy lifting, you can use compression more subtly, just for its character—while keeping your bass’s dynamics.

Not Just Bass: Tame All Low-End Elements

Bass Rider is optimized to work with all basses—electric, acoustic, synth bass, upright, anything. But it’s also useful for other sounds, like kick drum, or conditioning guitar to deliver a consistent signal level to amp sims.

Advanced Optimization

Bass Rider can ignore sounds you don’t want leveled, like string buzz and squeaks. And when playing live with a mic’ed amp or upright bass, set up Bass Rider to suppress spillover and leakage from other instruments.