Preparing bass-heavy electronic music for vinyl.
House, techno, drum and bass, grime — genres built on bass present specific challenges at the lathe. This article covers what actually happens in the groove and what you need to do about it before the file arrives.
Electronic music cuts to vinyl well. Many of the greatest records ever made are built around kick drums, synthesised bass and electronic percussion. But the physical constraints of a groove in plastic mean that bass-heavy material requires more thought than a guitar record — and a streaming master almost certainly isn't ready.
What the groove is doing with bass
Bass frequencies cause large lateral groove excursions — the groove wall moves a significant distance to encode low-frequency information. Very low sub bass causes the largest excursions of all. The stylus has to trace those movements accurately, which means the groove walls can't collapse into each other or cut into adjacent grooves.
When bass is too loud, or too wide in the stereo field, the cutting head runs out of physical space. The cutter either limits the cut level to compensate — meaning the rest of the record is quieter than it should be — or the groove damages adjacent grooves, causing distortion on playback.
Mono bass — the single most important thing
Stereo bass information encodes as a vertical groove movement. Vertical movements are harder for a stylus to track, and they eat into the available groove depth. Bass below approximately 100–120Hz in mono encodes laterally — the direction a stylus is designed to track most easily.
A dance music master for vinyl should have bass below 100–120Hz summed to mono. This is standard practice, not an unusual request. Most professional mastering engineers do this automatically for vinyl masters. If yours hasn't been vinyl mastered, this is one of the primary things vinyl preparation addresses.
Wide, diffuse sub bass — common in modern productions — is the biggest single cause of limited cut level on electronic music. Dealing with it properly is the difference between a loud, punchy record and a quiet, thin one.
What a good electronic music master looks like
Not identical to the streaming master. The streaming version is optimised for loudness normalisation — it may have had a limiter applied that compresses the dynamic range the groove needs. A vinyl master for club music should:
- —Have bass below ~100Hz summed to mono
- —Have peaks no higher than −1dBFS — hard clipping becomes groove distortion
- —Have limiting applied conservatively, if at all — heavy limiting kills the dynamics the groove needs
- —Have a side length that suits the format — shorter sides at 45rpm cut louder and track better in a club system
- —Be supplied as WAV or AIFF, 24-bit, at 44.1kHz or 48kHz
Side length and cut level for dance music
A 12″ at 45rpm with a side under 7 minutes cuts loud. Bass-heavy techno or house with a punchy kick and clear sub at that length, with a proper vinyl master, produces a record that plays loudly and tracks cleanly on a club system. That's the sweet spot.
The same track at 10 minutes needs narrower grooves to fit, which means lower cut level, which means less punch and less bass presence at volume. The difference between a 6-minute 45rpm side and a 9-minute 45rpm side is audible in a club.
If you have two tracks for a 12″ double-sided, two 6-minute 45rpm sides is better than trying to fit both on one side at 33rpm. The quality difference justifies the format.
Vinyl preparation vs a vinyl master
Vinyl preparation (£35 per order) addresses the technical requirements before cutting — mono bass, de-essing, level adjustment. It works best when the source is a clean, well-mixed export with some headroom remaining. It is not a substitute for commissioning a vinyl-specific master from an engineer who works in this area regularly.
For a serious release — something going to DJs, to press, to collectors — a vinyl master from a mastering engineer who understands the format is the right investment. The difference in the finished record is real.