Bored? Doing some mindless paperwork? Set your playback computer's soundcard to examine itself (recording source = playback) and then fire up your favorite spectrograph program and play some tunes. Glance over every once in a while to see which ones have prominent activity below 35Hz.
I am using Smaartlive and I tweaked it for decent resolution in the LF region. I have the display narrowed to 16-100Hz, sampling rate 32k, FFT 32k, resolution 1.0Hz. I tried some finer resolution settings with a lower sampling rate but the refresh is too slow and drives me crazy.
Lots of songs have
something down there but not very many have it as strong as the stuff above 50Hz.
Grassy Knoll's The Common Good (from the
Positive album) has strong thump stuff happening down in the 33-26 Hz range.
Harold Budd (an ambient kind of guy--think "massage music") put a steady, chorused 29-30Hz tone underneath his A Stream With Bright Fish. Strong at 38-39, too. And 58. And 80.
Incubus' Aqueous Transmission has the occasional 30Hz thump in the bass line.
Jon Hassell and bluescreen in their song Destination: Bakiff (
Dressing For Pleasure) get some beefy 32.8 Hz on the first beat of each measure--except where it bumps up to 36.9 Hz. They also drop some 36.9 on the song Sex Goddess.
No Doubt's Hey Baby does a little downward walking bass line at the end of phrases... it goes 41-37-33.
Korn & NIN: Freak On A Leash... bass line alternates mostly between 36.9Hz sections and 55-58Hz sections.
Peter Gabriel's In Your Eyes gets some good 30Hz bass notes sustaining underneath during the verses. There's also a fairly good 30Hz underpinning in the first half of Passion from the
Passion soundtrack, though 60Hz is a lot stronger. Same album gives some nice, long-held synth bass tones underneath solo oboe on With This Love. 32-58Hz... perfect for the house of worship monster sub test. Turn it up, you virtuous madman.
Lenny Kravitz's redo of American Woman has a pretty complex kick sound which has energy from 20 to 100 and higher. Lots of 39, 37 and a fair amount of 30. Of note is the 50.6 Hz range where the sound stretches out longer in time.
There are a number of Ultra Chilled double CD sets and the first one (numbered 01--there's some jailbait wearing light blue on the cover) has Deep Dish doing My Only Sin with a relentless 37Hz thump along the bottom. On another track in the set is Massive Attack doing Hymn Of The Big Wheel where you find 29-39-44 serving a I-IV-V bass line. Plus lots of 80Hz faux kick.
Madonna's Ray Of Light doesn't have a lot of super LF action but there's a notable bit of 22Hz before the bridge and then coming out of the bridge there's a synth chirp sweep progression that starts down at 16Hz (!!) and climbs up.
From another post:
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Christina Aguilera's Can't Hold Us Down has some 32.8 Hz synth bass action that extends slightly in time past the 65.6 Hz harmonic above it.
The bass in this song serves as the kick drum line as well--makes me think of 808 drum machine... The majority of the song has bass notes that are mostly four 52.1 Hz (probably Ab1) beats followed by a line of 32.8 Hz (probably C1) beats. Some of these are double hits.
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-Bink (paperwork is my kingdom tonight)