a few but better work arounds than EQ
but in conjunction
less comp or limit on the master
move the bass away from the kicks slightly
or bounce bass to wav and literally cut holes for the kicks
hi pass kicks until you can hear they sound different - just in that lo lo 70hz and down
(really good idea to bounce bass to wav so you can see how long the bass tail is)
you can also cheat by making kicks out of the bass
its a lot about sample selection too
The source is what matters. Good sounds will sound passable with bad production, if you just set the levels correctly. Bad sounds will never sound good.
A direct comparison is what my photography teacher told me:
You can make a good photo better with post production, but you can never make a bad photo good.
sure. but i mean you can pick kick samples and bass samples that compliment each other so well, that you cant really know or hear which part is which part. - but the sum of their parts is a kick and a bass sound or like the low part of the beat section
imo you can make all sounds work - if you for example use a bad or poor quality sound and a sound that somehow compliments that first sound - in that sense there really aren’t bad sounds per se, they just do what they do
that doesnt mean that good quality sounds arent more easy to mix with, they def are - but you could also argue good quality sounds just mean sounds that are very characteristic
I knew you’d pull that card. If it works is all aesthetics in the end.
I meant it in a “does it fit?” way.
And I guess you could argue that the “artistry” comes in here; if you “know” it works or not.
Back in my day, [Free Download] was cool.
I started experimenting with setting up a dummy kick track that is muted to sidechain the sub.
yeah, one of the big things is a lot of things that sound good in a mix don’t sound as impressive on their own… if your sub is big and fat you probably want a midrangey short kick that doesn’t sound as big on its own but will cut thru better. also volume balancing is the number one objective in mixing above any type of processing ,and if you’re having trouble with the two playing together there’s a significant chance that much of the problem is the volume balance between the two being off
as hubb said, manually cutting the audio where the kicks happen is a pretty solid bet, essentially manual sidechaining but more precise and less messy. speaking of Gantz, I suspect on several of his older tracks he did exactly that but with the entire rest of the mix being cut during kicks/snares… seems like it might be jarring but it’s surprisingly smooth if you keep the timing tight. play around with it. I do sidechain my subs often but don’t take it for granted that it’s an improvement, always worth doing an A/B comparison. sometimes it’s best au natural.
if you’re writing in midi and have a kick and bass patch hit at the same time, ramp the attack in slowly, in fact I would increase until you can hear the space between the kick ending and the sub coming in, then decrease the attack again just until it becomes a smooth transition and it feels like a unified kick/sub hit again. you can even have two tracks of the same/similar sub with different attack portions if it’s useful. you really don’t need a subbass sound with a strong transient if it’s hitting at the same time as a kick or snare.
I also think of how one of the classic techno/trance bass patterns with quick staccato 16th note basses is to just drop the note that would happen at the same time as the kick entirely, yet the effect still sounds like one continuous roll of hits when you combine the two. totally different genre but you can apply the principle elsewhere. just some thoughts
Yeah, good tips here.
@sleeps one other thing, I know I’m kind of going off here, but keep in mind with tracks like that you’re listening to a really good mixdown that’s been sent to a professional mastering engineer and is polished and probably pumped louder than your tracks will be while sitting in your session. not really a fair comparison so don’t get overly discouraged if it feels like it doesn’t stack up. even the difference of a couple db or LUFS from mastering is going to make the final track sound much fuller and more impactful
p.s. if you’re interested I’d be happy to have a go at mastering one of your tracks pro bono and let you know what I did if after if you’re curious… just throwing it out there
The obvious thing that comes to mind is sidechaining the bass to kicks or just making space in arrangement
However as others said, sample choice and processing matters a lot. You can try experimenting with saturation and compression (multi/single band) and cutting or boosting certain frequencies before/after those stages, to get a different tone out of the kick.
Re:EQ, i use TDR Nova a lot, freebie, i feel that i can shape the sound a lot better with it than ReaEQ. Also has some neat stuff like Mid-Side or Dynamic EQ
salaam brother
I do this in most tracks, and make that dummy input midi so you can completely tweak at any point
TDRNova is the one, freeware too sleeps
Yep TDR Nova is top of the list at the minute.
Might go for an EQ with no spectrum visualiser thing. I think I rely on my eyes too much.
Yeah that’d be sick m8. Don’t know what pro bono means but as long as it doesnt involve boners then I’m in
Why would you sidechain a dummy kick track? Why not just sidechain to the actual kick?
ableton has one called EQ 3 often just easy to use that
For example, if you want the ducking effect in parts of the song where the kick is not playing.
Gives u flexibility to duck the bass where the kick isn’t, can mess with different envelopes on the sidchain that maybe ur actual kick doesn’t have. Or maybe u haven’t figured out the kick yet but you want to have everything else sit right. I do it all the time and sometimes its the dummy ducking that makes the final track