If you have any tips ranging from Basses, Leads, Arrangement, Drums, or Mixing/Mastering. Please Please Post them!!
1 BigUp
These type of posts are never gonna get you any help. You have to be more specific. Nobody is gonna spend the whole day writing down everything they know on the subject.
throw your laptop in a compactor
5 Likes
Work the google on the internet machine.
Well for start, can you reference a couple songs?
Next the thing you wanna do is make sure you have an understanding of brostep vs dubstep. Brostep IMO seem to lean toward harsher formant leads and basses along with some samples but Dubstep tends to have more mid bass structure. This guy agrees with me https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EMz98Hu1-P4 .
Making either genre is easier once you have a structure down. As far as sound design goes you can look up on youtube a lot of stuff about the artists you like. Virtual riot specifically has a lot of tutorials and livestreams you can work off of.
Here is a livestream https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6v-71yLhry0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lA_qxkrpM0M
Here is a tutorial https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hE3yEpdKOXU
I shall return with more this this stuff can get you started
also make sure you use Ableton or Cubase to make things easiser.
Here is a nice Zomboy and Spag heddy one
Leads: High pitch with vibrato
Basses: Use phasers and comb filters, they’ll help
Drums: Short, snappy snares and punchy kicks. Look through Vengeance sample packs. Also you might find some samples around online
Arrangement: Listen to songs you know of and see how they do it. Virtual Riot did a Studio Time series talking about all of these topics. You could put a song in your DAW and mark points where different parts start or finish (like drops, breaks, and all that).
I’m looking for some of these punchy kicks, and I don’t know what vengeance pack is the suitable one, any help?
1.get drum synth
2, roll ur own
3 - profit
Any of them. I like the Dubstep ones, although the electro ones would probably be just as good. Layer them, play around with EQ and compression (but not too much compression). Get one with a punchy high-end, a good hit for the mids and a soft low, EQ them and take out any unnecessary frequencies from each, and compress them together (or separately, if you like).
don’t make it seems like the most apt response.let them go back to watching Anime,Hentai or whatever they did before being a producer became the hip thing to do
Sure.
Bass
-
Use multiband compression a great one would be Xfer’s OTT or my favorite Fabfilter Pro MB
-
Concentrate on creating better patches vs. using tons of post processing
-
Throw in random pitch modulation in growl basses to get extra vowely sounds
-
Use M/S EQ to clean up the side signal of your wide bass sounds usually HP around 200Hz
Leads
-
Find presets you love and recreate them, tweak to your liking…
-
Again use small pitch modulation using envelopes to give your leads extra flavor
Arrangement
-
You probably know this but most dubstep / brostep whatever else ranges from 140-150, I’ve noticed many artists have been banging out tunes around 150 lately…
-
Use other music you like as a guideline to place where your breakdowns and drops should be. (Modify to your liking)
-
Lay out simple drum patterns for your entire song first and foremost (It will help you finish more tracks)
-
Use more repetition…Although you are trying to create “very complex” drops with tons of different modulations and timbres if you listen closely you will find more often than not the sub bass layer will be playing a very “danceable” rhythm with the mid bass going crazy over top.
Drums
-
Spend time creating your own drums, learn how to layer different samples correctly to get the exact sound you want.
-
Use transient shapers to get harder hitting drums. Softube makes a great one for just under $100.
-
Use saturation / harmonic exciters on cymbals to get crunchy hats and crisp cymbals.
-
Don’t forget to pan
-
Buy reputable soundpacks. Pick one and use the hell out of it. Spend time going through your samples and picking your favorite Kicks / Snares so you don’t waste time searching for samples when you sit down to write a song.
Mixing / Mastering
-
Don’t try to learn it all in one day! Although it may be frustrating not nailing the perfect mix right away learn to make small improvements on every song you complete.
-
Use frequency analyzers to study your favorite songs. A great one is Voxengo SPAN.
-
Watch out for clipping throughout your plugins
-
Use volume automation for sidechaining. I recommend Cableguy’s Volume Shaper.
-
Learn one new thing mixing a day and apply it to your project as you go.
-
Leave yourself some head room. A good starting place for you Kick would be around -10 db / Sub Bass around -16db.
Figured I’d at least give you a bit of my time this evening and try to help you out! 
3 Likes
U know normally I come into bro threads to discourage these posts cos they are usually full of “rules” AMD misinformation but this seems overall a very positive and helpful set of guidelines.
One this I will say is don’t be afraid to layer ur drums with samples that aren’t from big “reputable packs” cos those have often got very little vibe and ur drums will probs just sound like a not as good version of someone else’s for a while which can get annoying.
Do what John says
Yet…my mixes still sound sub par to me lol 
Spectrum Analyser’s will actually not help you mix,they can give you an idea of what is possibly there but it’s probably not where it says it is.the problem with spectrum analyser’s is they rely on FFT and that is always a trade off between time and frequency accuracy.if you set the “fft size” too low you get accurate timing information but the frequency information is squashed into the available amount of information (fft size)that you let the analyser "see"before it spits out the data.if you increase the fft size then you get a (sort of)more accurate approximation of the frequency information but transients are pretty much ignored so what you are seeing is not happening for as long as you are seeing it.also bare in mind that it works of predefined “window” e.g hanning,gaussian etc so the magnitude information and all the rest of the data is plotted a certain way which is most likely not an accurate representation of what you are hearing but you assume as much because that is what the spectrum tells you
The same problem applies to oscilloscopes,and furthermore, what both of them show you is what happens before A/D conversion (and a lot can happen there that changes the sound for the worse if you have been mixing with visual aids)depending on your converters they can really alter the colour and spectral balance of your mixes
I’m not completely shunning their use i’m just saying that i wouldn’t rely on them for any mixing decisions.a better option would be to learn to use a Spectrogram if you really don’t care about the timing information (i imagine a lot of you don’t)
Yea use ur ears the if u are really stuck use an analyser and set thebeindow size as long as u can if ur looking at frequency stuff IMO. I don’t use em cos I can never be arsed
I find them most handy when looking at reference tracks, not really looking at my own stuff. Any mid / side splitting, MB splitting, and frequency analyzers help really zero in on a reference track to figure out where the parts are sitting.
1 BigUp
Cool input guys. Been struggling with mix downs since forever though. Most of the information I put up was just me regurgitating everything I’ve really ever read or heard about mixing. Can’t seem to nail that “perfect mix”. The quest continues…