Re: mixing kick and bass help
2015/11/30 18:08:56
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What bapu said.
Also, unless you're mixing for playback on club systems or setups with seriously good subwoofers it's generally not a bad idea to high pass everything around 50Hz with a steep roll-off below that point before the final compressing/limiting is done. Nearly all playback systems apart from those can't handle anything below that frequency (or even an octave above it) in the first place, and if there is inaudible stuff going on down there it can still have a lot of energy, which can build up and trigger compressors/limiters skewing mix finalising/mastering.
One trick for adding a bit of prominence to kick drums is to slightly boost the frequency around the smack of the beater hitting the skin - what that frequency is will vary depending on the drum/sample. If you're using synthesis-generated drums doubling them with a fast, brief tom-tom or low-pitched "rimshot" that's pretty much nothing but the initial transient can do a similar thing.
Also, either as an alternative to eq or an additional thing, try using side-chain triggered compression to duck the bass during the kick's initial transient. To do this put a compressor on the bass track after any compression you may already be using. Any compressor that accepts a sidechain input will do. Then set up a pre-fader send on the kick track/bus with destination set to the compressor's side-chain. The compressor will now trigger whenever it gets a strong enough signal from the kick track. You'll need to adjust the track send level and the compressor settings until you find a good setting.
It's even possible to only trigger the sidechained compressor at specific points so it doesn't trigger on every kick strike or with a response that doesn't folow the volume or duration of the kick sample. Instead of creating a send on the kick track, create a new audio track and put a pre-fade send to the compressor sidechain on it. You can now place samples of pretty much anything on that track, set the track fader to zero and use that track just to trigger the compressor on the bass exactly when and for how long you want. To vary the compressor depth vary the volume of the samples on the trigger track, etc.
A quick-and-dirty alternative is Wave's One Knob Pumper run on the bass track, but it's not as configurable as the sidechain method.
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