Mixing surdos or alfaias with bass

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ricecrispies
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Joined: Thu Apr 09, 2020 12:28 pm

Mixing surdos or alfaias with bass

Post by ricecrispies » Thu Apr 15, 2021 8:46 am

Does anyone have any tricks for mixing surdos and alfaias? I have bought a pack of Brazilian percussion samples, but I'm getting some very muddled sound in the low end of my mix when I try to use them. The usual trick for getting a bass drum to coexist with a bass guitar is to compress the bass while the kick drum is sounding, but surdos and alfaias have a much longer decay than you normally want from a kick drum, which makes that more difficult. I've got recordings and seen videos of Brazilian bands with surdos or alfaias, drum kit, and bass guitar all working fine together. How do they do it?

[jur]
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Re: Mixing surdos or alfaias with bass

Post by [jur] » Thu Apr 15, 2021 10:02 am

Did you try shortening the Surdos' decay a bit?
I have no idea how your samples sound, but you offen get very muddy content in the 250-350Hz area with this type of big percussions... which is an area where your bass lives a lot.
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