Destinguishing Kick drums from bassline

danvandamn · Post by **danvandamn** » Thu Sep 23, 2004 10:40 am

Apologies if my spelling isn't so great...

Has anyone got any tips in making a kick drum clearer and more defined when you have a pretty growling bass line?

Any tips appreciated!

Dan.

mosca · Post by **mosca** » Thu Sep 23, 2004 11:14 am

layer your kicks - get a nice 909 kick with a fast attack and then add a sub kick underneath, gentle eq and compression works wonders as well

mosca

Cryocon · Post by **Cryocon** » Thu Sep 23, 2004 12:21 pm

eq them so their frequencies don't clash. i usually work on the rule of thumb: Low frequency bassline, use kick with more mid range frequencies. Mid range bassline, use low frequency kick.

If you get the sounds right in the first place then you'll probably not have to do any drastic eq'ing.

3phase · Post by **3phase** » Thu Sep 23, 2004 2:39 pm

Use a Lowcut filter on the BD between 20 and 30 hz, experiment with the fine tuning...a few cents up or down can make a big difference...
Tuning of drumsounds usually does a better job than eq-ing

alternatevly you can low cut the bass, or booth.. a matter of taste..but you allways get the clearest sound when not too many instruments touch the lowest octave. especially on digital systems where the freq range goes theoretical down to zero...
On an analog desk every channel works as a lowcut allready by the prinzips of analog ampl circuits. This off cause dont helps when your cheap analog desk dont handles low frequencies propperly at all.
On big consoles you often reduce the bass in the BD channels or just push slightly because the signals are strong enough down there allready...

with lowcut i dont say 24 db lowcut.. 6 db or max 12 is usually enough to clear the situation and keep enough air moving

AS someone else stated ...of cause a good adjusted midrange helps aswell...but it cant clear mud in the lows

Pitch Black · Post by **Pitch Black** » Thu Sep 23, 2004 3:02 pm

Speaking of analog desks, A trick a friend of mine uses is to run the kick into two channels. One normal, the other with the input gain turned up so that the channel clips a bit at the input. With judicious mixing of the two, you can definately get the kick to sound tougher and punchier.

Moody · Post by **Moody** » Thu Sep 23, 2004 3:05 pm

I will offer a suggestion that somebody told me that made alot of since and seems to work. With proper compression and tuning, you will need little eqing or mixing. Basically make the sounds fit into the spaces available. And Have Fun!

noisetonepause · Post by **noisetonepause** » Thu Sep 23, 2004 8:49 pm

Shift them in time so as to make the transients clearer; and the transient is *very* important when it comes to making the sound cut through... the initial attack of kick and bass will be in a similar frequency range and the easiest way to distinguish them is to make sure they don't occur at exactly the same time. This is quite often a problem with MIDI programming.

-Paws

debu_ · Post by **debu_** » Thu Sep 23, 2004 11:35 pm

I'm curious what's a good program/technique to layer kicks? With wavelab/soundforge on pc, in the arrangment view on ableton, or is the a better prog or technique I'm missing? I've always had decent results with my single kicks but I'd like to give layering a try.... thanks for any tips, D

montrealbreaks · Post by **montrealbreaks** » Fri Sep 24, 2004 10:23 pm

Funny, I just PM'd somebody about this last week.

A trick I used on a couple of tracks (but I can't remember which now, sheesh) was as follows:

I would put a spike in the eq of the bass, a lot of gain with a narrow Q value, at the fundamental frequency of the bassline. That is, if the bassline was a low A, I would put a spike at 55, 110 or 220 Hz, depending on the sound and my mood. Then, at an odd frequency, I would put a steep dip in the EQ, say at 140 or 70 or something.

I would then eq the kick drum OPPOSITE to the bassline, so that the kick had a spike where the bassline had a trough, and the kickdrum had a trough where the bassline had a spike. This would allow them to mix well and not interfere with each other. It really gave good seperation between them I think. I would do the same with the full mix of pads, leads etc and the snare drum - that way the rythm would mesh with the harmonic elements of the track nicely, and I could apply more multi-band compression in the mastering phase of production than I would have otherwise - as the two would never spike at the same time at the same frequency.

L8er
Montrealbreaks

Moody · Post by **Moody** » Sat Sep 25, 2004 12:23 am

Wow! What is your website again?

montrealbreaks · Post by **montrealbreaks** » Sun Sep 26, 2004 4:05 am

Moody wrote:Wow! What is your website again?

ummm - mine?

http://www.garageband.com/artist/marcussterzer

I'm not dedicated enough to have my own website yet I guess... Just a hobbyist.

radder · Post by **radder** » Sun Sep 26, 2004 6:02 am

montrealbreaks wrote: I would then eq the kick drum OPPOSITE to the bassline, so that the kick had a spike where the bassline had a trough, and the kickdrum had a trough where the bassline had a spike. This would allow them to mix well and not interfere with each other. It really gave good seperation between them I think.

Yeah, what he said!

Well-explained, man!

Something else I try sometimes is to kill everything below about 70Hz AND use a high Q-value parametric EQ (spike as you say) of 6 to 12 dB somewhere between 80 and 100 Hz on the kick - this is based on the low band EQ and low-cut settings on a mixer. I would normally adjust the bassline against that to get the clearest mix. Sometimes it just needs a little high-cut sometimes you need to get fancy. Experimentation is definitely the key...

D K · Post by **D K** » Sun Sep 26, 2004 6:39 am

ok, here's an old analog trick
put a compressor on your bass, 3:1 ratio/ quick attack and release
run an aux send from your kick to a noisegate to clean it up
run the noisegate out into the key listen on the compressor
every time the kick signal hits the compressor it will will squeeze
the bass signal the amount of the ratio setting, holding it and letting go
depending on the attack and release times
this makes room for the kick transient while being able to maintain a
real nice bass level in the mix
you can get some amazing results with some tweaking
too bad you can't run a key listen from another track in live(or can you?)
hmmm....
dk

Pitch Black · Post by **Pitch Black** » Sun Sep 26, 2004 6:50 am

To follow on from the sidechained compressor trick, with lots of electronic music styles you might only have 3 or 4 kick patterns and a simillar number of bass riffs in a song (or less)

Its actually not that hard to automate "ducking" the bass at the clip level using envelopes. I do this all the time. When you can be so surgical and precise (read: anal??) whipping the bass volume down instantly under each kick hit, and then pushing it back up again, it sounds like really fat "melding" compression.

"I'm the anal bass leveller, twisted instigator..."

::mic-minimal:: · Post by **::mic-minimal::** » Sun Sep 26, 2004 9:08 am

try out spaceboy, they're raving about it over at kvr.

http://www.shareit.com/product.html?car ... UR,USD,GBP

Destinguishing Kick drums from bassline

Destinguishing Kick drums from bassline

layering

Re: Destinguishing Kick drums from bassline

Re: Destinguishing Kick drums from bassline