Ableton Forum

How do you guys go about getting a tight mix of bass and kick? For example, do you use a mult-band compressor on the kick to get it thicker/fuller? What about the bass?

I've read that it's good to compress both the kick and bass prior to compressing them both together (which is also recommended). However, I have no idea what kind of setting I should use or how to go about getting the correct setting; meaning ratio, threshold, attack. I know that it all depends on the track, but I'm not even sure where to begin...

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

Cheers,
MB

I like side-chaining the bass to the kick. duck the bass for a few ms out of the way each time the kick comes in.
I also like doubling my kicks with a very sub ultra low bass sound. basically making each kick sound a kick + a 80-200 hz sine or something like that
you get an extra oooomph!

Hi Mike,

I published a video lately that shows how i go about making a beat, you might find it useful; it includes layering and tuning the kicks. You can check the finished beat at the top of the page to decide whether you think the vid would be useful for you:

http://www.basementhum.com/2009/08/flyl ... ument.html

this is what i do:
- pick a good acoustic kick, layer it with a kick made with operator to make it deeper (something sounding like tr808 kick) ,layer with a sine operator sound around 50khz gated to one of the kick (treshold around -9db).
-compress the 3 layers with a very fast attack and high ratio like 8-9
-sidechain the bass to the kick, use your ears for the settings, by the way a fast attack is always suitable (apply a bit of gain , because using the compressor the overall sound may bleed a bit)
-send ALL these layers to a bus channel and compress fast and high

EDIT: i forgot of course that every one of this channels must be sweetened with a good EQ job!