sweetbuss said: speaka...jst sat down with my big fat spliff and a phatter bass sound to soak up wat ur wrote ...i think u've almost given out the entire equation there....could you enlighten me a bit more on the Kick...i always always seem to have a rough time trying to get that right kick sound to syncro with my already PHAT bassline :iconfused



edit: what abt the mix level (anything to that) sometimes i feel when i lower the sounds a bit they seem to syncro like glue...any truth to that? Click to expand...

This is one of the harder bits to it, no doubt, and I'm fairly certain that I threw away many good kicks and basses because I couldn't get them to fit with each other.The idea with the kick and bass, is to try and get them to sound, approximately speaking, the same, like they belong to each other, or that they are one single entity.This, (IMO) in audio is achieved in several different ways, and we need to look at all of them.First up is overall volume in the mix - within 0.x of a dB, your kick and bass should be have very similar peak values in psy. Now what happens with two disparate elements when we match their peak volume is that elements of each sound start to disappear, as different frequencies become masked. So, having considered peak volume, we now need to consider the volumes of individual freqs. Well, I say individual freqs, that isn't what I mean, I mean in general terms, does one sound have more bass, or mids, or tops, than the others? Considering that the kick and bass operate in pretty much exactly the same area of the mix, and with exactly the same presence desired, it makes sense that if one is louder than another at some freq area, then one is going to stick out more than the other at that point.Maybe this is desirable, maybe this isn't - maybe we want the click of the kick to be louder than the attack of the bass or maybe we don't - but we need to control these elements to make sure that they are how we want them. I tend to do this using broad shelving EQs, because these are the least aggressively 'EQ' sounding, and allow me to rebalance large areas of the sound fairly easily. But take a look at the pictures below which speak a thousand words as to what I'm trying to achieve. This is my kick and bass that I'm currenty working on - note a lot of freq and volume similarity in general terms! And yes, the mid of the bass does come through slightky more strongly than the kick and the top of the kick is slightly stronger than the bass when I listen to it, and this is probably something I need to work on!Its important that while I'm adjusting shelf levels, I keep the peak between the 2 channels the same. Both need to be the same volume :iyes:. It is even more important to say that if something looked 'wrong' on the chart, but sounded right, I wouldn't hesitate to go with my ears!After I'm happy that they are 'close enough' I stick em both into a group channel and compress them. Just like we needed to consider the volume of individual freqs, we need to consider the volume of the kick and bass over time, and try and affect some kind of congruity between the two - which is where compression excels. Compressor settings aresituationally dependent, so there is not a lot of point in me going into massive detail apart from to say that the idea is, let the attack of the two channels through - which your ear will virtually nag you until it is right without compression anyways at the tweaking stage - and then compress the rest, so that the same dynamic sound is being applied to both parts which 'ties' them together with a similar sound. I set attack to around 20ms (lets the attack of the parts through) and release to around 50ms (fast enough to let go quickly, but not pump like a mofo). I set ratio to around 8:1 (pretty strong) and move the threshold down to the point where the gain reduction meter starts peaking at around 4dB. That is that for compression.Finally, I move the group channel fader so that the peak volume of the kick/bass group is around -10dB, so that I have headroom to work on the mix.In reference to your question on why quieter sounds better sometimes on kick and bass - our ears frequency response changes at different volumes - which could have something to do with it - you will focus on the peak volumes (which you are more likely to have mixe right) much more. In addition that, if you were really really driving your speakers at higher volumes, that will affect the sound, and in addition to that at really high volumes, your ears compress the signal that you hear, although it is no more compressed in the mix than it ever was!