Hey there,
I really love all your mixing tutorials. I've got 2 questions. Keep in mind I want to produce 2014 era big room (Blasterjaxx/ Showtek style mostly)
1.Do you sometimes bus process your bass and leads together when doing supersaws?
2 . How do you mix your kicks? 2/3 layers? Which plugins you like the best to process em?
Personally I've had ok results with Sausage (20-30% max), Waves Xtrans mono (bring up attack), and sometimes some extra parrallel distortion. Would like to know whats your favorite technique since your other tutorials gave me good results
Thanks alot!
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Short answer is NO. There are many misunderstandings with mono placement. Mono means not stereo, 1 channel vs 2 channels. So can we have mono meets stereo in the same stereo channel? YES absolutely, thats our master channel and for some a premaster etc. Most DAW automatically go to stereo. Some like me, make things mono in the mix, some just use plugs on the master to mono below certain freqs and dont mono anything in the mix. Additionally you can use free plugs like monomaker or this rack to mono below certain freqs. Leads are a beast of their own and i often add lots of additional stereo and reverb and for this reason, i dont like to mix the 2 in a bus or group. Lets say in your bass buss you layered an octave of a bass and you wanted it stereo bc its wide and maybe has delay or reverb. You CAN do this all day long, and i encourage you to bc its how you get pro sounding full wide bass however you have to keep in mind HPF. You need to HPF 100hz +.
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Big room kicks, blastersaxx kicks, etc. First lets talk what you need to build them. You need SUBS and CLICKS, i personally rarely go over 2 parts to big room kicks. So FIRST you need a decent selection of some BIG ROOM kicks, as well as a selection of your favorite kicks with amazing clicks. SO what we do is we typically leave the click part tuned as is, as most wont have a tone, we want our tone from our SUB PORTION. So what i like to do is use some of my favorite distorted subs etc and i will add additional BASIC processing to make it shine. Similar to getting a car, and maybe adding rims, tint, speakers, basic things, but things that really transform the car. Here is how i do it. BEFORE WE START ANYTHING WATCH THIS QUICK VIDEO BY HENRY FONG ON HOW TO USE FADES AND WORK IN AUDIO WITH YOUR KICKS.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RCy9v1MbNk4
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The sub. This guy is our blood and guts of the track, and its one of the biggest flaws on otherwise great tracks i hear on this sub. Those of you who i review tracks for on here know this and have made BIG improvements by making samples less straight out the pack. OUR GOAL WITH THIS IS TO CUSTOMIZE AND RESAMPLE. With the sub i like to drag A KICK WITH A HUGE SUB it right into the arrangement and get to work. Tune it to the track immediately. Next we want to soft HPF this 30hz-40hz depending on the key of the track. We also want to find a note freq chart, and boost the range that HAS TONE but is not PURE SUB LIKE OCT 1. https://artificialtunes.tumblr.com/post/8249542526/waves-in-space-part-1 LETS say we work in F we can see that the FEEL part of the sub is 21.83 (too low) and 43.65 (i would prob HPF around 30-37hz since below that is inaudible). NEXT we can see the TONAL parts as 87.31, 174.61, and up. This is where we will use ADDITIVE EQ (boosts) and we will SUBTRACT (notch) room for our click later. Maybe we chose a really distorted sub but its still to generic. I used to use several plugs for subs now im all about MB saturators like FAB FILTER SATURN. WITH an MB we can easily create bands, and apply multiple saturation, distortions, and bit crush all in 1 plug with out adding it to the ENTIRE sub, we can leave the low sub bass freqs alone. SO i cant really coach too much bc its preference, but i might take 250-350hz and add bit crush, or a very dirty distortion and customize the settings in the band. Next i will take 100-250hz in a separate band and i might add some saturation or less heavy distortion bc this is going to be processed mono on the back end of this tutorial and we dont need width on the LOW SUB PART, we DONT WANT THAT AT ALL, EVER!. Alternatively, you can use glitch 2 (amazing bitcrush, lo fi, modular, dist) within glitch you can adjust the freq of the bit crush, HPF, and use the mix knob as wet and dry for each setting. You can double up and apply this after even after you already used fab, depending if your needs are met. If you use live you can open a audio effect rack, use multiple saturators (keep we)(keep wet 50%+ set to freqs, distortion, bit crush, kick tight in corpus etc. If you go this route, make a new chain, and leave this as your DRY chain, set to 0.0, the other chain will be the WET chain (with all the fx) and you can use the vol like a WET/DRY knob so you can better balance your effects if they are too strong.
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Resampling. Once you have a bomb sub/kick we can rec this to a new audio track. Im not much for adding compression at this stage, we ARE however.. concerned with volume. Drop the vol so its -8 -12 -18 whatever, its doesnt matter as long as there is some headroom. REC to new audio track.
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Now we have a banging kick, quiet but banging, this is when we CUT the current click, and WE DROP A NEW CLICK IN. As i mentioned we dont need to tune this, but WE DO WHAT THIS TO PIERCE THROUGH THE MIX. So drag some clicks in and follow the henry fong tutrorial on how to use the FADE to make the kick SEAMLESS. With the click you may have to turn down the sample a bit to match the sub, do this as you please. Its great to have independent control of the seperate parts of the kick.
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Once your up and rocking with the right click, and the huge dirty sub part, we can start EQ. Lets HPF 30hz, lets LPF 16k. HENRY has GREAT ADVICE on where to NOTCH big kicks. Remember we already EQ the sub somewhat, but this doesnt mean its done. Lets continue to boost according to our chart, and make this guy shine, but at the same time... we need it to allow other things like leads to get through.
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Im BIG ON VOLUME and NOT on compression. I will use ableton compressor, i usually with start with something like attack 1-3, Rel A, Rat 2. We want to utilize the soft clip,or you can put a saturator on, even a limiter set to 0. We want enough to make it cohesive, and slightly alter the click (glorify the attck) HOWEVER AND THIS IS SUPER IMPORTANT. SAY YOU GOT THE KICK FROM A PACK LIKE KSHMR... ITS FREAKING GOOD TO GO, THOSE KICKS ARE A DONE DEAL, PROCESSED PLENTY. SO VOLUME HUH? yeah, We want to mix the track quiet, like so its -12 on the master. THEN WE RAISE THE KICK VOL to LOUD, this is why the kick seems so freaking loud.. BC ITS MUCH LOUDER THAN ANYTHING ELSE.
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MONOMAKER. If the top end of your kick has stereo, you need to split the frequency using a monomaker like this free one for live. http://www.mediafire.com/file/a3t2hxjh1i9fahe/FB+Bass+Mono+Maker.adg
Mono below 250-350hz and you will be PERFECTLY FINE!
This is basically a PROVEN recipe for pro kicks, and the method i would say 90% of producers use big room kicks use. The other 10% may have the sound design skills and the time to make their own subs. I can too, but to me its not as fun, and i can get stuck for 2 days on a kick. I have my samples i resampled and they work. Ill upload a few kicks if this tutorial does well. If you guys have questions just reply and ill answer. Save the hate posts though, if your not feeling it, move on. If you are im down to assist you in making your kicks legit.
BASICS ALL DAY
Hope this helps.
Submitted August 05, 2017 at 07:40PM by TurntReynolds https://www.reddit.com/r/edmproduction/comments/6ruso2/pm_question_answered_pro_big_room_kicks/?utm_source=ifttt