Can't bringt straight basses into the mix

Saftstein

Active Member
VIP Junglist
Joined
Jan 8, 2014
Location
Austria
What's up people,

Today i'm struggling with a new tune I'm working on. The drums are pretty simple, a old sampled break with a fat kick and clap layers. The drum in solo sounds exactly as i want them to sound.
I got a pretty distorted bass for this tune, made in massive -> Two detuned saws and just a lot of effects. It just plays long notes with some variations. Underneath a Triangle sub and on top some FX stuff (white noise, and a top end bass layer).
The whole tune is in Eminor and i'm pretty sure all the Drum hits hit on an EMinor chord. The problem is, when i play the reece together with the drums the whole drum set sounds kind of compressed, the bass doesn't give the drums air to breath. I tried sidechaining it heavily to kick & snare. The straightness of the bass gets lost and it doesn't sound good at all. I also tried to cut out some frequencies where the kick and snare hits, also without success (the bass sounds weak afterwards).

Seems like i can't fix the problem with volumes either. If i put the bass back the whole tune leaks pressure, if i put it up, again the drums starting to sound bad. How can i manage to get air between heavy reeces and drums? If i compare to other tunes you can clearly say that kick and snare have a certain region where they can do whatever they want, aswell as the bass that sits on top of it.
I'm starting to get desperate :D
 
have you tried pitching the drum bus up or down a semitone? also maybe dampen the 7500-20khz of the reece, helps the brightness of the drums cut thru and isn't really needed to make basses sound big
 
Last edited:
Why not post a few bars of the drums and reese? Not enough to lift your stuff if you're worried about it, but enough to have something meaningful to suggest.
 

Okay guys here's the audio. First part is with 2 scrap yard oscs and second one is with 2 saws. Both detuned and with a little LFO on it. [MENTION=26766]RUSSLA[/MENTION] cheers for the help, will try it, but theoretically it would sound shit if all the drum hits lie on F and the track's on E, right? Hmm yea, music's not always about theory :P
[MENTION=92719]smoothassilk[/MENTION] cheers, already did that :)
 

Okay guys here's the audio. First part is with 2 scrap yard oscs and second one is with 2 saws. Both detuned and with a little LFO on it. [MENTION=26766]RUSSLA[/MENTION] cheers for the help, will try it, but theoretically it would sound shit if all the drum hits lie on F and the track's on E, right? Hmm yea, music's not always about theory :P
[MENTION=92719]smoothassilk[/MENTION] cheers, already did that :)

Imo tune your kicks, the rest is down to taste and subjective to the track i think. So in that case, just pitch everything else but the kick maybe

- - - Updated - - -

will listen later btw
 
I assume you've got some multiband compression on the bass as well as the drums. Try cutting back on the compression of both, and then to bring the loudness back up compress them together with a slow release. It would help to have some frequency content about an octave up in the kick since it sounds like it's mostly one or two frequencies for the body and it blends into the reese, so try saturating the kick or layering something with more harmonics over it. The bass of the kick and the bass of the reese sound like they're at about the same frequency range so you could lower the bass of the reese and when you later put it all through a multiband compressor you can bring the bass back up and when the kick plays the bass of the reese will be ducked and then slowly brought back up.
 
tune sounds fine to me mate, saw version that is - more weighty (y) maybe a bit more eq work on the bass/cleaner distortion, snare a touch brighter possibly. otherwise sounding aight
 
You describe your kick as "nice and fat" - I suspect that is the problem. 'Fat' kicks generally have lots of bass in them which if you have a bass sound playing at the same time you really don't need. Fine for house or hip-hop but can be tricky in dnb. You can either pitch up the kick, or, if you don't like the way that sounds, put a high pass filter on and cut out some of the unnecessary bass from it. You can normally cut out pretty much everything below 50/60Hz without a massive difference.

The basic problem is that you only have so much volume to play with and when your kick and bass play together your compressor squashes the pair of them together as best it can. You can mess around with compressor settings and side-chaining but really that should be your last resort. The first thing to try is turning the volume of one or other down. Cutting the bass from your kick turns the volume of the kick down without losing its dynamic impact.
 
You describe your kick as "nice and fat" - I suspect that is the problem. 'Fat' kicks generally have lots of bass in them which if you have a bass sound playing at the same time you really don't need. Fine for house or hip-hop but can be tricky in dnb. You can either pitch up the kick, or, if you don't like the way that sounds, put a high pass filter on and cut out some of the unnecessary bass from it. You can normally cut out pretty much everything below 50/60Hz without a massive difference.

The basic problem is that you only have so much volume to play with and when your kick and bass play together your compressor squashes the pair of them together as best it can. You can mess around with compressor settings and side-chaining but really that should be your last resort. The first thing to try is turning the volume of one or other down. Cutting the bass from your kick turns the volume of the kick down without losing its dynamic impact.

Thank you mate, that's really helpful.
Gonna cut dat bass out of dat fat ass kick and i'm sure it will be better. I also heard that kicks should peak between 90-120hz. Mine peaked around 75hz, so I pitched it up 2 semitones and got it now around 87hz which already works better
 
Thank you mate, that's really helpful.
Gonna cut dat bass out of dat fat ass kick and i'm sure it will be better. I also heard that kicks should peak between 90-120hz. Mine peaked around 75hz, so I pitched it up 2 semitones and got it now around 87hz which already works better

Definitely having your kick around the 100Hz mark with a high pass cutting the low end boom of the kick is pretty standard i think. I know that you should try new things and not follow the same rules as everyone else but drum and bass has so much low end activity you need to have your kick dodge the bass as much as possible.
 
I managed to listen in to the clip [MENTION=97225]Saftstein[/MENTION] and I think it sounds perfectly fine, the kick is big and pronounced and the reece bass is large too.

Is this the revised version, with a pitched up, eq'd and ducking kick, or was it always like this? Because I don't hear a problem with it
 
Back
Top Bottom