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NEBULOsity
IsraTrance Junior Member
Started Topics :
26
Posts :
78
Posted : Mar 26, 2014 09:12
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I think that if you have sub in range 30-80Hz and mid in 80Hz-4KHz you have to place crossover to 80Hz but you have to use special filter for this purpose with flat response.
Look here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Butterworth_filter
If you use another filter you must find frequency where phase effect disappears. So low pass and high pass will have slightly different freq.
  https://soundcloud.com/nebulosity |
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the five assed monkey
IsraTrance Junior Member
Started Topics :
22
Posts :
145
Posted : Mar 26, 2014 13:07
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The following quote is taken from an article written by Nate Raubenheimer aka Protoculture:
Bassline:
"Most of my bass lines consist of two or three parts, or layers, usually split in to the main bass line, and one or two mid bass parts. I find layering to be the best way to get anything sounding big and more interesting, specially in a world where we've all become accustomed to just using presets from rather thin sounding VST plugins. Don't go overboard though or you'll end up with a messy mix. Simple is usually better. Try duplicating the midi tracks and assigning different sounds to play the same notes.
Main Bass Line
When it comes to the main bass line, it has to be rock solid. Its the driving force holding everything together in a track and needs to be 100 %. I usually turn to plugins for this simply because the envelopes are usually tighter, and I like to leave these tracks as a instrument track right until the end of writing the tune rather than bouncing to audio. Funnily enough, I've often found that the really simple, and sometimes crappy VST's can be great for this kinda stuff with a bit of work. My personal favs though...
Linplug Cronox 2 (not 3, dont like it at all) - seem to be using this loads
Spectrasonics Trilogy - Check out the saw waves (the prophet wave is particularly nice)
UHE Filterscape
I usually just use a single saw oscillator (you can add a sine or sub pulse if you need extra bottom, but I find with the high bpm stuff it usually just causes problems in the mix) with the LP filter set to zero and quite a high envelope modulation amount, with a tight decay. Easy and simple. The hardest part now, is getting stuff to sit right.
Thats where my favorite plugin of all time comes in, Quadrafuzz. Don't know what I'd do without this baby. Stick it on your bass without even touching any controls and you'll already hear things tightening and fattening up. I actually don't do to many drastic edits with this, but it depends on what you're working on, my partner Tamir from Atomic Pulse uses insane levels on each of the eq bands, and then turns down the master gain to lessen the distortion and it works for him, although usually with different plugins (he uses the Big Tick Rainbow quite often)
Next up is a decent compressor. I like to use the Sonalksis Comps for this. They're not the most transparent compressors, but they do have a nice "twang" for things like electronic bass lines. I normally use a ratio between 3:1 and 5:1 with hard knee enabled, and set the threshold according to how much I need to squash the bass. There is a nice feature called "crush" which you can play with as well of you're looking for a harder sound. Also, fiddling with the attack will allow you to tweak that "click" in the attack of the sound a bit.
Now down to the eq. A lot of people don't spend nearly enough time with this and its the most important effect in your arsenal. You really need to listen carefully, and dont just listen on solo, you need to hear in context with the rest of the tune. I often come back to the eq several times during writing a tune to tweak things if I have added new sounds or key changes.
Its difficult to give you examples of this as its always different from track to track, and from sound to sound, but I'll give you a good starting point I use quite often. In Cubase, I start with the lo eq, and I usually leave this set to Hi Pass II as it enables the q. I usually just slope off stuff from about 30 or 40 hertz, leaving a gentle bell at around 50 to 60. Lo mid, or eq 2 I put at around 80 with a fair amount of q, not too much but enough to bring out the lo stuff along with a bit of punch. Then I cut out a bit around 400 - 500hz with eq 3, again a fair bit of bandwidth, but not too much gain as to hollow the sound out. This usually leaves a nice gap for the mid bass which comes later. Finally I change the high shelving to parametric, and give a small peak anywhere from 3k to 6k, just to define the tops a bit, but be careful in that range, to much gain there can be a problem.
Mid Bass
This is where you can really get creative with your bass lines. Bass lines are usually quite mono sounding as you loose punch if you go to stereo. This is where the mid bass sounds come in for me as I can really spread these out over the stereo field without loosing the drive from my lo end. There are chorus plugins that will let you chorus just the high end of your main bass line but I've never found one that does the job properly. I prefer to rather have a different sound all together. For this you can use pretty much anything you want, but I often get these sound from Atmosphere and NI's Massive, or from why Virus and Blofeld.
I follow pretty much the same procedure as before, adding quadrafuzz and a compressor, but the eq is a bit different. I usually cut the lo at about 80hz to 140hz depending on the sound, and I don't take out the lo mids around 500. Fiddle around with this until you've got the sound sitting with the bass comfortably, but still with enough separation to differentiate between the two parts.
The next step helps with the seperation. Now I usually go stereo with these sounds and there is a number of ways I do this. One is a ping pong delay. The cubase one works well, as well as my other favourite, Bionic Delay (think this is, or used to be, a free plugin, its a copy of the stereo delay from Logic - do a search on kvraudio and you should find it). Just don't use too much feeback or you'll end up with a mess, just keep enough to enhance the stereo. Another is using a chorus or similar effect. I don't like the standard chorus in cubase too much, but I often use the mono to stereo plugin in cubase. Its designed to work on mono material but it seems to do the job on stereo stuff for me just fine. The waves doubler plugin works fantasically as well, but the waves stuff is hell of a expensive to buy, so another great way to get a good stereo double sound is to duplicate the channel you are working with, then pan one hard right (depending on how much spread you want) and the other hard left, then set the delay in the inspector window (the one on the left of the screen in cubase) to about 10 to 20 milliseconds and voila, instant big, wide, stereo sounds!
Last few tips... regarding key changes in a track. Your settings often depend on the key you're working in, especially the eq's. So if you are gonna do key switches in a track, be careful you don't suddenly have a massive booming bass, or silly thin sounding bass, when you drop from an A to F for example. Best way to remedy this is to bounce your tracks to audio at the end of the track when you do the mixdown, and split your channels in to loops of one key only. That way you can separately eq the bass when its in one key, and do another eq for another key etc etc. thus keeping the energy of your bass the same through any changes.
Another handy tip, which I do with percussion as well, is route your bass channels to a group. That way when you're changing levels or adding filters and things, you only have to work with one channel." |
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Medea
Aedem/Medea
Started Topics :
127
Posts :
1132
Posted : Mar 26, 2014 16:13
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jizy
IsraTrance Full Member
Started Topics :
90
Posts :
1493
Posted : Mar 26, 2014 21:26
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5 arse monkey i appreciate that, but i read that many aions ago...
NEBULOsity your getting hot
medea - i dont blame u
so 80 to 80... i need a special filter and not cross it over at 60..?
colin ? knocz ? |
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frisbeehead
IsraTrance Junior Member
Started Topics :
10
Posts :
1352
Posted : Mar 27, 2014 16:27
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Quote:
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On 2014-03-26 21:26, jizy wrote:
5 arse monkey i appreciate that, but i read that many aions ago...
NEBULOsity your getting hot
medea - i dont blame u
so 80 to 80... i need a special filter and not cross it over at 60..?
colin ? knocz ?
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if you're worried about that, you can use the filters on a multi-band unit - 'cause those are thought out to be the most transparent, hassle free when having such concerns in mind.
but if you check in mono and sounds good, it's good - means there's no phasing or phase cancel taking place.
easier to use a simpler signal on low end layer. this one is mono (centred) and you can go stereo as you go up in frequency - pretty much like Protoculture's post points out.
this kind of stuff is a must in a lot of EDM genres like DNB, Dubstep, some progressive styles, House, so forth and so on, it's about having a real fat sound that expands throughout the spectrum and making sure it plays as one instrument - so yeah, grouping all layers and processing them together a bit will make it sound more coherent. cheers |
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jizy
IsraTrance Full Member
Started Topics :
90
Posts :
1493
Posted : Mar 27, 2014 18:58
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thats why i mention waves ll3 multi using those cross over filters by hitting the solos per band on diff channels was an ok thing to do, hence why i mentiond it... cheers for response,
so am i on the right lines with using that
i kno how to widen the bass uper freqs etc
i kno the princables and what styles use them..
this wasnt really about widening tho
u can widen bass with just 1 layer with a mono maker of summing point! 2channels of MID AND SIDE
but.....
my question was about at which frequencies do u cross over to attach the 2channels perfectly if u wish to use 2channels for it for control,because u cant simply join them with a normal hp and lp because there will be a hole at were ever its set....
would using a linear phase multiband solo points be the one otherwise u can hear the frequency crossing over,,,, sumtimes its good sound
notice the crossovers per bands ,there are slight gaps
soloing the bands and fitting them 2gether that way,.. see wasnt just guna be bass il use it for, say like a drumloop.. il use one channel for 2bands and the other for the higher bands... slowing it down and adding effects etc etc for sound design
its this crossing other thing that i wana get right iz all, so i was right in doing what i was doing originally then? using instances of the LL3 and soloing the bands i want without moving them... |
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frisbeehead
IsraTrance Junior Member
Started Topics :
10
Posts :
1352
Posted : Mar 27, 2014 21:58
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I'd steer away from the linear one.
Think those cross over stuff is more about how it separates the inner workings (dynamics) rather then the split filters themselves, tried to duplicate one track with it on, inverted the phase (got silence of course), and changing the separation value doesn't change that - so the signal remains the same. It's got to do with the little snake, if the limiters will have a sharpest or rounder working near the band limits.
As for the other question, think it depends on the sound. Where the Kick hits is also important for deciding on such things. If you had a sine or triangle for sub, I'd say just check the range you need, like 30-60, 40-80. Yeah, just check the range of your bass's fundamental and the values have to lie very near, the other one comes next , my advise is to check in mono as you go, if you think some "bleeding" actually sounds better, don't be afraid to do it... As long as there's no phasing down there, nor phase cancelation, nor any noticeable phasing between the bands, you're ok.
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jizy
IsraTrance Full Member
Started Topics :
90
Posts :
1493
Posted : Mar 27, 2014 22:02
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hmmm... ok,cheers for response
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Padmapani
Started Topics :
2
Posts :
431
Posted : Mar 30, 2014 03:15
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yeah, you can totally do that by ear. maybe you'll have some overlap which sounds good in the end, or you'll leave a slight gap that your kick fits nicely into, so as long as it sounds good it is good.
and using something like smexoscope for checking the waveform and adjusting the phase accordingly is certainly useful. |
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