Production quality - mainly Bass and Kick

Protoculture wrote:


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Hey all

I've been so busy with tours lately and I'm not in SA very much at the moment, so I thought I'd start getting a bit more active in the forums again. Hopefully I can be of some help to some of you, plus Im bored as hell sitting in a hotel room in Sao Paulo and my macbook has a crap video card so I cant play games to pass the time...

So anyway, thought I'd run through some of my techniques and tips when writing tunes in my studio, and i'll start off with basslines for this post as that seems to be a starting point for most peeps.

I'm using Cubase 4, but I'm sure these tips could apply to users of other software as well.

Lately, 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.

Ok, thats it. Hope that helps some peeps here. I'll try answer some any questions I can here, when I'm around, and hopefully I can do another tut on something else soon. Let me know what you guys want to know.

Cheers
Nate

Protoculture wrote:

Hey all

Seeing as I got so much good feedback from you guys, and seeing that I'm still on tour in Brazil, sitting in a hotel room with nothing to do... I thought I'd sit down and write part two, how I work with percussion.

Firstly, this is dance music, its got to make people move, and percussion is how you do that. For me, a dance track with poor and sparse percussion is usually a poor dance track, this even applies to minimal stuff. If you listen carefully to the more minimal deadmau5 stuff, his percussion is freaking huge, and guys like Trentamoller, while sonically not as big, is super detailed and groovy.

As I mentioned before with the basslines, the trick to getting big percussion is layering and layering and more layering. I sometimes end up with up to 30 or 40 channels of percussion before bouncing down and narrowing it down to somewhere around 10 to 15 channels. I like to keep them all organized on the arrange page to groups of kick, snares, hats, loops, and programmed percussion (usually tracks of well placed hits and small perc sounds to add a bit of extra groove) Just be careful of overloading your tune with too much though, and spend a bit of time making sure everything sits with relation to the other stuff in the tune.

I'll just go from here and run through a bunch of handy tips I have for mixing and programming percussion. Think some of these tips will probably apply to a lot of other stuff as well. Apologies if its a little disjointed as there is a hell of a lot to talk about here...

0. Audio or Sampler?

Sorry, started numbering with zero cause I added this at the end Wink
I used to use samplers like Kontakt and Battery extensively for drum programming. Nowadays however, I don't bother all that much any more. I just loads samples straight on to audio channels and chop stuff up from there. Samplers are still useful, they seem to make it easier to get more dynamics when you're programming stuff with different velocities, and they can be great for mangling stuff. I often use Stylus RMX as well. With audio though, its just much easier to mess with things like reversing or adding fx directly on to a single audio hit for example.

1. My Beloved Quadrafuzz

As I mentioned previously, I turn to this time and time again. Its great on snares and can really bring out a bit a lot of punch in your sounds. I use it on kicks from time to time as well, but watch the drive that you don't end up with a mess. Also try soloing one of the distortion bands to get that telephone effect. It works nicely on loops.

2. Compression

I tend to use the Sonalksis stuff again here quite often, on kick and snares. I'll also use heavy compression on loops sometimes if I'm trying to get a sort of "texture bed" in the background of the percussion loops. Try playing around with the attack of your compressor to get just that right amount of click. I am also quite selective with compression as well, I like to leave some of the dynamics untouched when Im layering stuff, as its nice to have a contrast between super "tight" sounds and more "floppy" sounds with say, a bigger stereo image as the tight stuff.

3. Sidechain Compression

I use side chaining sometimes on loops to pump the groove a bit. I use the powercore cl and sidechainer for this, but for those of you who dont have the powercore, cubase 4 now has a side chain input for there compressors. Logic users won't have a problem with this. Another option is Beatpuncher (think the full name is Compadre Beat Puncher - correct me if Im wrong) Nowadays, I tend to "cheat" quite a bit as well, when Im too lazy to set up a sidechain channel. Cut your loops in to segments of 1/4 bars (set quantize to one quarter bar, select your audio file, using the cut tool, hold down alt and cut at the end of the first bar, the rest of the file will be cut in to equal segments) then you can select all the quarter bar segments, and drag the volume envelope from the left corner of each file. Then double click just above the envelope line, and you can just draw a volume curve which would be reminiscent of a sidechaining effect.

4. Envelope generators

Cubase has a great new plugin called envelope generator that works a bit like a compressor. Basically its a volume envelope thats triggered by a threshold on peaks of audio, say, the beginning of a snare hit. You can then adjust the attack volume, decay and release of the audio. Great for adding some snap to your snares.

5. Panning

Its amazing how many people seem to have this idea that you need to mix everything symmetrically. You don't have to, all you have to do is maintain a relative balance ie: you want to have a similar range of frequencies and volumes on the left and right, not necessarily the same sounds playing out of both speakers. Its essential that you play with the panning when you're working with a lot of channels so that you can find a space in the mix for everything. I often have a couple of hat loops, some panned hard right, other panned hard left, some in between and maybe just a bit in the middle. Think of micing up a drum kit, you don't have all the drums sitting on top of each other with one mic in the middle do you? There are some old Beetles records where the engineers panned all the drums to one side, all the guitars to the other, and just left the vocals and bass in the middle. Sounds weird but it actually does work wonderfully. I wouldn't be that extreme with dance music, but play around until it works for you.

Protoculture wrote:

6. More tips for stereo

Refer back to the bass line tutorial, most of those tips apply here too. Auto panners and modulation effect are great, also delays and stereo widening tools. I often use a few snare on top of each other, one that's really snappy and dry after using the envelope generator and quadrafuzz, then others that I've either panned, added reverb, or split in to left and right so I can delay one side by a few milliseconds to get a widening effect.

7. Reverb

Don't be shy of wettening stuff up a bit. Short percussive reverbs are great for opening up your stereo image, or for pushing stuff into the background a bit. I really dig the Sony Oxford Reverb for this. I've got the plugins for the powercore, but they are available now as native plugins as well.

8. Eq's and levels

Again, you really need to sit down and listen here until you get a happy medium with everything sitting in place. Don't go overkill on the on the lo cut filters, many times I hear guys cutting everything out below 3 and 4 khz, even snares, and all you end up with is a mess of "tssst tssst tssst" noises and not much punch (or "perceived" volume) in your tracks. The mid range and particularly lower mid range is where a lot of action and dynamics happen so don't lose them completely. If you want nice meaty snares you need to leave, or sometimes push stuff between 500 to 1000, but just make sure you dont go overboard or the sound will be too overbearing and probably start to mess with the kick. Which brings me to kick eq, I like to normally mix that similarly to my basslines with just a little bit of variation, so head back and check it out on the previous tutorial. With hi hats, you obviously want more tops than mids. I often scroll through the VST Channel presets for hi hats, then modify them for my sounds from there. Its just a quick and easy way to get an idea of what you want. Be careful about pushing stuff too much around 8 khz though as you end up with too muching "essing" (sound you get particularly with vocals at 8khz, on words that have the letter s, it can end up sounding horribly distorted and is pretty unpleasant, specially on a big rig)

9. Tuning drums

I know a lot of people feel quite strongly about tuning drums, but when it comes to electronic stuff I usually couldn't give a shit. I have thousands and thousands of drum samples in my library so I'd rather just pick another one if one isn't working. I do however play around with the kick quite often. A good trick to get a nice lo sound is to add a pitch envelope to the kick. Right click on the kick sound, and choose process>pitchshift then look and the of the window and choose the "pitch bend" page. I usually start with the max pitch set to about 3 semi tones, then, leaving the initial pitch in the middle at the start, add one node to the envelope and drag it down to the bottom, shortly after the start of the kick. This will leave a nice click in the beginning and will drop most of the sub energy lower for a nice deep kick sound.

10. Beat Slicing

There is a number of ways to do this, including recycle, using cubase's hitpoint detection and other bits of software which I'll get to later. My favorite way of doing it is rather to set my project tempo to the loop Im chopping up, then, like I mentioned before, use the alt click cutting method except this time I normally use a 16th quantize setting. I always create a blank section in the arrangement over the cut up pieces and paste them together into one block, then set the tempo back to normal and everything should be in time. You will probably have to do a small bit of editing after, like trimming the edges to avoid clicks.

11. Cool Tools for Percussion

I use battery quite often, its got some great features for fine tuning drums. Recently I just discovered some a new toy, and subsequently ordered myself a copy. Its from FXPansion and called Guru. Its an awesome way of slicing up sounds, and its got some mad tools for mangling and ripping sounds apart. Check it out here...
http://www.fxpansion.com/index.php?page=4&tab=27
Also check out Sugarbytes Effectrix... its kinda like dBlue Glitch only quite a bit more advanced and you can layer multiple effects on top of each other.

12. Working with Groove

If a loop is not sitting properly, you can try shifting it slightly out of time by using the delay setting in the inspector. It often helps to either add just a little bit of negative delay to tighten things up, or positive to drag things a bit. With regards to layering again, I particularly like percussion which has that "wall of sound" quality to it, but be careful you dont end up destroying the groove of the percussion. You can have everything playing loud and at the same volume, but then create groove elements buy having some things stand out by playing with eq, or creative use of fx. This is personal taste, but I like to make sure I've always got a good big snare. Sounds silly but a lot of people forget about this. It just moves a track better. Same goes for an open hat, but complement it with some running closed hat patterns. That kind of "oomph tsss oomph tsss" groove is a bit naff and uninteresting.

13. Final Tips

I've mentioned this before, but again, I like to keep all the percussion assigned to a group. Once you've got a good mix for your percussion, you don't want to mess it up by changing levels and stuff. On a group you can change everything at once. Its all nice to be able to add a little extra compression after on the group or some other fx like filter sweeps etc.
Get some good sample sources for percussion. Its cool to go make or record your own sounds, but to be honest, I really don't have time for that, so get some good sample cd's and get your library organized. I've got all the Vengeance stuff which fantastic. Mutekki Drum Codes is also nice, and I've got piles of loop libraries as well. There are some good internet sites that have free stuff as well, and some where you can buy only the single samples you that want from libraries. Cubase's media browser is a great way to stay organized, and when you've got a 300 Gig sample library, its essential. You can add tags to audio once the drive has been scanned, its a lengthy process, but something you can do bit by bit in your spare time.

Anyways, running out of ideas now. So once again, let know if you guys have questions and what other tutorials you'd like to see.

Enjoy

Nate

Protoculture wrote:

Since there's been loads of questions regarding this, I'll do a quick tut for you guys to check out. Please bear in mind a few pointers before you continue...

1. This is NOT a definitive set of rules for mastering. Mastering is an art which takes years to erm... master . Leave it up to a professional mastering engineer if its stuff thats ready for release.
2. Mastering won't make your track sound better. Get a good mix first before you bother with mastering techniques.
3. This guide is intended to get tunes ready to play out live or dj with... not intended for you to master release ready material, even though most of the principals do apply.

First, a bit of theory. You'll want to be exporting your tracks in 24bit... whether you do it in 44.1khz, 96khz or 48khz is largely irrelevant as this is more important for recording. It does however become important if you're working with analogue gear for mastering, but pretty much all of you reading this wont be so don't worry about it. The reason you want a higher bit depth (24bit) though is as follows... If you look at a waveform, the bit depth represents the resolution vertically, meaning the higher the bit depth, the higher the resolution, and thus, the higher your signal to noise ratio will be, which equals an overall cleaner signal. If this is a little over your head, don't worry, just remember to always output your mix at 24 bit.

Another thing is to always output your wave as loud as possible, but WITHOUT clipping the signal. You have to be careful here so leave a bit of room for error, but realize that if you bounce it too soft (or if your dynamics are all over the place due to not using enough compression or balancing levels right), you'll be wasting a lot of headroom. and you'll be reducing that signal to noise ratio even further.

Once you're bounced down, you're ready to open a new project for your mastering or load up the file in your mastering application of choice. I like using Wavelab, Cubase or Logic will do fine if thats what you're using. First run a DC Offset Removal function on your whole audio file to remove any offset that might have occurred during the mix. You probably won't hear any difference but just do it anyway. Another thing to consider during your preparation is to load up some reference material to compare to whilst you're busy with the mastering, just make sure that the reference stuff is not running through the same plugin chain as your track that you're mastering.

Now we'll get down to the plugin chain. Again, bear in mind their are loads of ways to do this... I'll just give some guidelines and some examples of software.

When it comes to mastering, its generally a good idea to try and use good, transparent, high quality plug ins. There are a few cheap alternatives though that you can still get great results with.

I'll recommend a few plugs in the order of the plugin chain here...

1 EQ - Don't underestimate a high quality eq... they all have very different tones but you'd best be looking for something similar to a passive eq format.

Sony Oxford EQ (I use these on the powercore... really like these plugins)
UAD Precision EQ
URS Eq's (I forget the exact name but there are a couple of good ones in their everything eq bundle)
Waves Eq's - There's a couple of usable ones in there.. I'm not a massive fan of waves plugins though
Brainworx BX Mastering EQ
PSP Neon and MasterQ

There's loads of others but these are a few good examples...

2 COMPRESSION - You could go for a single band compression like a SSL Bus Compresssor emulation (ie UAD or The Glue) but you can also go the multi band route, which I do most of the time. Or both if it sounds good.. its up to you.

SINGLE BAND BUS COMPRESSORS
UAD 4k
Cytomic The Glue
Waves SSL
UAD Neve 33609

MULTIBAND EXAMPLES
UAD Precision Multiband
TC MD3 or Master X3/5
Waves C4
Sonalksis Multiband Dynamics

Once again... only a few examples of whats out there.

3 LIMITERS - Basically the same as a compressor but with a ratio of infinity.

SONNOX Limiter - I really like this one a lot
The infamous Waves L1/2/3 - once again, not a big fan of these
UAD Precision Limiter
TC MD3 Brickwall
PSP Xenon

Well thats basically your signal chain... it can vary a bit if you want to experiment with other things such as adding small of amounts of distortion via tube drive emulation... or toying around with parallel compression and enhancers and stuff, but I'd recommend you guys stay clear of that stuff until you're comfortable with the basics.

So here we go in a bit more detail.

EQ... Roll off the bottoms with a HP Filter (and its quite important you use a High pass filter and not just a lo cut) at bout 40 to 45 Hz to remove any unnecessary bottom end and rumble. I like to use a steep slope for the filter... the SONNOX plugins go all the way to 36db filter slope. You can roll off everything above or around 22k if your eq allows for it as you don't here anything up that far anyways. Just make sure that the slope is steep enough so that you don't hear that you're loosing tops. I often play around with the eq a bit, cutting mids if they're too harsh... but listen to it in conjunction with the compression and limiting as well. If you've got a high quality eq with good character, like the UAD Neve stuff for example, you might want to add a very small boost up in the highs around 16k and up for a bit of extra shine, but don't try this with a shit eq. The highs are the first place you notice whether an eq is up to scratch. And don't make big cuts or boosts with your eq.. you shouldnt be doing anything over 1 or 2 db max.

Compression... Not gonna bother too much with single band here, however try it out. Sometimes a good bus compressor can just give you a feeling of "glueing" everything together and making all the parts in the mix sound cohesive.

Multiband Compression... The point of this is to avoid problems of certain frequencies... particularly the low end... affecting how the signal is compressed as a whole. If your bottom end is too high, you may find that it makes the compressor work too hard and start pumping. Hence a multiband compressor will offer you a range (usually 3 or 4) of compressors for a number of separate frequency ranges. Best way to work with these is start from the bottom, solo the low band, listen, set the compressor, then move on. Repeat the process for the mid's and highs, but keep AB'ing it with the whole mix as well to make sure everything sound kosher at the output.

Limiting... The last step in the chain. Just set up the limiter close to 0db (I use a little under... around 0.003db. Most limiters are pretty straight forward offering a threshold or input control... and the output which you would have set already near 0db. Adjust the input/threshold so that you start only just getting small amounts of gain reduction on the output. I wouldn't suggest averaging anything more than 1 or 2, possibly 3db of gain reduction. If you have the odd peak slightly over that, its ok... just listen and make sure your mix is not pumping. You want it to sound loud, firm and tight, but still be transparent and retaining some dynamics.

Lastly, since you'll most likely want to be burning this master to cd at some point, you'll have to be converting it back to a 16bit 44.1k file. So, you'll have to insert a dither algorithm at the end of your chain. Most good limiters will have one built in, if thats the case, just set it to 16bit. Otherwise you can use something like the Apogee UV22HR Dither plugin that comes with Cubase for example... again just set it to 16bit. You can then go ahead and bounce your files to a 16bit mastered wave.

Thats about it... few things to remember... take your time, make sure you're not clipping signals in the chain, overdoing the eq or pumping the compression. Listen carefully and check out your reference material as well (make sure its good reference material... trying to copy a shit master won't get you anywhere... if you're referencing trance stuff, get something that matt's mastered.. or most of the Nano stuff is done well as well as Hommega releases, Ido Ophir from Domestic usually does a great job at mastering those and also did Adam - Headrooms album) Also, be careful of relying on presets that come with some of these plugs guys... settings will vary from every piece of material to the next so whilst a preset might be a good way to learn and start from, it will almost never be ideal for the material you're working with.

Anyways, thats all I've got for now... Like I said, these are guidelines for rough mastering, so don't get too uptight about whats right and wrong. If you're confused, pay someone to do it for you. I'll try answer any questions you guys might have.

On 2013-05-27 14:28, B-recluse wrote:
nice clean bass and kick ! it helps so much for the rest for your mix !