Loud kick drum in hip hop-reality or illusion?

[Darwin James]

Originally Posted by fourvector

God, my eyes.

Hilarious. I will never read a post like that.

[MikeyMike]

Originally Posted by Darwin James

Hilarious. I will never read a post like that.

Hahahahaha. Still laughing. Got me rollin with that one.

[loscolorados]

Originally Posted by Tabnetic

4) proper eq to ensure the kick isn't fighting with other instruments

5) compress the bass w/ a sidechain keyed to the kick. make sure attack and release settings correspond to the tempo of the song. or you can compress the whole mix and sidechain this way, but it's a bit more tricky not to make sound bad.

how can attack correspond to the temop of the song?

[Laarsø]

I was able to meet some mixists who have worked on Grammy-winning songs by DMX, Janet Jackson, Kanye, Raw Digga, etc... All of them say they mix each song for around 12 hours. This is when the room has an SSL or Neve and there is great acoustics, plenty of gear, and plenty of experience. Joe Chicarelli said he likes to put the mix to bed quickly - in about 8 hours! If you are less experienced than Joe, or Ken Lewis, or Chip Allen, or Brent Kolotalo, among others, then you should probably spend even _MORE_ time than 12 hours on each mix that you are serious about...

The first hour, minimum, is spent EQ'ing the 808 or whatever is being used as kick drum. No joke. I watched this happening over at Right Track and was amazed. No other element of the mix is up, yet. Then they add the snare/rim/block, etc.... Then the lead vocal. After that, it's dealer's choice. The mix hopefully starts to mix itself, and the kick, which has been listened to in excess, becomes less prominent in the minds of the mixists. The result is a slamming hard mix with enough kick to give you a proper bass colonic. After you are done mixing this way, the premastering clerk will be able to decide if a high-pass filter on the side chain of his limiter is going to benefit the mix or if it is already glued in the right way. Most of your mix is in the slide-wires. You should be able to use just faders and pass filtering to get 85% of the way there, imho. The rest is largely up to mic placement, instrumentalist and vocalist performance, and sample choice (as in voice choice for synthetic ear candy - not talking about "sampling" beats or riffs).



Keep your people's heads movin (while holding your own steady...)


Cheersø,
Laarsø

[Ramonizer]

A Jomox M-base is for nice analogue sounding, hard hittin' kicks.

Jomox MBase 11 Review - YouTube

[SFB]

1. picking the right kick sound in the first place. Don't feel obligated to use the kick you started with. Sometimes if you audition lots of different kicks after the mix is complete you will stumble upon a kick that just works.


2. parallel compression is good.

3. making sure you eliminate bass frequencies in tracks that don't really exist in the low register, they are just eating up space.

4. Use sidechain or Eq to get some separation between the kick and bassline

5. sometimes a little distortion works, or a transient shaper to increase the attack or extend the release.

6. layering your initial kick with a different kick that adds more punch, weight, boom, etc.

[StringBean]

Originally Posted by fourvector

God, my eyes.

+1