Beginners Help

[Milesy303]

Good afternoon folks. Been reading through this forum for a little while now, and thought I would join in on some discussions.

I am from Glasgow and I have dabbled in production on and off for over ten years, and enjoy making music. I have the ideas and the creativity but really want to learn the professional engineering practices to make commercial quality music.

I am a techy by nature and work as a software engineer, and also dabble in electronics and such in my spare time.

I have been dabbling in audio since I had an amiga and used to love knocking about with octamed. I mucked about for a long time with buzz machines as well and even made a few tracks on ReBirth.

At the moment my home studio is small, but I am building on it every month. I have:

Alesis M1 Active Monitors
M-Audio BX5A Monitors
Korg Electribe EMX1 Drum Machine and Synth
M-Audio Ozone MIDI Keyboard
Focusrite Saffire Audio Interface
Tapco 260FX Console
Pro Sound 2 channel 16 band EQ unit.
Alesis 3630 2 channel compressor

My main task firstly is just to get a fat and rich kick and bassline, and get the dynamics of the two working together before I add more elements.

I want to do all my EQing and compression through hardware where I can. Does that make em a gear slut then? lol

I am limited in my channels so I plan on bouncing stuff down as I go.

So I hope to be able to get my kick and bass flowing smoothly through each channel of the EQ and then each channel of the compressor. Does that sound sensible?

My tapco console is limited in the frequency bands I can manipulate so I thought the EQ unit would give me so much more control.

I plan on starting on my plan tonight. I am going to pull a 909 kick off my drum machine. I can get my kick sounding reasonable thick and fat. I had an idea that my bass would sit above my kick in the mix - But what I did find though that if I put a HPF on the kick it takes so much away from it and there must be a lot of what makes the kick is present in the higher frequences. I now suggest to myself that using my 15 band EQ I can get a lot more control and cut a space in the middle ground somewhere and put my bass in to that space? Does that sound sensible?

Thanks for listening

[Alex Specht]

Originally Posted by Milesy303

Does that make em a gear slut then?

CERTIFIED!

I sometimes pan the Kick and Bass VERY slightly to opposite sides. This helps with the definition.

For Acoustic Kick the "click" is around 4k and the "boom" is around 100. Reduce the stuff in the middle and you have your slappy kick.

For a 909 I dont think this applies. What I used to do was use two Beat boxes. the 909 and a sub kick along with it. I used the 909 for the "click" and a sample or sub kick for the "boom" I assume your beats are 4 on the floor if you are using a 909 "boom chick boom chic"

Also, you are not going to hear any bass or kick with your M1's and the M-Audio BX8s will give you a very false representation. I would use headphones for the bass, then do the rest of the mix in the Mons.