Or, The Kick Drum and the Bass Guitar.

I still struggle with this in my mixes.

I've gotten a little better at it than when I started, now that I've realized that I can't make everything huuuuuuuuuuuge.

Yet the perfect low end still eludes me.

It seems really important to give everything its own space.

For example, if I want a really booming bass (guitar), the kick might need to be a bit clicky. Or vice versa, if I have a thumpy kick drum, the bass (g/t/r) is probably more about low mids than low lows. I hear these 2 approaches pretty frequently.

However, I also hear mixes where the kick and bass both seem to have real lows, without any signs of mud.

And suggestions suggestions on pulling this off? I know it varies from song to song, but any advice would be much appreciated.

Thanks,
bh

this is definately something that i struggle with on a song by song basis. i just did a mix with an R&B feel to it and i neede to get the bass to thump as per the artists request. i seem to be able to seperate the kik from the bass guitar, but when i put my original mix of the tune into my car to here it, the frequencies that i boosted on the bass, made it almost inaudible on that stereo, when the song through a system with a sub, the bass was tight on the bottom, almost making a bowel movement necessary. i find it hard sometimes, to get the low end boosted in the frequencies that my car stereo considers the bottom. in general rock stuff, i can get bottom full, yet not muddy, but the R&B low end eludes me. when i played the client the mix, he loved it saying that that is the thump he wanted. but i told him to listen to the mixes in some other sytems, before making judgements. its not always easy to find low end that will push a six inch speaker in a car the way i would like to. anyway, i hope someone can enlighten this topic.

So... when I got to the end of this diatribe... I naturally reread it... and I realized that it kinda needed a "preamble" ... so here it is:

When I'm working, there is a certain level of schizophrenia I seem to acheive... it's one of the reasons I don't like people in my control room when I'm working, especially mixing... but I do want them around in case I want to check on direction or get an outside/fresh set of trained ears to give me a suggestion or two.

Frankly, with the half dozen people that are rattling around my brain [most of them arguing with each other] the control room is crowded enough. As I got a bit deeper into the explanation process, I got a bit deeper into the various characters that argue with each other over what's going to happen... however, they're a bit difficult to differentiate with the written word... so when you see a completely different writing style, or me arguing with myself, find another voice when you read it... good ****ing luck

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When it comes time to mix something, whether or not I've cut the tracks, I generally push up all the faders, get a bit of a balance, then listen to the song. Then I try to figure out what it's telling me? Every time I try to muscle a song into doing what I want with a mix, the mix invariably sucks... so, at least for me, it's all a question of sitting there, listening to the damn thing, and try to interpret what the hell the song is trying to tell me, and then do what it tells me to do [which has either been good training for being married... or the other way around].

With a kik and a bass arrangement, the first question is just how important is the kik drum to the song.

"Well damn dude... the kik drum is everything, duh"... not necessarily. In engineering circles many practioners seem to have gotten into some kind of cock thing with kik sounds... it seems like it's a worse syndrome with SR engineers than with studio rats, but it's still an issue in the 'little room'.

There are more than a few songs that will cross your desk where the kik drum really needs to do little more than move a tad of extra air on 1 & 3. It can melt into the bass sound reinforcing the tone of the bass on 1 & 3, and the song will be perfectly happy.

Other times the song will tell you that you damn well better separate the kik and bass... which is where the "fun" really starts. First you need to figure out who claimed to be the audio 'limbo' champion [how low do it go?]... sometimes it's the bottom on the kik, sometimes it's the bottom on the bass. One is going to have more 60Hz than the other, the other is going to have more 80-100Hz than the other... it's often pretty cut and dry who goes where. Even with the same rigs, it will often change from song to song... so don't forget to take each song on a case by case basis.

Sometimes when I get stuff to mix from less than skilled 'recordists'... the two instruments will fight like it's closing time and there's only one girl left in the bar... and seeing as she's already blown them both in the parking lot... both feel the right to the territory. This is when you actually start to earn your money, as you now have to referree between these two very stubborn events.

When I realize that I'm going to have to weed out the **** on the bottom... the first thing I'll do is drop back and punt. We'll get the damn ball back, but at the moment we have to figure out how to **** up the defense enough to get some serious yardage. I will now bring up the vocals, snare, H/H, percussion, and a couple of the more important 'melody' oriented instruments.

While we usually think of 'groove' happening in the rythm section... I find that the rythm section groove ain't **** unless the vocals sit in, and texturaly further that groove... so, seeing as the bottom of my rythm section is being an unco-operative ****... I'll move on to the other groove oriented aspects, try to get them to flow, gel, and generally sit together without fighting... then I'll get back to the two boys with the attitude problem and teach them a mother****ing lesson.

I'm not a big fan of reverbs on vocals... occassionally they can help, but more often than not, it'll give me a pain in the balls trying to get other **** to cut through the reverb fog... but I am a serious ****ing fan of rythmic vocal delays. In the final product, you don't necessarily have to hear them, but they should be felt [huh? are you on crack?... no, by "felt" instead of heard, what I mean is that you don't necessarily hear the delay... but as you go along with your mix you turn them off from time to time... as you do that, you'll find the vocal getting "flat" sounding, that it loses part of the compelling texture you've created... and when you turn the delays back on, the vocal sits back in the groove and takes it's seat in with the other instruments, without necessarily being the loudest motherfucer on the block]

So now I'm sitting there with the snare (top end of the kit.) [this is where the application crashed... we'll see if I can get back to where I was going or not... needless to say, I'm pissed!!!] the percussion, the main melodic instruments, and the vocal... so, how do we get the bottom in?

First, let's take a look at the kik drum... why isn't it separating from the the damn bass? Well... it could very well be the bass's fault. Is there a bass 'mic' and a bass 'DI' track? If there are, are they working together or turning the bass into a washy ball of ****? Until recently, when I discovered the Littlelabs IBP, I would pick one... mic or DI. Which ever one had the best 'growl' to it.

With an IBP (or 2 or 3) I can usually get the bass to really gel (in a seperate but equal sort of way) with the kik without having to necessarily pick one track over another... so... while we're looking at the kik... let's figure out why it's not getting through the bass.

Usually it seems to be a time/envelop kind of thing that causes the two to jam up [at least as much as a frequency thing]... so with the application of a real muscle compressor like an 1176LN or a Purple MC-76 you can **** with the envelop of the bass so it will say what it needs to say, and get out of the way of the other ****.

By 'growl' I mean the note of the bass, and how it sits in the track in terms of definition... usually I don't seem to want the world's prettiest bass tone to get the bass to really say what it's supposed to say... more often then not I'm gonna try to get the bass tone to really gel with the guitars/keyboards/melodic instruments but sometimes it's going to be a real focal point [damn, this is no where near as good as the one that got eaten before... mother****er]. Now the kik has to have the right envelop to squeeze through the damn bass.

Enter something along the lines of a slow attack, quick to medium release compressor on the kik drum, or a DBX-160 VU whichever is closest. This will allow me to get the high end point of the drum to sit with the bass, hopefully not **** with the other ****, nor become one of the those damn annoying "little foot tick drums" that were so common on 80's metal records... I'm generally looking for a highend point that's either up at like 12-14kHz [so it kinda sounds like the beater is sinking into the kik head], or down around 1kHz where you start to get the real 'whack' of the drum, but run into the inherent danger of the sound ****ing up the bass tone, one or more of the melodic instruments... or worse, the money track [vocal].

So now, hopefully, I have a bass that's solid, and a kik drum that cuts, and the two tones are kinda working without jamming up the rest of the track... if there's still a problem, it's time to get out the old GML 8200, don a mask and gown and commence to doing some surgery. I'll often try to find the lowend point of the kik, isolate it with the 8200 with a narrow bandwidth, then open the bandwidth until the bottom of the kik is beating the **** out of me... then split the difference on the bandwidth between where I started and where I ended, put the EQ on the bass, and cut a db or two out of the bass tone to allow the low end point of the kik to cut through the bass without the conflicts I had before.

The trick here is to not EQ the bass... but use the envelop capabilities of the compressor on the bass to accentuate the parts of the bass tone that make it special, while keeping it in context with the rest of the song.

So now it's just a question of printing it, listening to the whole thing, tweezing some ****, lather rinse repeat until the mother****er comes together.

Sorry that this version of it wasn't nearly as good as the last version of it... but like a lot of things, there was only one shot at it. Getting into the right headspace to get **** mixed right is real similar to where I was before with the previous response [which went all over the place just like 'preamble' said it was going to... at the end I was gonna go watch 'The Shining' and wait for football to come on TV... but alas, that head space ain't gonna ****in' happen again on this post.

Kind of a shame... best of luck.

did that post finish like mid sentence or is it just me?

bass,,, how low can you go?


its a bitch when it wasnt properly thought out before hand in the tracking stage.

i find the kick to be pretty damn important in modern music. personally, i find it the most important element of the mix a lot of times. a ****ty kick will almost always ruin a song for me.

that said, i am having to mix one of the ****tiest kicks that was tracked elsewhere right now and its pissing me off to no end.... well, it will end today when the client picks up the final mixes. a ****ty ass kick combined with a fretless bass that sounds just as ****ty. dealing with that doesnt seperate the men from the boys... it seperates sanity from insanity and kicks sanity out to the curb.

to take fletchers nice analogy... its like two guys at a bar at closing time who both got blown by what they thought was a girl and ended up to be a guy.

Yeah... the ****ing application crashed halfway through sending it... ****ing PC's... so I'll try to recreate the end... but who the **** knows if I can get back to that head space...

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Cursory at best... didn't really get close to the earlier version... damn.

I've noticed that most of the kick "thump" comes from frequencies above 100hz. To get bass audible on small speakers, you also have to have frequency content above 100hz, really more like 150-200hz. Ultra low-low end (what I consider to be below 100hz) usually needs some support above 100hz. So when I mix kicks, or make kick sounds that go "whump" (whump=subbass" as well as thump, I use two seperate waves. Sometimes I use an 808/909 sound (essentially a slightly noisy sine wave) under my thumpy kick sound. I then roll off (with a 6th order filter or something with a very gentle slope to prevent excessive phasing) content on the thump sound below 120-130hz. Sometimes it works to compress the two sounds together, sometimes it's better to leave them seperate.

If I have bowel liquifying bass, I generally just make the kick "thump", and only add in the "whump" very quietly on downbeats. That way, you get the extra whump only on larger speakers. On smaller speakers, the kick whump will also kinda thicken the mix a little bit on the downbeat, in those situations.

Of course, you can always use gating, or do fader rides too. If you have a kick with a short decay, you can use it as an attack for the bass. Sometimes that is fun. Compressing the bass into a nice 1 bit wave is also helpful at times,if you just HAVE to have the bass and kick in the same frequency regions, at the same time. In that situation, it's also helpful to compress the kick. That way you won't have faint wave material washing around pointlessly and confusing the speaker and the listener.

More to write about this, but I must do so late.rgrggt

Awesome post! I am however a little confused (not unusual for me) by some of the wording...


Ok, wise magic, makes alot of sense... it's the beginning of the next paragraph that throws me a bit...

I'm not quite sure how to read this... left to right, I know <8^) . On one hand you're using EQ to peel away some of the conflicting bass tone frequencies in order to help sneek the bottom of the kick out from under the bass. In the very next sentence you're saying the "trick" is to "not EQ" the bass but rely on re-shaping the wave form via compression... Do you mean that you only EQ the bass as a last resort kinda thing in case phase alignment and compression don't get you there first?

Like I said the other one was better... what I meant was to do the EQ cut but not to go nuts trying to muscle the bass around with EQ... thanks for pointing out the discrepancy.

Low end on digital is a bitch IMHO.

Ribbon mic's, outside kick mic's, Pultec copies, Neve 1073's, Focusrite 215's Cranesong Hedd, quality converters & monitors..it all helps...

Low end on analog wasnt a walk in the park I recall either...

Jules

Two words: SPL Transient Designer

BK

#1 tool to have: subwoofer. Without one, you're only hearing half of your bass...and probably shelving off the good stuff.
There are a lot of tricks to get bass...woofers as microphones for kick, floor tom and bass gtr, resting a bass cab on the mic stand so the stand picks up low-freq rumble, isolating your cabs from the floor with risers, doubling a bass line with Moog Taurus pedals (or any other organ/synth), using a subharmonic generator (dbx 120, 500, Peavey Kosmos), Pultec eq's (like Jules mentioned), API 560 EQ on kick with 30Hz full on...but most importantly, hearing/feeling this through a subwoofer.

God bless you Fletcher,

Having run into your posts has made me laugh out loud many a time and always come out a little wiser.

I couldnt imagine what the internet for us music folks would be without you.

Peter

Gotcha, thanks for clearing that up for me.

Yeah Fletcher, f&ckin-A right on with that post bro.

I always used to f&ck up the bass with EQ, could never get it right, could never figure out why. I started to hate EQing bass so much, I just stopped doing it and started going after the kick instead. Or re-recording the bass! Which seems so much worth the trouble if it's REALLY a problem in the mix.

The bass has a lot of energy, probably more so than anything else by far. Which seems to make it a more fragile audio source. I know that seems counter-intuitive, so I'm curious what your thoughts are.

But that seems to point to why it's so dicey to EQ the bass. Boost a frequency on the bass, and you add a lot of low-end distortion (not a problem on the kick sometimes), and it becomes this mix-dominating beast. Cut a frequency on the bass, and it loses character.

OR: Don't touch it, and just find that sweet spot in the mix for it instead.

Am I just rambling here or does any of this make sense? Because I'm still new at this sh*t.

Curve's note about bass energy makes me want to expound a little more on bass eq.

The reason why I use low order low pass filtering on bass is because bass energy drives a song. It's the main force in a song, and what creates most of the feel. When you eq, you phase and distort. That affects the feel.

Re-recording the bass is often the choice choice, but you can sometimes totally save basslines from plugins like PSP's bass one, Waves MaxBass etc, combined with careful mixing and compression.

So, EveAnna , do electronics handle bass differently than signal of higher hz? Stuff other than amplifcation and transformers? I don't know much about electrical science, and I'm guessing that the extremes of the audible frequency range interact with components differently.

I concur.

I sometimes find myself using the High Pass Filter on the mic pre at tracking stage for the bass, setting it somewheres around 90hz +/- 10 hz, to taste, if the kicks are holding the 60hz realm.

I think I understand your question to mean do bass frequencies affect individual electronic components differently than higher frequencies do? (besides transformers and chokes which have an obvious answer) Hmm I don't know if I have ever thought about this question as pertaining to an individual component such as say a capacitor or a resistor outside the context of the surrounding circuit design, impedances, layout considerations, power supply design, or value choice to be honest.

Well, I guess I have now that I think about it: take a 30uF electrolytic and listen to that on the output stage of a white follower versus a big rolled film-and-foil 30uf bomb. You'll certainly hear a difference in the two capacitor contructions, very much in the bass and in the treble too... to give an example.

Or why does one cable sound better in the bass than another?

Take, say, a toggle switch you have wired up to mute both channels of a stereo preamp. The crosstalk will be more prominent for the higher frequencies.

Still though, there will be reasons why these kinds of things happen having to do with how an individual component's inherent electrical properties are reacting with the surrounding circuitry. I'm not sure you can take a given part completely out of context.

What usually ****s me up is trying to get the kick heard on smaller speakers. Getting the "whomp" low and out of the way of the bass isn't a problem, neither is getting the attack most of the time. Ever listen to the J Mascis and the Fog album "More Light"? The kick seems like it's sitting between 100-200hz or so, plenty of oomph on smaller speakers yet it's not boxy. I keep trying to figure out how to get that sound but nothing I track ever sounds like that and it pisses me off.

You obviously need to do a J. Mascis and the Fog album. Then you'll have gotten that tone thus netting you the capability of dying a happy camper.... with dreams fulfilled.

Capacitors in paticular have different properties when dealing with various frequencies. I'm not a tech head when it comes to this stuff but IIRC something called Equivalent Series Resistance (ESR) changes with frequency as well as the capacitors Impedance at various frequencies.

I think there's an article by Walter Jung floating around that goes into some detail about these issues.

http://www.capacitors.com/pickcap/pickcap.htm


Mark

I usualy find the opposite. Dropping from say a set of Reveals to a pair of Minimus 7's pulls most of the information that's fighting for the lows right out of the equation and leaves the "attack" related stuff alone (for the most part). The kick seems to pop out a little more to me... of course that low end "wrestling match" stuff's all still there, it's just not being heard through the 7's.

I know what you mean, I think. Getting the low lows isn't usually the problem. (And I've usually found that subs cause more problems than they solve.) It's that 100-300 area, the area that serves as low end for small speakers, that's really tricky.

Thanks for all the responses guys, great stuff.

Become one with and worship your NS10's.

Mark

An important aspect has not been discussed...
Tuning of the kick is very important to the musicality of the song and pleasing sonics.

If a kick drum is not tuned to a relative note of the key (or keys) of the song, then differing eq and compression can 'enhance' the tuning, as the physics of a struck instrument produces a slurred range of notes, sharp to flat. So you can enhance a frequency that is musically right to integrate with the bass.

Because of so many differences in tuning, beater pressure, temperature ect ect, the bottom end can 'slip' and rub.
I think that this is why every songs kick and bass eq is (and should be) different.

Same applies to snare drums and toms.

One of the big secrets to a Bonhem drum sound in the studio, was that he was alway changeing the tuning of his drums to match the key of the song, toms included.

DO NOT USE ANTARES on your kick drum... (except for a 'trick' sound... maybe).

Think about the laws of frequency masking on the kick track(s) leakage and all... the answer lies there.

I agree with that.
Going back to Fletcher's original comments, the kick doesn't always have to be that important. It depends on the song or even the genre.
I've played on quite a few records where you could barely make out the kick on the final mix. And why can you never hear the cymbals?........or maybe my ears have lost their top end.

Yeah, but I'd still probably **** it up. I've gotten close but I don't get the same sense of moving air. I've heard it on other records too, that one was just fresh in my mind. I try to leave the bass amp in the same room as the drums. It usually helps to tune the kick to the song if that makes any sense and leakage is hardly ever a problem.

Start with a good kick (be it real or sampled) that has it low ring around 50hz.....boost liberally at this frequency (with analogue eq and narrowish Q). This gives the low power and warmth. The thump comes around 75hz and there are other important things happenning higher.

Sometimes I will use this technique as a last resort if the bass and kick are not working together. BTW, I am not totally crazy, I stole it from an interview with CLA. It works.

Take a 6 dB/ octave HPF and roll off all of the low end on the bass from 200 hz on down. Now set a narrow Q on one band of the eq and boost it about 8dB. Slowly sweep it down while listening to it in context of the mix until you find where it sounds good with the kick and keeps the groove happening. Once you find the magic frequency you can adjust the amount of gain and the Q so that it gels perfectly with the tune.

I have used the same trick on kick with good results as well. I usually will audition it with the kick and the bass to see which one works best in the song. Give it a shot. It cleans up the low end by focussing the enregy of the instrument into a particular part of the low frequency range.

I also enjoy using limiters on bass rather than compressors. They seem to do a better job of taming the low end. Also, an aural exiter on an aux can sometimes do wonders to clean up a messy bass tone.

Lord Alvin, that doesn't sound crazy at all. I'll give it a shot, and let y'all know how it turns out.

Thanks,
bh