A Grammy Winner's #1 TIP for Balancing KICK and BASS

getting a tight low end is something that a lot of people struggle with and the reality is that if you don't get that good relationship between the bass and the kick it's going to be hard to end up with the tight and the balanced low end so in this video i want to share with you a simple trick so you can get a good relationship between the kick and the bass so you can be on your way to a tight low end hey what's going on my friend the chris lim here from mixdown online now before we start this one up if you want to speed up your mixing workflow i'm going to encourage you to take my free workshop on how to build the perfect mix template in this workshop i show you everything you need to know about building your own mixed template by showing you what i did on my site so i show you the exact mix template that i work with every time i mix a song and if you're a cubase user you can also download the free cubase mix template session for you to base yourself on to create your own mix template okay so check it out the link is down below okay now let's jump right into it and look at what we have with this very cool trick to get the right balance and relationship between the kick and the bass which is something very important if you want to end up and go towards getting a tight low end i learned this one from master mixing engineer jackie king that you probably heard of the guy's an amazing mix engineer one of my favorite on my end um and you know i've been watching one of his videos years ago and he was sharing that technique which i actually found very interesting and from that point on i started to implement that into my mixes and it actually works very well so i thought of just sharing that with you all right so let's jump in cubase and check this out so first i'm gonna just open a vu meter that i'm gonna insert straight on the control room now if you don't have the control room which is part of cubase pro you can just insert that that view meter on your master output okay your mix bus basically it's going to do the same thing and the idea is to get an extra 3 db vu or so when both are playing together now the reason jakir uses a vu meter for that matter is because vu meters are sensitive to low frequencies and the kick and the bass are low frequency instruments alright so let's start by listening to the kick drum and what i'm gonna try to do here is to aim -3 db on my vu meter now it doesn't matter if you don't end up at you know specifically minus three db it could be minus seven minus five it doesn't matter what matters is the difference between the two when the two are going to be playing together okay so let me show you okay so the vu meter peaks at -3 when the kick drum is playing and if i add the bass on top of that i should get if it's well balanced i should get around zero vu which is 3 db louder [Music] okay so that's good i just needed to rebalance and increase the uh the level of the base so i can end up at around zero vu so i have an extra 3db that was added once the base was in the in the mix basically so let's listen in the context of the mix what it sounds like [Music] this is where i'm gonna get a good relationship between the kick and the bass now this is not a rule whatsoever but more a guideline you know or something you can start with and then you can balance that out with the rest of the mix this is something you can do when you're working on the balance or a static mix before you start diving into uh into the mixing stage and it's also something you can do while you're mixing near the end of the mix like right now my view meter like i said is at the end of the chain after all the mix bus processing the instrument channel processing also and all individual tracks processing [Music] so there you go i think the balance sounds right and it's a very simple trick but it works very well again it's not a rule it's a guideline a starting point to get towards a tighter low end once you have that relationship between the kick and the bass right it's going to be easier to get to a tighter low end you know you can then start to work on frequency balance between the instruments and the bass instruments and so on and this way you're going to end up to a very tight full and balanced low end leave your comments and questions down below don't forget to subscribe to the channel if you're not already share and like if you enjoyed this video and until next time take care and see you

Channel: Chris Selim - Mixdown Online

Views: 10,186

Keywords: audio, audio engineering, audio mixing, chris selim, cubase, cubase 9, cubase pro, home recording, home studio, home studio mixing, home studios, mixdown, mixdown online, mixing, mixing audio, mixing tip, mixing tutorials, music, recording audio, steinberg, the recording revolution, tips, tutorial

Id: Tp0uFqreGic

Length: 5min 24sec (324 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 01 2021