Kick and Bass Low End Mixing Tricks w Ulrich Wild, Cameron Webb & Warren Huart: Produce Like A Pro

hello everybody hope you're doing marvelously well as ever please subscribe hit the notifications bell and you'll be yes you guessed it notified when we have a new video ok so this is a huge one this is such a big question I get asked over and over again there are video springing up on a daily basis about this how do we get really good low end how do we get good low end separation but more importantly how do we get it to breathe I remember a few years ago having Tim Palmer mix an album that I have produced and engineered and I was really happy with my rough mixes but when Tim sent back the final mixes they were fantastic he had all the same mid-range and above detail that I did he also added some beautiful delay techniques which I've since adopted sidechaining delays there's a whole video about that you can check that out but the biggest difference between our mixes was the low end the low end was fantastic on Tim's the kick was round and focused and just seemed to be coming right at me and the bass seems so massive and big without ever being boo me so of course I called him up I asked him a hundred questions and the great thing was because it was something I had originally produced and engineered myself I knew what he was doing when he described it because I could open up my own session hence why I'm doing this video important things to remember when you're mixing live drums they are very very different from mixing you know addictive trigger ezdrummer where they've taken this very well recorded consistently played drum the thing about live drums is they can be very very dynamic incredibly dynamic so there's a lot of real extra stuff that goes into mixing a live kit which you're not going to get from mixing you know a virtual bass and a virtual drum kit so this stuff here is stuff you can apply to virtual instruments but it's something that can be applied to live drums live bass okay so we're gonna look at three different approaches the first one is mine and that's me showing you a song that I mixed entirely in the box and it's the kick and the bass guitar from that song the song is called love me I'm rich it's about a rich rock star and I wrote it so check that one out secondly is mr. Cameron Webb and this is a punk rock song thirdly last but no means least as a song from all required this song from Oracle wild is Brendon smalls galactic on you might know galactic on you might know Brendon small even more from Metalocalypse it was a massive cartoon hilarious and the music is fantastic so check out the way all it mixes in logic way mixes the kick and bass guitar great techniques from him so each of these songs have a different kind of energy you've got like the completely over the top Queen inspired mega kind of insane seven-minute frog rock galactic on track you've got a raw sounding rock track that I cut here in my studio playing most of you if not all of the instruments I think all of the instruments and then you've got the punk rock of Cameron three very different approaches but three ways to show you how you can tame a live kick and a bass guitar and make them work really well together so without further ado let's get stuck in the kicks it's good there's just a little stodgy nurse so let's find some of that 350 you pull it out already more definition let's go to the good old-fashioned 60 lots of bond men too much now 110 100 hundred and ten is always a problem for me on kick drums there's a build up there you go and also the bass likes to live a little bit down there why not let's go to 7k whoops go to 7k well there you go [Music] now just push Smits and niggles with frying my base [Music] you know that kick is pretty massive if you want me to be really honest I think I probably I'm gonna stick a transient designer on that now just make that just a little bit smaller so you can control the sustain and the attack [Music] I'll put down all that first let's go back in the drums only for a second you know me I don't like to listen solo all the time but that's great without love it great all great Rachel [Music] honestly free it's a pretty damn good tone as far as body's concerned and the reason why we have the second is for this [Music] I like that [Music] let's put it EQ after it and I want to hear really use some crazy high bus listen to the topic seamos the distortions in this area so now what I'm going to do is I'm going to copy let's go here and get an EQ and reverse good six because it has a low pass and I've gone up two on my sands up one I got up to about two seventeen here let's do the opposite let's go sharp see what's interesting about this now look at the level of the base it's brought it down a couple of DB maybe 3 DB maximum but all that top end information which gives us all that ping ping ping [Music] pretty evil bass tone now so what I've done is I've created this crazy bass tone by getting the bottom end only from the one di and the second one with the Sansa so the bottom end is always there and always consistent [Music] I like D is in general football meant when you're using amps obviously they have tons of personality we don't have an ampere we only have a DI but if we had an amp I would use that for the top-end for the personality that brings out all of that part of the base that you love but the DI usually not always is usually recorded with less distortion has less second third harmonics or any of that stuff that coming from you know other pieces of equipment it's the cleanest source and using my best way of getting bottom end [Music] I love it but I want it to be more of what it is now so let's do the same thing I'm gonna use our old friend multiband but first one we can control going into it so we're going to get an req it's cheap and cheerful does the job I like to wait sounds its basic we're gonna go at 65 or 60 and just do a soft roll off so there's gonna be some 60 in there but it's just getting out of the way of the kick so let's have a listen [Music] cool now we're gonna go to our multiband choose the mc2 [Music] so we're gonna do a usual trick gonna go up to about 250 take that out so it's gonna get the ball men and compress it like crazy underneath [Music] and bring it back up so it's even check it out solo [Music] so Kevin my own independent barmen control [Music] you I need a kick drum to be controlled I don't want to kick job hard soft hard soft - dynamic I want to I want that kick drum when it punches I wanted to hit really hard I want to hear the saltiness of it I don't necessarily want it to sound overly triggered I'm not I'm not big into that sound even though you'll see that I do use a sample on this song I start with the core kick drum I'll look at what the song needs and I'll take I'll start with an EQ and I'll come all add a little high end you can see on this song I dug away 1001 K so let's go let's call 1k dugout add a little high in add some bottom in because when you're playing this fast stuff sometimes it's just a slap ear so I take the kick drum I'll EQ it a little bit brighten it up on this this occasion compressor I'm using the stock dizzy compressor of course I don't want to hit it too hard if I look at here it's not suffocating it's just kind of controlling the attack a little bit and you'll notice in a second that I'm not just going through one compressor I'm just feeling I'm starting with the first channel which is the kick drum channel and adding a little control and then once I get a control that I kind of like I go down and I bussed this to a kick stuff and I put a second compressor on it it maybe has a couple different settings maybe the threshold is different maybe the attacks different because to me the beauty of compression is when you have a sound and it sounds and then it goes away really fast if you compress a sound and you use a little bit of a slower release it makes your sound sustain longer so if you have a kick drum that's tick-tick-tick it if you can get it to go to tick a little meteor it'll have a meteor sound so that's that's why I use compression as well but besides of controlling it the governor of it I like to add a little bit a smoothness a depth to it which you get from more kind of analog gear compressors old tube compressors do it a lot because their releases are slower so a lot of times I'll use it a variety beak used but I'm using the digi ones here so I'm not digging out a lot on this I'm basically just adding some bottom and then adding some top but I'm doing it twice so I'm going a Q and I'm going into a compressor so basically it's compressing but it's also controlling my EQ a little bit going into another EQ because I didn't think there's enough high-end so I'm adding a little bit more high-end and then I'm going to a final compressor here and release is 80 what was my first release let's see that's the same kind of using the same trick I work on this kick on its own for a while and then I'll work on the snare and I kind of build it and then eventually I'll go back and I'll adjust a little bit once I put the whole kit in because here's the thing when you have it so load it's never going to sound like this and you have to understand it's a couple step process it's not always like oh you're Mack get this kick like this and you walk away now you get it like this and then you work and you work on other elements if you look at these bass you see they're all solidly hot to me a lot of times sometimes I'll even go hotter than this to me you got to get the highest level into these machine to get the best quality back out because it to me when I get a track for someone with with it with a low bass it's just it I can never get that fullness and the bigness and the wideness so to me you have to slam it you got it you gotta get as loud as you can I go into these with compressors as well so to me I'm already committing to if you look here it's pretty solid it's it's it's got a it's not there's a lot of not a lot of dynamics but the song doesn't have a lot of dynamics so I start with compression because compression is is what I do that's what I love compressors all along the wall the stressors or retros or Jeff taking my favorite one the Alltech 322 so I will compress going in and you'll notice that too and because of that I get I have to do less work later it's it it's to me it's like the more I can do that the more fun I can have with mixing and unless I have to do with overall make creating the sound to me I want to create the sound going into this thing for ease I will bust to a bass sub and you'll see I'll put a little EQ okay what it's lacking wow I put him there was a lot of bottom in lacking there a lot of high end so basically I didn't like the mid-range so I kind of cranked it up then I'll go to a compressor same thing I'll turn it up I'll adjust the threshold back and forth figure out what I like in the end it looks like I need a more bottom end and had too much clink so then I'll just take this bass [Music] and I'll just adjust levels up and down until I find something that I like and obviously that I listen to the drums with it the big thing for me too is I like when the kick drum and the bass kind of match a little bit so they're kind of cohesive in a faster song like this it's a little different I have a clicker kick so you might not notice it as much but if they're punching together the whole bottom end and the fullness of what will be larger because of that this is without any effects EQ or compression we're sending that to our Maximizer to tie it in with the drums and have it all when kind of glued together that way let's see what we did with this bass and because you know it sounds good does it you know will it cut through enough in the mix and it's a low-end e-enough or whatever so you can see we're taking a little bit of this Clank out and a little bit more top end and some of those and some some some low means this one it's just the just EQ and compression to just smooth this out and give it a little more girth and even more compression [Music] it's so easy for some of these notes to kind of disappear and in the sea of guitars and with double kicks and and everything around that we you know we would just use compression to to get it to to to get it to be real solid down in there with especially the sample kicks we're looking at a lot of a lot of low-end push that goes together the low end of the bass that the lows of the bass and the kicks and the guitars they all have to work together and I don't ever really do this but I'm just using as a tool to illustrate a point I have this this multiband compressor here to show us the three sections of three sonic bands that I feel things have to work and all of them together - they don't really do anything as you can see each one of them aside from one this one they're all on they're all like set to no compression but if you solo this low-end guy here can hear it's just you know the the low end of the kick and the bass and the you know all the low-end information is balanced down there and you could still hear it as a song it kind of sounds like you're hearing something through a door maybe or but it's still like the song it still makes sense to you even though you can't hear anything else besides this low stuff from 300 Hertz down it's listen to the the high bit here so this same thing here you know you have the the very top of the guitars the cymbals and and the just a siblings of the vocals working together and that's you know that's the kind of things I'm listening for never like this because that doesn't make any sense to actually listen to it like that or maybe that's to you and not to me but that's what I'm listening for the when I'm listening to the whole thing okay I hope you enjoyed that there was a lot of fun to do to be able to show three completely different approaches thank you ever so much to auric Wilde for your incredible talent and of course mr. Cameron Webb to great friends to wonderful mentors for all of us here and please as ever leave a bunch of comments and questions below and let us know how you tame the low end on your kick and bass guitar have a Marvis time recording a mixed thing and I'll see you all again very soon [Music] you [Music]

Channel: Produce Like A Pro

Views: 122,777

Rating: 4.8935423 out of 5

Keywords: Kick and Bass Mixing, Kick Drum Mixing, Bass Guitar Mixing, Low End Mixing Tricks, Bass mixing tricks, Kick Drum Mixing Tricks, Ulrich Wild, Cameron Webb, Warren Huart, Home studio recording

Id: 8vG1-FMtOTs

Length: 21min 2sec (1262 seconds)

Published: Mon May 07 2018