{"id":131,"date":"2018-01-24T19:23:00","date_gmt":"2018-01-24T19:23:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/box5722.temp.domains\/~audioor1\/how-to-ensure-your-bass-and-kick-drum-mix-well\/"},"modified":"2019-08-06T10:36:16","modified_gmt":"2019-08-06T10:36:16","slug":"how-to-ensure-your-bass-and-kick-drum","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/audioordeal.co.uk\/how-to-ensure-your-bass-and-kick-drum\/","title":{"rendered":"How to Ensure Your Bass and Kick Drum Mix Well"},"content":{"rendered":"
This article is based on something so fundamental, it is as much about composition and arrangement as it is about mixing. One of the hardest parts of a track to mix is the bass and kick, this poses a problem when you are making house and other electronic genres which rely on both being at the forefront. When badly mixed, the clash of the two means that any compression<\/a> will shatter the weight that they should have. It all comes down to the fact that they both occupy the same frequency space. Constructive interference in particular, can cause volume spikes which trigger a compressor more than it should and the result is a highly attenuated signal which can kill impact.<\/div>\n
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While there are techniques such as side-chain compression<\/a>, which means that the kick can sit nicely on top of the bass, it involves using effects and has a noticeable (yet sometimes desirable) effect on the sound. For me, the number 1 rule of mixing is that a song shouldn’t need much mixing in the first place. Your track should be arranged and suitably composed such that everything fits together in the first place, with mixing just ironing out the issues.<\/div>\n
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Just as when baking a cake, it is better to know the exact ingredients and quantities beforehand, as opposed to tasting the batter and adding things to taste (too much of this can ruin the cake), mixing is the same. Classical composers, as another example, had to work hard to make sure that the songs mixed well through both instrumentation and melody choice, without any of modern day mixing equipment, this is essentially what we are going to do today.<\/div>\n
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You don’t need to look far to find where the issue lies, we can identify what is wrong when the bass and kick don’t blend well together. Ultimately it can be traced to one simple fact: they often don’t blend well together.<\/i>\u00a0As simple as it sounds, by playing about with the melody of your bass-line, you can completely sidestep the issue. Try placing your bass notes in between the kicks, the most notable example would be the genre Melbourne Bounce, where the bass plays on every off beat. This ensures that they never occur at the same time and mixing the two is a case of ensuring that they are in key, and their tails blend well together, which is much easier.<\/div>\n
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While some may disagree, I regard most Melbourne Bounce tracks as pretty horrendous and as a whole, quite un-inventive. This tutorial is not intending to tell you to drop your genre and switch to Melbourne Bounce, however, we can draw some inspiration from it.<\/div>\n
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Instead of just whacking a bass note on the off beat, we can play about. We can have the main bass notes accentuated on the offbeats and syncopated timings, then even allow a few to hit alongside the kick. One of the best examples of this is LO99’s track “Take Me Back”:<\/div>\n
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