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Bass and kicks


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Ok so basiccly I've got a song, and there's a drum line and a bass line. Now what happens is whenever the bass line is played with those drums, the kick gets sort of muffled. It's hard to explain but the kick sounds alot better when the bass line isn't playing but when the bass line is playing it like "cut's off" part of the quality of the kick sound which ruins the song because the kick isn't thumping as it should be. Any help? I've heard sidechaining can help but I'm not sure excatly how to go about doing this.

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Someone that uses FL can probably help you with exactly how to side-chain it in FL, but the process is basically this: you use a compressor on the bass, but the compressor is controlled by the kick so the bass always makes room whenever the kick hits.

Another technique to clear up this conflict involve giving the kick and the bass different room in the frequency range. It's much easier than side-chaining, but you gotta figure out what part of the sounds you wanna keep and which ones you're willing to reduce. Basically, you cut frequency X from instrument A (and maybe boost it in instr B) and cut frequency Y from instrument B (and maybe boost it in instr A). X and Y are different frequencies in the 80-150Hz range.

It's usually a good idea to make sure your other instruments don't bleed too much into the lows either.

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Yeah, I think Rozo has it exactly right. The problem is simple - there's just too much going on in a single frequency range. Sound can't stack indefinitely, so when you come across a situation where one sound forces another to get lower you need to make room one way or another. Side-chaining and adjusting the frequency are two ways to do this. Gating the bass whenever the kick hits is another strategy, if you don't mind sacrificing the bass a little bit.

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Yeah, I think Rozo has it exactly right. The problem is simple - there's just too much going on in a single frequency range. Sound can't stack indefinitely, so when you come across a situation where one sound forces another to get lower you need to make room one way or another. Side-chaining and adjusting the frequency are two ways to do this. Gating the bass whenever the kick hits is another strategy, if you don't mind sacrificing the bass a little bit.

Gating it is just side-chain compression taken to the extreme... unless you manually automating the gate. :P /nitpick

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