![]() ![]() For example, there was a persistent pitched kick‑drum resonance coming through the room mics at 74Hz, which reduced the bass‑note definition, and cutting that out with a notch filter tightened the low end noticeably. Some dynamics tweaks also helped tighten up the combined bass kick sound: light gating of the kick drum to reduce its LF ringing (upper screen) and ducking of the bass triggered via a side‑chain feed from the kick drum (lower screen).Because the drums had been created using Steven Slate's excellent sample collection, and because the choice and tuning of the raw sounds had been well chosen to suit the song, it wasn't actually too tough to achieve a suitable drum sound - but I did need to put in some additional work to avoid unbalancing the bass‑guitar line. So why had Johnny experienced difficulties with it? The answer is that the problems came not from the bass part, but from various other tracks that were interacting with it in the context of the full mix - chiefly, the drum tracks. Interestingly, the frequency‑balance of the supposedly problematic bass part was fine, and survived through to my final remix without any further EQ. After a trawl through some reference mixes that Johnny had sent, it was clear that extreme low frequencies played little part in the style, so I also high‑pass filtered the kick and bass (again at 20Hz) to keep them from impinging unduly on the overall mix headroom. As usual, I applied 20Hz high‑pass filtering pretty much across the board, to avoid subsonic sludge, although this was only a precaution, as none of the tracks had serious problems in that department. The simpler of the two tasks was sorting out the low end. As expected, it was these areas of the mix that demanded the lion's share of the mixing time. I asked Johnny to send his raw, unprocessed multitrack audio files, so that I could import them into my own Cockos Reaper‑based mix system. Mix Rescue | January 2011 by Sound On Sound The Secret To Bass: Everything But The Bass! Despite this, he'd been unable to get his production sonics to a state where they bore comparison with those in his record collection, so he turned to Mix Rescue for advice. Listening to Johnny's own mix of the song, it was immediately apparent that he was not only an enormously accomplished singer, but was also well aware of his chosen genre's musical and arrangement conventions. The low end of the mix was also a concern, because he'd found that the bass guitar became overbearing and rumbly well before the bass part was really audible enough in the balance.Īlthough the likes of Judas Priest, Iron Maiden, and Saxon don't trouble the charts as often as they used to in their '80s heyday, there are, nonetheless, many musicians who still relish their classic heavy metal sounds - amongst them SOS reader Johnny Lokke, whose track 'Promises & Lies' is the subject of this month's column. ![]() No matter what he tried, though, he struggled to make his voice sit in the mix without it sounding thin, and he was even wondering if he might need to re‑record the vocals differently. This had been a long‑time source of frustration, and he'd already been right round the houses experimenting with all sorts of different processors and effects. To clear room in the mix for the bass guitar's main frequency peak, Mike cut this region from the kick drum using EQ (below).Although he was keen to pick up tips regarding all aspects of the production, his priority was to find out how to achieve an appropriate lead‑vocal sound. In the spectrum analyser display you can see the relationship between the frequency ranges of the kick drum (yellow trace) and bass guitar (red trace). This month, we hunt out the devils in the detail of a metal mix!
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