Cleaning your sounds

allways try to know what the peak frequency of each sound is... then cut that frequency out of other sounds... for example : you have a kick drum that peaks at 80 hz...well, cut 80 hz out of your bass line... check the peak frequency of the bass and cut it out of the kick...

your drum and bass will sound better together...

put an equaliser on the master output, cutting all frequencies below 20hz and above 20 khz...this frequencies you cannot hear, but they take headroom away out of your mix... export a track, cut these frequencies and watch the waveform change... the difference will be heard !!!

these are a few tricks i use ...u can hear the openness of the mix in this track...

Distreality & Gin Moore track 2 : Pumping Dub

on that track it turned out as i wanted, using these 2 tips...

Yeej, my favourite topic :))

This is what I do:

• First of all, only the bass (in most genres) need subsounds so you can cut (at -90db) everything else at 60hz. This creates room for other sounds as Distreality noticed already. Put every sound thru a sprectrum analyser and you'll be surprised how much subs are going on in sounds that don't appear to have them.

• Define each sound on your soundspectrum, for example: snares are rather high, you don't need snare sounds of 100hz. So cut your snaresounds below, like 200hz (dependng on the sound you want offcourse). And by cutting I don't mean graph equalize them with a soft eq that only goes to -10db but CUTTING at -90dB (cooledit can do this). A quick resumé of sounds and there frequencies (mind that this is very very "in general":

*bass: 40-500hz with peaks at 100-200hz *kick: 40-2500hz with peaks at 60-150hz. kicks are very relative to the genre you're producing. if you need a bloppy kick (like in pstrance and elektro sometimes, you need the higher freqs, other genres: less + I don't know)

• leads: 100-5000hz with 200-700 for warmth, 700-2000 for dynamic and clear sound and 2000-5000 for sparkle :))
• snares: 250-8000hz, very dependable on your genre but 1000-3000hz gives it a high punch. mind snares cause they peak your sound, I usually end up notching my sners at 2500hz once playing live.
• hihats,cymbals etc: 1500-20000 hz. very imporatnt to cut those sounds below that freq.

• Mind unwanted frequencies. they are especially annoying and fucking up your sound when you use lots of resonance (which makes it fat but screamy). Some frequencies are more annoying than others. For example: something between 1500 hz and 2500hz is an annoying frequency, you might wanna -6dB that frequency for some sounds.

• make sure nothing collides with other sounds. like sharp leads on top of sharp snares, voices and percussion gives earaches. Make sure everything has its place. When you want a certain sound to be upfront, give it more room than other sounds. for example: at a moment where percusion is very important: lower your leadsounds, don't play 5 leads and all of your percussion at the same time.

• Watch reverbs and delays. They sound cool, but they give unwanted noise after the attention is passed for them (and during the next sounds). A good trick for snares is to reverb them at high quality and then gate them in order to give them the cool reverb sound when they hit, but immediately after that they give no sound anymore. Same goes for delays, only use long decays when necessary.

• Less is more (and this is the most important tip).

Interessting topic!! Go pro's! :) I'll follow this thread closely!

Yes thx you Bandarlog, i think it's the most usefull teknikal topic i read here!

jep - this is the info i need! nice to have some professionals explaining it! :)

quote from distreality (oldskool-quoting-way 8) ) "you have a kick drum that peaks at 80 hz...well, cut 80 hz out of your bass line... check the peak frequency of the bass and cut it out of the kick... your drum and bass will sound better together..."

I tried this, but is not as simple as i thought, what kind of eq/anything do you use for this? when i tried it, it kinda wasted the sound of my kick.

thanks bandarlog, this stuff really helps me forward!

As for kicks and basses, that is a chapter on its own and should be learned constantly by any magician :P

Bass and kick are very tricky. I will give you some tips that count for psytrance but I think they could be usefull for all styles. Psytrance is known for relative high speeds and these days especially for its addictive kbbbk bass structure (with k for kick and b for bass ;)) that keeps them rolling all night (I'd like to be naive). Now that structure is very hard to make because the idea is to give the impression that the bas doesn't stop rolling, but it does when the kick hits in. So why not bbbbbbbbbbbb all the way with kicks on top? because they collide and actually make you lose power instead of gaining it. That's why most producers go for kbbbk. SOIT, how to make kick and bass go together: (mind that I am no expert at all and you should ALWAYS consider reading http://forum.isratrance.com/viewforum.php/forum/2 because this is by far the best forum with the most skilled wizards (no for real, these guys are wizards!) and their tips count for every genre.

So, bass and kick, some tricks:

• Sidechaincompression: glues bass and kick together, I don't use it (allthough some are convinced to hear it in my songs) but it seems to be good. Look it up and go figure out. It always seems to me that sidechaincompression makes the song to pumped up with basses that duck to much, hard to explain.

• What I do is giving kick and bass their own efxchannel with eq (don't forget to notch at certain points, like 400hz in bass), NO reverb (especially not on basses), some compression (I prefer not to), some bassbooster (not fruity's) and even maybe a bit of delay (but rather not). then send both channels completely to one other channel with a multibandcompressor on it that removes too much subs, adds some bass and compress the other freq's at your choice.

• Consider using >1 kick and even bass. But mind that they are ALWAYS seperated in frequencies. Like one bass from 40-250hz, other one from 300 and beyond (for clarity takketakketak :))) Especially kicks sound cool with that, you can have one kick Lowpassed at 500hz and another bloppy elektro/laser kick with metallic reverd and delays on top (this is fun :D)

• Mind the length of your kicks and the length of your basses. Best is to render them as a whole and see if they collide (visually) at first, after a while just listen. The bassound of the kick should be finnished when the bass kicks in, again for psytrance and for styles where they best don't collide for maximum power, not in all styles. for basses it's more easy: no attack, max decay, sustain: I don't, but can't seem to hear the difference myself (it's a mystery :))) and no release. Then carefully adjust the lengths of your basses.

• Another trick is to manually adjust the volumes: automate the volume of your bass by setting it to 0 when the kick hits in and to the normal the millisecond the kick has finnished (then copy those automations if you can).

Again, these are very general and common tips for psytrance but they tend to have much clarity, those producers so they could count for other genres as well. Long hooverbasses like in nuskoolbreaks or d'n'b do have kicks on top of them, I think you have to be a compression wizard for that :-)

And these are tips I use, but after years of producing I still don't think I master basses by far... It is so ver vewy hard. :P

thanks a lot! I've been experimenting with it today and my sound came out quite pure, even the kbbbk.
(its funny how people doing this stuff visualize sound 8) i do the same thing even in layers (offtopic - never mind 8o )) So I tried it with a combination of volume-automation and your second tip (sending both fx-channels together to another fxchannel. This worked fine and I learned a lot doing it (i never used automation before actually and i'm in my "childrens shoes" :) with compression and eq cutting) but I guess for being sure the result is ok, i'll have to buy some decent monitors! (which i cant wait to do) sidechaincompression didn't work out that good, maybe i did something wrong, gonna retry tomorrow or so, i'll keep you updated!

greetz!

great tips, ik zou me der ook beter eens mee bezighouden

Originally posted by : strekie

great tips, ik zou me der ook beter eens mee bezighouden

Gij hebt uit uw eigen al cleane sound you bastard :))

Some great tips here. In genral I would say that it is important to watch each sound induvidualy for unwanted frequencies (you'd be suprised how much low rumble any given hihat sample might have). Also try to think about wich sounds are important to the track. If a track has vocal don't be shy of putting them on top of the mix. While looking for tracks for my show I noticed that that is a issue for a lot of people (especialy with hiphop). The same goes for snares in breakbeat and drum and bass tracks.

Also although reverb might give your track more depth do not swamp everything with it, sometimes it's better to use some subtle delay here and there. i know bandarlog already mentioned this but it realy is a very common mistake a lot of people (including myself) make.

Finaly at the 'mastering' stage be carefull with limiters. Allthough they do give your tracks more volume and punch they also push up the volume of all those nasty muddy frequencies and hissing sounds. A track with to much limiting can be very tireing to listen to.