KVR Audio

FeelingMachine · Post by **FeelingMachine** » Fri Mar 01, 2013 11:13 pm

Hate to interupt but isn't anybody else crying with laughter at the thread title and the amazing diagram of a fish !?

I love this place sometimes xD

Touch The Universe · Post by **Touch The Universe** » Sun Jul 12, 2015 7:21 am

I remember reading this thread after coming across a few more kicks that looked like fishes and they sounded good. I'm trying now to recreate them. I'm working with bazzism and when streaming and looking at the wave there is no deep curve at all (only a straight block), even on sampled kicks there will be atleast some dip since they are usually heavily processed etc. I will try with compressor setting maybe 10-20ms attack time to let the initial transient pass then a really fast release 25-35ms with 4:1 ratio with threshold around -5--10 db. Do this settings sound correct?

*Edit, yeah, compressor settings change from each one mostly so dishing out numbers like this is useless.

camsr · Post by **camsr** » Sun Jul 12, 2015 9:34 am

Dudeman, learn to speak proper english, and nobody really cares how you set your compressor's parameters.

JJM629 · Post by **JJM629** » Sun Jul 12, 2015 2:46 pm

I might have ago at making a fish now....

Anti-Logic · Post by **Anti-Logic** » Sun Jul 12, 2015 6:29 pm

Try Blockfish.

cryophonik · Post by **cryophonik** » Sun Jul 12, 2015 6:51 pm

Compress bass if you want it to look like a fish. Largemouth bass, in particular, have a lot of attack. Be sure to release those fish.

Anti-Logic · Post by **Anti-Logic** » Sun Jul 12, 2015 7:04 pm

cryophonik wrote:Compress bass if you want it to look like a fish. Largemouth bass, in particular, have a lot of attack. Be sure to release those fish.

First attack the fish, smash them against a brickwall to limit their vision, clip their fins, then release them?

cron · Post by **cron** » Sun Jul 12, 2015 11:56 pm

Use the sidechain mode on your compressor and brutally highpass the sidechain. The compressor won't 'hear' anything during the body of the kick so only the initial transient will trigger any compression. A lot of compressors (e.g. DC8C) will let you do this kind of sidechain filtering of the input as standard without setting up additional tracks and routings. Very quick release, attack to taste. Gets that fishy waveform where your kick sounds like a 2-part "ba-woo".

Touch The Universe · Post by **Touch The Universe** » Mon Jul 13, 2015 4:41 am

camsr wrote:Dudeman, learn to speak proper english, and nobody really cares how you set your compressor's parameters.

Thanks for your positive and awesome reply

camsr · Post by **camsr** » Mon Jul 13, 2015 8:56 pm

Sorry, no problems.

camsr · Post by **camsr** » Mon Jul 13, 2015 8:58 pm

cron wrote:Use the sidechain mode on your compressor and brutally highpass the sidechain. The compressor won't 'hear' anything during the body of the kick so only the initial transient will trigger any compression. A lot of compressors (e.g. DC8C) will let you do this kind of sidechain filtering of the input as standard without setting up additional tracks and routings. Very quick release, attack to taste. Gets that fishy waveform where your kick sounds like a 2-part "ba-woo".

Is that how most people make fish? I usually start with heavy VCA compression on the entire sample, then EQ the "body" in. Doing that to a kick makes a large resonant tail.
This is also a good example of compression before EQ.

Still, there's almost always EQ before compression.

cron · Post by **cron** » Mon Jul 13, 2015 9:06 pm

camsr wrote:
cron wrote:Use the sidechain mode on your compressor and brutally highpass the sidechain. The compressor won't 'hear' anything during the body of the kick so only the initial transient will trigger any compression. A lot of compressors (e.g. DC8C) will let you do this kind of sidechain filtering of the input as standard without setting up additional tracks and routings. Very quick release, attack to taste. Gets that fishy waveform where your kick sounds like a 2-part "ba-woo".
Is that how most people make fish? I usually start with heavy VCA compression on the entire sample, then EQ the "body" in. Doing that to a kick makes a large resonant tail.

Sendy (I always trust her opinions when it comes to sound design) said the dip is usually a result of surgically EQing out the lower mids at the point where the transient turns into the body. I'm guessing it works on some samples better than others - I suppose it all depends on how 'swoopy' the frequency curve of the kick is when going from high to low.

I prefer my method though as I find it a bit more reliable and intuitively controllable. Generally works on everything regardless of the existing amplitude or frequency envelope of the sample - you just need a transient that momentarily contains higher frequencies than the body.

Someone else mentioned layering - fading a different body sample in a few moments after the transient...

Lots of ways to skin a cat.

edit: Just spotted your edit about boosting with EQ after compression so the compressor doesn't react to the boosted bass. Very clever! There's another method for my toolbox...

camsr · Post by **camsr** » Mon Jul 13, 2015 9:25 pm

cron wrote: I prefer my method though as I find it a bit more reliable and intuitively controllable. Generally works on everything regardless of the existing amplitude or frequency envelope of the sample - you just need a transient that momentarily contains higher frequencies than the body.

And that's the only context it works correctly in IMO. Without the ability to isolate the part to remove, at the time we want it, it doesn't work. If that transient is at the very beginning of the sound, then it only compresses the beginning, because the compressor won't attack past that point. The release envelope takes over but the front is already crushed in that case. That could be fixed with the method I described, though.

One compressor I like for narrowly targeting frequencies is ChunkWare VanillaComp. It has a sidechain bandpass filter and it's very much distortion free.

bezirani · Post by **bezirani** » Mon Jun 26, 2017 3:43 pm

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You need to play with Amp envelopes to get the desired effect. Of course there are many ways to solve any problem but I find it easier to deal with amp envelopes (you need to be able to do curves with the envelope i.e exponential rather than linear) rather than compression and EQ.

https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B1I4y (https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B1I4y) ... URoM0Q5STg (https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B1I4y ... URoM0Q5STg (https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B1I4yrhAD0X-YTJuSURoM0Q5STg))

VariKusBrainZ · Post by **VariKusBrainZ** » Mon Jun 26, 2017 5:20 pm

bezirani wrote:You need to play with Amp envelopes to get the desired effect.

Exactly what I was thinking, there seems to be too much 'over engineering' recommended to do something simple.

Though I might use an envelope controlled resonant filter to tonally sculpt for that nice initial pillowy marshmallow sound

Compressing kicks to make fish