KVR Mix Workshop - Week 3: Kick and Bass

[Kim Lajoie]

Week 3: Kick and Bass

Original full mix
Raw Kick (warning: uncompressed .WAV 26MB)
Raw Bass (warning: uncompressed .WAV 26MB)
A7's version
GeckoEE's version
Ngarjuna's version
Yonyz' version
Cordelia's version
Produced Kick
Produced Bass

Now we've got the lead vocal and the snare in place, we can move on to the kick and bass.

As I've written before, the lead vocal and snare are in the foreground, and everything else slots in behind them. Keeping in this in mind, the kick and bass should only be a little bit behind, as they're still quite important. Think of them as the "second line". I also work on the kick and bass at the same time (rather than one after the other, like with the vocal and snare) because they have to work together - much closer than the snare and vocal need to. It's also very easy to come up with mud when mixing them in isolation.

Listening to the isolated tracks, you'll notice that the kick is far more processed than the bass. In fact, the kick/bass combination are somewhat like a mirror of the snare/vocal combination. Like the vocal, the bass is melodic and sustained, and the kick (like the snare) is untuned and extremely percussive.

Bass
We'll start with the bass because it's the least processed of the two. The raw file is not a naked direct input, so don't feel like you need to add an amp sim. This is The Sound. All I've done is included some heavy compression to flatten the dynamics. This keeps the bass feeling solid throughout the song. Without compression, the level of the bass fluctuates from note to note. Some notes may be too loud for the mix, and others may be too soft. In a dense mix, this makes the overall balance feel uneven and unbalanced. For more sparse music, it might be more appropriate to use less compression, or even no compression.

I've also used some saturation on the bass as well. I can't remember if it was a separate process or if I was overdriving the compressor, but it doesn't matter. Saturation does two things in this context - preserve dynamics (yes!), and skew the frequency balance.

Saturation preserves the dynamics in the performance because saturation responds differently to different signal levels. Rather than stronger notes merely being louder, saturation makes the stronger notes the same level as the others but gives those stronger notes different tone. Specifically - stronger notes will be more overdriven, with stronger higher frequencies. In this case, there's a little bit of added fuzz in the midrange. It's subtle, but you don't need much to make a difference in perception (especially when overdriving bass).

Saturation will also skew the frequency balance - specifically adding energy above where most of the energy is in the instrument. This allows the bass to be heard more easily - particularly on smaller speakers (but also sounds great on large speakers!). Its also different to simply boosting the midrange with EQ, because the added energy is drawn from below, meaning it's more consistent with the fundamental frequency. In the case of electric bass, this means you'll get a more consistent tone. Using EQ to boost higher frequencies will also boost string and fret noise.

As great as saturation is, using too much saturation will work against you. By increasing the energy in the midrange, you crowd that area. By turning down the bass to compensate, you lose the low end. In a mix like this (which has a significant distorted guitar component) it's easy to lose an overdriven bass among all the guitars. You could compensate using EQ to reduce the energy in the middle and upper frequencies, but unless there's a specific overdriven bass sound you're after, it's almost always easier to simply use less saturation.

Kick
The raw kick is very much a dull thud. It has a little low bass, a lot of energy in the lower mids, and not much above. Because I wanted a thick electric bass sound (with saturation and a lot of lower-mid energy), it doesn't make sense to use a kick with a similar profile. This was actually a difficult kick to work with in this context. First I used a harmonic exciter to bring out the high frequencies. I actually drove it quite hard - filter frequency down to 1kHz, maximum drive, maximum saturation. It paid off though - this got me about 80% there. I then used EQ to dip the lower mid frequencies (around 240Hz) and boost the high frequencies (around 6kHz). Lastly, I used some subtle saturation to reduce the initial transient (the "smack") and bring up the tail (the "thud"). Note that I didn't actually boost the lower bass!

By doing this I fit the kick around the bass. While the bass has a thick lower-mid presence, the kick adds a thud in the lower bass and articulation in the treble.

Mixing them together
You can hear my mix by lining up the relevant "Produced" vocal, snare, kick and bass tracks in your sequencer, all at unity (0dB) level. They should sound as a unit - together these form the skeleton of the mix. Everything else hangs off these tracks. Because I wanted to emphasise the melodic, rather than percussive, elements of the song, I've opted to push the bass somewhat in front of the kick. The kick almost exists solely as a punctuation for the bass. You might choose differently...

Anyone is free to download the links and have a go for themselves. If you are serious about participating though, you should send me an email to workshop at kimlajoie dot com to get involved. Participants get access to all the audio tracks for mixing and private personal feedback from me on their work. Since we are now quite some way into the mix, anyone joining now should expect to spend some time catching up.

<- Week 2 Week 4 ->

-Kim.

[ngarjuna]

I just listened to mine again (and the rest, good job everyone) and had to make a change, so I just re-uploaded. This is always the biggest challenge for me, getting the low end right; it's not uncommon for me to make a lot of trips back and forth from my mixing room to the reference speakers getting it to where I want it. I think I'm happier with the version I just uploaded though (I said that the last 2 times I uploaded a file =p).

[asnor]

Did you take notes this time?

The kick and bass were definitely a lot more work than the snare and vocal. I don't recall doing any revisions to the latter, but the kick/bass got 15, or so. It still needs another adjustment, but it's a minor issue that I haven't had time to work out yet.

[ngarjuna]

I did take notes =). And I actually saved all the tracks themselves to refer back to and tweak.

[asnor]

I actually saved all the tracks themselves to refer back to and tweak.

How were you doing it before?

[asnor]

Did we lose Cordelia and Spinedoc?

[ngarjuna]

Sometimes I delete tracks after the stems are rendered to make the files load faster. That's why I ditched the vocals and snare and kept the stems. In general, it's probably not a good practice as evidenced by my needing to go back and remix this week's material a few times after I thought I was done.

I like your kick drum, btw, a7.

[asnor]

Thanks, ngarjuna. You should hear some of my earlier versions. They aren't pretty.

The direction and feedback have been pretty invaluable.

As far as rendering, have you considered saving a pre-render rpp? I've been thinking about how to manage this with revisions and progress and am thinking that might be a good way to go. For example, save as "kick_bass.rpp" or something, so if I want to go back I can just load the older file.

How do you approach it when you're mixing other projects, generally?

[ngarjuna]

Well normally it's a bit more organized than it is now because I would work in stages. So I would have a file of originals, a file of stems (for my little preamp color / tape saturation that I tend to apply to most tracks to varying degrees), then a file for the main FX applied, then sometimes (for a more vintage-y sound) there will be another stage of preamp color, then generally a file of the bus stems. I'm sure that seems like a contrived mess to some, but it's actually pretty workable for me; it's just not practical to use 1 or 2 versions from start to finish due to Nebula's CPU consumption. I could just mute channels with effects (REAPER does have the option that when a channel is muted, it does not process the effects on that channel, effectively saving CPU when you render and mute the source), but I'm really anal about having a nice neat project to look at, it helps my brain be more organized; it just feels cluttered to have a project with twice the number of channels that I am actually using. Having all those different project and stem files would probably be too confusing if I weren't used to the process already.

What got me off track this time is that the work flow is totally different. I effectively have to go from start to finish each week on a particular part as opposed to finishing a whole stage then moving on to the next. At first this was not such a big deal, but I organized my buses first thing by instrument type like usual, not thinking that we wouldn't be finishing whole buses per week some weeks. In hindsight, I should have made a bus for each week. It's not a bad thing, it just threw me off from my usual workflow which caused me to make bad decisions like "just throw away the processed tracks once you've rendered and you're happy with it." Thank goodness I'm still happy with my VOX and snare or I'd be in a little bit of trouble trying to reproduce what I did heh.

But yeah, I hear you about the feedback/direction being invaluable. My first kick sounded like a big dull thud. Because of Kim's suggestions, I ended up adding in unprocessed versions of "the whole ball of wax" to see what would happen and realized that I didn't have any headroom with the amount of low end I was pumping in this early in the mix. Also, the kick and bass were using so much energy that I had to bring the guitars way down which was making for crappy climaxes which was when I realized I had to start over from scratch on the kick/bass.

[s4w2th]

Just wanted to say, this thread is fantastic. Ten years ago I would have given my right arm for tutorial like this. Good work Kim!

[GeckoEE]

A7, I love the bass fuzz, and you did an amazing job replicating Kim's kick.

I would love to see your notes for this one.

here are mine:
Bass:
EQ: low shelf +3.5dB at 160Hz, low mid cut -3.5dB at 320, high self +4dB at 7k
GClip soft clipping. Enough to crunch the loud notes, and barely touch the quite ones.
Side chain compressor with kick (4:1 150us attack, 41ms release -25 dB threshold)
leveling compressor: 10ms attack so as not to shape it, 3:1, -25 dB threshold long release

Kick:
EQ: Some real craziness here. Low Shelf 4dB, 68Hz, mid cut -13dB 240Hz Q=2, upper mids/wide presence boost 5.75kHz, 11dB
Envelope shaper: made in synth edit for this project.
No harmonic exciter. I couldn't find one that sounded good.
PSP piano verb to make it sound like it is rattling the china.

[Cordelia]

Did we lose Cordelia and Spinedoc?

Hey a7,
I'm still here. I didn't have any FTP uploading software (my computer isn't internet connected, I borrow this one for browsing) so I send my files directly to Kim (thanks, Kim). I sent it late last night, so it should be up soon.

This week was hardest for me, especially the kick. I didn't have a harmonic exciter, so I downloaded JB SEND and Voxengo Overtone GEQ and used those, but I've never used an exciter and didn't know what I was doing. When I listen to the produced files I get distracted by the reverbs.

Anyway, I'll take a listen to the posted files this afternoon. I hope everyone had fun!

[ngarjuna]

Yeah, the reverb does make it hard to A-B with the produced files no doubt.

Cordelia - you can use command line to FTP (FTP is actually a command line protocol from Unix days). I'll try to shoot you a PM later with instructions if you'd like. It's not hard at all once you know the few basic commands you need to get it done.

[asnor]

Ngarjuna,

Actually, it makes alot of sense doing it like that. I might need to figure out something similar for this project, since my plug count is starting to get up there, and we aren't even half way through yet.


GeckoEE,

Thanks for saying so. Like I said before, the direction and feedback have been pretty invaluable. I'll post up my notes tonight when I get home.

BTW, just looking at your notes, It looks like the main difference between yours and mine is the pianoverb. I don't recall my exact settings, but yours seem pretty close to what I had. And I don't mean that the verb is bad, just that it seems like one of the few differences.

Cordelia,

Glad to see you're still with us and hope you can get that FTP thing figured out. I'm looking forward to hearing your results.

[asnor]

btw, has anyone gotten the week 4 stuff yet? My yahoo email is acting a little strange lately and I'm thinking it might not be working correctly.