Put the kick poke between the bass notes
When I’m working on a mix or a master, a relationship I pay a lot of attention to is the relationship between the kick drum and the bass.
The kick drum needs a certain amount of heft (50-70 Hz-ish), punch (80-120 Hz-ish), and presence (1,000-5,000 Hz-ish, depending).
The bass needs a certain amount of solidity (60-85 Hz-ish), warmth (85-135 Hz-ish), presence (300 Hz area), grab (600 Hz area) and bite (1,200 Hz area).
And the two need to work in a complementary way! It’s really easy for one to interfere with or “mask” the other.
Something that I struggled with for a long time when I was first learning this stuff was how to get the kick to punch without combining with the bass to create mud — because the frequency range where the kick bunches and the bass booms are mostly the same.
One solution that I arrived at that has proved to be very helpful: narrow boosts, targeted between the bass notes!
To illustrate, let’s imagine that we have a song in A minor. These are the bass notes that the bass would most likely be hitting, assuming that the song uses E minor and D minor:
D — 73 Hz
E — 82 Hz
F — 87 Hz
G — 98 Hz
A — 110 Hz
B — 123 Hz
C — 131 Hz
(Obviously you would need to figure out the specific notes and frequencies for whatever song you’re working on; this is just one example.)
So, if I wanted to get some punch out of the kick drum, without conflicting with the bass, I would put a narrow boost (Q=between 2.5 and 4.0, gain = anywhere from +0.5 dB to +4 dB) in one of the following places: 77-78 Hz, 91-94 Hz, 103-105 Hz, 115-118 Hz, 126-128 Hz — i.e., in between the bass notes.
That’s a lot of options for a lot of different kick drum sounds! I tend to listen to boosts in each “available” frequency range and move the frequency around by 1 Hz at a time and see where the groove feels the best (not sounds the best).
You can even do this on the master bus. Sometimes I like to take that approach, even on something I’m mixing, where I have the option to do the EQ on the kick drum channel — sometimes the phase shift associated with narrow boosts can do something cool to the low end overall. If I do this, it tends to be fairly far along in the mix when I realize that I need a little more thump — if I’m setting up my EQs at the beginning of a mix, I’m doing them on a channel-by-channel basis.
Boom boom — jamie
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