Nate Raubenheimer aka Protoculture is back with us once again this week taking a detailed look at one the most important aspects of electronic dance music - Kick and Bass.
Over these 20 videos Nate shares his professional knowhow and in-depth analysis of these vital elements of the frequency spectrum, which if you don’t treat with respect, can ruin and muddy up your mix.
We start by looking at the tools we can use to analyse and visualise frequencies that the human ear can’t always pick up, before firstly moving on to the all important kick and how to build and recreate our own kicks that we know will work. We then check out how to correctly process our kicks with EQ and compression and how to eliminate phase issue problems when they arise.
Nate then moves onto showing us how to create a punchy bassline and the importance of harmonics, selective EQ, along with compression and expansion techniques to ensure the kick and bass are giving their full potential without clashing.
Finally, we look at the proven methods to help our kick and bass sit perfectly in the mix alongside the other elements.
This course is packed full of pro tips and tricks to make sure you get the most out of your productions, highlighting the importance of getting it right from the very start so there’s less work to do at the end and giving you more time to get creative!
Thank you Nate for another fantastic series of videos. I certainly learned a lot about phase, and the importance of having a scope/spectrum/correlation tool.
Nate is a true wizard! And an excellent teacher as well, a very rare combination. There are lots of videos out there where you just see guys tweaking parameters, but they cant really explain what they are doing and why, but here everything is crystal clear.
Thank you Nate & Sonic academy for this great tutorial series on kicks and bass. This has so much information and was just what I needed. Nice to have everything explained with examples and visuals with that. It makes understanding a lot easier. Looking forward to the next one!
I truely miss the thing i thought was most important. The lenght of the kick vs bassline. For instance by watching a scope. So the dont overlap. Isn´t that a thing anymore?
After reading the title I expected to learn more about actually MIXING the kick and bass together. IMHO this focusses a lot on what you can do to each of them in solo, but unfortunately not so much on how you get both elements to form a tight and professional sounding low-end. Furthermore, some of the techniques discussed weren’t really applied to a real world example, instead it was just shown how to achieve a certain thing with the plug-in at hand. I didn’t find that to be very useful.
However, I still picked up a few tips and tricks here and there. Thank you!
Hey Tim, thanks for the feedback. I did intentionally skip over some real world examples for actually getting tracks to sit together (every track is going to be different, covering a multitude of different styles etc. just wouldn’t have worked)… I felt there is so much of that available through my own as well as other producers Sonic Academy track walkthroughs. Really wanted to focus on some of the more technical ‘fixes’ less discussed by other tutorials. More theory explaining why you do something rather than just showing examples… I’m glad you picked up some tips though aside from that
Nothing is a thing unless it applies to what you’re doing. The whole shortening the kick thing and check that on a scope is something I do for sure, though most of the time I just adjust the envelope by ear, but it is really dependant on the material you’re working on. If your kick for example is tune, sometimes having an overlap with your bass line is a good thing. Other cases where you’re using an 808 in some styles of music, the kick is the bass line.
Thanks protoculture for the reply!
You where mentioning the reverse eq trick for disco records for instance. When applying such a thing, doesnt it really need sidechain anymore? Or is it just one of the many parts that make it sit n that particular genre, Thanks Greatings
