Hey guys,
I have a track which at the moment has an intro build with gated pads and a swelling bass all spacey like.
Towards the riser into the drop I add in some cool (imo) Fx hits and swells all in the high end away from a building arp which has a filter on it automated.
I then start up a pitched riser into the the last 8 bars with a typical kick based drum & bass fill/rise before droping into the main drum beat/bassline.
It sounds ok but for some reason it doesnt quite have the impact I imagined it would have. Any tips or ideas to making this work a bit better?
White noise! LOL
Ah no - A real obvious one is to remove the kick for a bit - and / or keep the kick in, but gradually kill the lows.
You can sweep the EQ up to nothing also if you want?
Adding a reverse thing, a hat, kick or snare (or combo of several things) can sound cool, just going into the 1st hit of the next bar.
Have delay or reverb on it - keep it 100% wet for a bit… have a few beatless bars (whatever sounds good) and then bring in the next section underneath it when its fading out.
Killing everything “DJ Mixer Style” for a beat is cool too. But I’d probably kill a few lows on the way, if you havent already.
Apologies if you’ve done it already. Its v.obvious I know, but class! 
Yeah I do have a filter and reverb and what not. It sweeps everything out up the way as the riser hits the screaming high. I think what might have been missing was a bar or two of silence before bringing in the main beat etc?
Also what is confusing me atm is working at half time. 85BPM. It was just easier this way with the source material for the remix. Also this is my first proper attempt at remixing so I’m probably over analysing the ****e out of it.
Can you post a small clip mate ?
To be honest i dont like it enough for me to scrap it and start afresh. I have saved the instruments I created and I can always go back to it. But I think I will call this one a failed experiment.
If I fall into the same trap again I will post up an example.
Check out my tip that i left on the Sonic Academy facebook page, this is exactly what you’re looking for.
Rob can you post that here? I refuse to visit anything facebook…
Cheers Roben…
I will have a look see on Facebook then.
Hmmm… Yeah I had a look & thought WTF there are soooooo many posts I’m in no mood for that. 
Stream Zombi Remix.3 by Death Hands Clone | Listen online for free on SoundCloud
Ok let the flaming commence lol.
Seriously any assistance/ideas would be apreciated guys thanks.
[quote]Deathhands (04/06/2011)[hr]Stream Zombi Remix.3 by Death Hands Clone | Listen online for free on SoundCloud
Ok let the flaming commence lol.
Seriously any assistance/ideas would be apreciated guys thanks.[/quote]
the arrangement of the drum is spot on but imo i think you need to bring the drums forward in the mix. the kick is to weak and the snare needs to smack me in the face. you might need to eq some more and/or compress the drum and maybe compress the indivdual drum parts themselves. as an experiment, solo your snare, drop a compressor on it and slowly bring down the threshold and you should hear it punch more. play around with the ratio and attack etc untill it sounds good. try it on all your drum sounds, see what its like. 
have you heard of “mix glue” compressor ableton has one. that may help with the impact after the break
i hope this doesnt piss you off, just trying to help. but someone maybe able to give better advice
Hey man. Nah I wouldn’t post it up if I wasn’t up for a discussion about it mate. I’m glad you had your say!
I already have compressors on every drum hit, I have used the built in ableton ones as I only have demos of sonalksis stuff at the moment.
Also I wanted to see what kind of a sound I could get with the Ableton stuff.
Perhaps I’m not driving the compressors hard enough for the genre?
However in a previous attempt at this I did the opposite and it kinda became a overly loud mushy mess lol.
I’m also using a compressor on the group bus for the kit. Is this the mix glue you refer to?
With regards to the snare im also using the voccoder in Ableton to trigger noise underneath the snare to give it a little bit more fizz and bring the original Ludwig Black Beauty 14" Snare hit more in line with a D&B feel. It also has the Eq brought up just over the 200Hz mark to add some low end (typical in D&B so I’m lead to beleive).
I do agree that the kick doesn’t quite cut it at the moment, but if I can find a way of making it beefier and cut through better without overly compressing it I would prefer that.
I’m attempting to keep hold of some of the live drum nature of the Superior Drummers sound.
The only thing I can think of now is more eqing on all of your sounds and a bit of panning.
Something else I’ve learnt recently from Jamie is to dip all you bass sounds at 200hz this will help your kick. 
Do you have an eq reference chart/guide? I’m away from my pc at the moment but I’ll send you it later. Gofunk posted a mixing guide on the forum somewhere in the forum that should have all that info inside. Maybe someone can link to it for me?
Mix gel is a preset on abletons compressor. Put that on you master channel and see if that helps with your drop mate
Yeah I have a whole bunch of those type of frequency reference charts.
Although I often forget to reference them lol.
Do you know of any good guides to mixing specifically within the D&B genre?
The problem might be that your bas and synth sounds are just too loud in the mix.
yeah that is entirely possible at this stage.
Mussi has it. For a dnb track you’re missing the “D” - all the drum hits are sitting too far back in the mix. It’s a mix of EQ and vol levels - poss a little of both.
From what I vaguely remember about freq’s for dnb drums, your kick should be around 120Hz, snare higher and bass lower if that helps.
all good stuff man.
Have you tried using a different kick? It needs to be a more powerful one then the one your using.