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Hey folks, Matt Weiss here, www.weiss-sound.com, www.theproaudiofiles.com.
I'm going to combine a couple of different ideas and relate them to one of
our favorite subjects in the world - 808 kick drums. Now, this is a little
bit of a weird technique. It sort of involved concepts learned in both the
mixing hip hop tutorial as well as the mixing compression tutorial, but
it's going to show you how to approach an 808 a little differently. So
let's check out this 808 kick drum right here.
[Sound plays]
Now for me personally, the interest in an 808 kick drum is generally what's
living the upper octaves. The lower octave is usually just sort of a fat
sine wave. The upper octaves are where the distortion and character start
showing up. Now, what this tutorial that I'm doing right now is going to
show you is how to bring out a lot of that character in a very transparent,
but bold way. The thing you have to keep in mind is that it's all
arrangement-dependent. So I'm going to play the track real quick.
[Music plays]
When you have a very dense track that has a lot of lower-mid content, or
even just general mid-range content, sometimes you just want that sine wave
808, and that's fine. When you have a more open arrangements that don't
have a lot going on, that's usually when you want to play up the character
of the 808. Sometimes you find yourself in an arrangement like this one
where it could kind of go either way, and sometimes you've got to make a
judgement call.
I've made a clone of it because this is going to be a type of parallel
processing and the idea here is to target the tone of the 808. So the first
thing I'm going to do is I'm going this FabFilter Pro-Q and I'm going to
throw on a high-pass filter and I'm going to get rid of the subtones.
[Sound plays]
OK. So what I've done is here I'm high-passing it around the 180 Hz and
what that does is it eliminates some of the subtone. Now, this is the first
little tricky piece. If I were to play this at the same time as the
original 808.
[Sound plays]
What happens is that the low low end ends up getting sucked out. This is
because there is something called phase and that's how EQs work. They work
based on phase change, but not a lot of people necessarily know that, but
one of the thing that happens is that everything that's happening below the
cut-off and a lot of what's happening above the cut-off are coming out of
phase with itself.
Now, normally when you hear just one thing you don't really hear phase, but
when you play it with something that has similar sonic material, those
little phase differences make a big difference and that's why the bottom
end of this 808 is just getting ripped out when you play the two at the
same time. So I'm going to change this to linear phase mode and what that
means is that the absolute phase of everything is going to stay the same
and that's going to allow the low end to stay more consistent when I play
them back-to-back.
[Sound plays]
Notice that the low end actually stays in place now? That's good. That's
our first step. Okay. Now the next step is that I really want to target
just the tone which is that sort of buzzy distortion, but I don't want to
add extra punch to the 808 itself. What I'm going to do now is I'm going to
pull up another FabFilter plugin called the Pro-G which is a gate/expander
which has a very unique function called ducking. And what ducking does is
it's kind of like compression, where when the volume exceeds the threshold
it's going to pull the level down.
The difference between ducking and compression is it's going to pull the
level down more than what a compressor could. Instead of pulling it down
based on the level of the threshold, it's going to pull down based on a
preset range. And if I set that range down to 100 decibels, that means that
if it absolutely breaches the threshold, a high ratio will pull it all the
way down to 100 decibels. So what we're doing is trying to remove the
attack using this ducking mechanism.
[Sound plays]
Now, there's still a little bit of leading-edge in there. You sort of hear
it like it's the sort of fluttery turning on thing. I'm going to use a look-
ahead to get rid of that.
[Sound plays]
All right. Not bad. And now I'm going to turn up the output volume.
[Sound plays]
So what I'm essentially done is I've isolated the buzzy quality that's
coming out of the 808.
[Sound plays]
So here's without.
[Sound plays]
Here's with.
[Sound plays]
Now I'm going to listen to it in the context of the mix and decide how much
of that extra buzz I want and if I need to do anything else to it.
[Music plays]
So here's before.
[Music plays]
Here's after.
[Music plays]
Maybe still a touch too much.
[Music plays]
That's pretty cool. All right, guys. Until next time.