Balance Your Bass Like A Pro

Do you ever struggle to get your bass levelled and punching like it does in your favourite pro tracks? It is one of the most important, yet most difficult areas to master within Electronic music. Quite often it has producers running round in circles trying to find a solution during their mixdowns. However, there is a simple, fast way you can achieve this and get it very close to your favourite music. Check out this week’s tutorial where I show you a great way to balance your bass so it sounds as close as possible to the tracks you admire.

Transcript

So, what you would do is take a tune that you really like and you’re going to check to see where the peaks are of their kick drum, and the peaks are of the fundamental of their bass, and if you’re having trouble around the hundred hertz area. Probably the first, maybe the second harmonic as well and then you can EQ volume, adjust your bass accordingly. 

So, if we grab Sarah’s tune, what we would do here is go in and again let me just sort out this resolution. Knock in, go in and say okay this is clearly the kick drum here right so I’ll cut out all of the stuff either side of it.. Okay, so, you can see the peak of the kick-drum. Now, if you’ve got Auto modal and you don’t have to mouse over it it’s gonna appear right here, okay? So that tells me the peak of Sarah’s kick-drum and we’re just dealing with the sub is sitting at -12 so you’re obviously referencing a track that you really like or a number of them to even get a feel for how this works across your genre, and that tells you okay that’s sitting at -12, now where’s there a base hit in here. So, we know we’ve got this kind of offbeat almost kind of reverse monster thing going on, and here, you can see -16 is the lowest peak here. So it’s the highest peak which also tend to be the lowest, the furthest list. So what we’re interested in here is not matching the peak of our kick with a peak of theirs, we’re not after absolute values, we’re looking at relative values. We’re looking at saying okay if my kick peaks at X, the base the subbies frequency is 4 decibels less and that’s how you can mix the base and you can do exactly the same by then saying “Okay what volume is the first harmonic?” So we’d be looking at this guy here and then you’d say okay that’s so many less and that will help you to shape it so you could just EQ this out. For example, just notch it down a little bit or shelve it depending on what base you’re using and that is gonna give you a very similar contour to what you’re hearing in the tunes that you like. Now, bear in mind that’s reference that’s just a starting point, but if you were, and this is what I would do, if you were to finish the mix of your track and then duplicate your kick, and bass,and then alter it in accordance with a reference track, and in AB what you have before, and what you’ve got now that is gonna start getting your ears into tune. You’re gonna start recognizing and training yourself to not have to keep doing that you’re going to start recognizing, “Ah, that’s what the bass sound like”, and as I said if your room is causing you problems because you could have like a null in your room that could be 40 decibels or something insane, and if that is at G-0 or let’s say at G-1 ‘cause you’re having a problem around the hundred hertz area then you’re always gonna think “Jesus! I can barely hear that and be cranking it up insanely”, so it is a very good idea to get yourself a set of headphones that will at least give you a decent impression of what’s going on down there, then you can use that technique and you’ll find that you’ll start to learn where the right ballpark is every time even if you’re just doing it almost by the numbers in spectrum and having to reference as I said in headphones and then somewhere else. But it will get you to where you want to go.

I’ve released a brand new, totally free ebook for you called Creative Strategies for finishing more music. It features some of the world’s top underground producers sharing their inside tips on how to be prolific, handle creative pressure, turn your inspiration into finished tracks, and give yourself that important edge in the music industry. The ebook has 15 pages rammed with insights and workflows from some of the world’s biggest underground music producers including John- O Fleming, Schlow MeHaba, Claude Young Jr, and Mark Jenkins, and there’s loads more. The ebook is totally free for you so dive over to finishmoremusic.com/ebook and grab yourself a copy now.

Thank you for watching

I really appreciate you tuning in and I hope you’re enjoying the tutorials and taking some real value into your music sessions.

If this video resonated with you and you feel it will have a positive impact on the people you know,  please share  it  by using the social media buttons you see at the bottom of this page.

To make sure you are always the first to know when a new video lands: Subscribe to the FMM Youtube channel here.

Let me know how you get on with the techniques I showed in the videos and if you have any suggestions for future tutorials, ping me a message on Instagram (@IamKeithMills)

Balance Your Bass Like A Pro

Do you ever struggle to get your bass levelled and punching like it does in your favourite pro tracks? It is one of the most important, yet most difficult areas to master within Electronic music. Quite often it has producers running round in circles trying to find a solution during their mixdowns. However, there is a simple, fast way you can achieve this and get it very close to your favourite music. Check out this week’s tutorial where I show you a great way to balance your bass so it sounds as close as possible to the tracks you admire.

Transcript

So, what you would do is take a tune that you really like and you’re going to check to see where the peaks are of their kick drum, and the peaks are of the fundamental of their bass, and if you’re having trouble around the hundred hertz area. Probably the first, maybe the second harmonic as well and then you can EQ volume, adjust your bass accordingly. 

So, if we grab Sarah’s tune, what we would do here is go in and again let me just sort out this resolution. Knock in, go in and say okay this is clearly the kick drum here right so I’ll cut out all of the stuff either side of it.. Okay, so, you can see the peak of the kick-drum. Now, if you’ve got Auto modal and you don’t have to mouse over it it’s gonna appear right here, okay? So that tells me the peak of Sarah’s kick-drum and we’re just dealing with the sub is sitting at -12 so you’re obviously referencing a track that you really like or a number of them to even get a feel for how this works across your genre, and that tells you okay that’s sitting at -12, now where’s there a base hit in here. So, we know we’ve got this kind of offbeat almost kind of reverse monster thing going on, and here, you can see -16 is the lowest peak here. So it’s the highest peak which also tend to be the lowest, the furthest list. So what we’re interested in here is not matching the peak of our kick with a peak of theirs, we’re not after absolute values, we’re looking at relative values. We’re looking at saying okay if my kick peaks at X, the base the subbies frequency is 4 decibels less and that’s how you can mix the base and you can do exactly the same by then saying “Okay what volume is the first harmonic?” So we’d be looking at this guy here and then you’d say okay that’s so many less and that will help you to shape it so you could just EQ this out. For example, just notch it down a little bit or shelve it depending on what base you’re using and that is gonna give you a very similar contour to what you’re hearing in the tunes that you like. Now, bear in mind that’s reference that’s just a starting point, but if you were, and this is what I would do, if you were to finish the mix of your track and then duplicate your kick, and bass,and then alter it in accordance with a reference track, and in AB what you have before, and what you’ve got now that is gonna start getting your ears into tune. You’re gonna start recognizing and training yourself to not have to keep doing that you’re going to start recognizing, “Ah, that’s what the bass sound like”, and as I said if your room is causing you problems because you could have like a null in your room that could be 40 decibels or something insane, and if that is at G-0 or let’s say at G-1 ‘cause you’re having a problem around the hundred hertz area then you’re always gonna think “Jesus! I can barely hear that and be cranking it up insanely”, so it is a very good idea to get yourself a set of headphones that will at least give you a decent impression of what’s going on down there, then you can use that technique and you’ll find that you’ll start to learn where the right ballpark is every time even if you’re just doing it almost by the numbers in spectrum and having to reference as I said in headphones and then somewhere else. But it will get you to where you want to go.

I’ve released a brand new, totally free ebook for you called Creative Strategies for finishing more music. It features some of the world’s top underground producers sharing their inside tips on how to be prolific, handle creative pressure, turn your inspiration into finished tracks, and give yourself that important edge in the music industry. The ebook has 15 pages rammed with insights and workflows from some of the world’s biggest underground music producers including John- O Fleming, Schlow MeHaba, Claude Young Jr, and Mark Jenkins, and there’s loads more. The ebook is totally free for you so dive over to finishmoremusic.com/ebook and grab yourself a copy now.

Thank you for watching

I really appreciate you tuning in and I hope you’re enjoying the tutorials and taking some real value into your music sessions.

If this video resonated with you and you feel it will have a positive impact on the people you know,  please share  it  by using the social media buttons you see at the bottom of this page.

To make sure you are always the first to know when a new video lands: Subscribe to the FMM Youtube channel here.

Let me know how you get on with the techniques I showed in the videos and if you have any suggestions for future tutorials, ping me a message on Instagram (@IamKeithMills)

Automating Delay Times In MInimal Techno

When it comes to arranging a Minimal Techno track, often it can be a struggle to maintain movement and interest due to the lack of parts we have to work with. However, the best producers in the world are able to take very few core elements and make them feel like they are constantly evolving throughout their track. So what’s their secret? Creative Automation! In this tutorial I show you a simple way to make a very minimal sound come to life using some creative tape delay techniques.

Transcript

A lot of the deal with this genre of music comes into the automation of very simple sounds, and a lot of like cool techniques that you can use this mega mega popular is the altering of delay times, and as you’ll probably know – and I’ll just pull up an Ableton plugin for this, but honestly I could pull up a whole blooming bunch of different things that would have this. This isn’t just Ableton specific for anyone worrying that we’re going down that down that road. We’re certainly not. So many many delays, third-party ones inside of our DAWs, you can select things like reap itch mode. It’s sometimes called tape mode as well. So inside a minimal techno, the changing of delay times is huge often when you’re not synced to the tempo of your track. So again as we were talking to Ray, you can find out the exact milliseconds that match the BPM and in fact, I said milliseconds to Ray and I should have said hertz. These calculators, you’ll type in right I’m working at 124 BPM and it will then say to you “okay the Hertz value for a single cycle to lock in a quarter note is this” and it’ll do exactly the same with a milliseconds. 

So you can set up a delay that is you know a particular. In fact, we could kind of probably do same here. Let’s just turn that off and let’s actually have a bit of sound coming out of this thing why not. Let’s go for an audio track. I will stick a ping pong on here. Now I don’t, in fact, we could, I can even cheat because I can show you something in here that you can do most DAWs  as well and let’s go for some kind of weird but cursively bleep or beep or something along those lines, probably something in here look. There we go, a screaming the kind of minimal techno sound. 

Okay, so here’s what I’m talking about. Now most DAWs, if you highlight the grid, it will tell you somewhere the duration of the length that you’ve highlighted so you can probably see down here in the bottom, it’s telling me this duration is 121 so that tells me that if I’ve got a delay time set on my ping pong delay here of 121, this is going to delay perfectly in time with 16th because that’s what I’ve got my grid set to. So what we can now do is just play this and that’s perfect in time with a grid and of course we can start messing with multiples of this. So if we put 1 for 2 in, that’s obviously now in fact teller complete line 242. We’ve now gone up to an 8th note. And if I just put the metronome on, so I can literally mess around with these timings I could go to 484, now we’re at a quarter note timing. So that’s really handy shim because what you can do now is set this up to any particular time you want and then we can automate and we can use, we can mess about basically with delay time so we could start on this quarter delay, and then as I said we could have this so that what was that that was going to give us 242, so why don’t we bring that down maybe here perhaps and I can get this now locked in at 242. There we go. And let’s see one a bit more feedback on this. Can you hear that’s perfectly locked into the time? So you can start doing very cool things like that but where the power comes in is when we change these things to repeat your type mode and in fact what I’m going to do is just drag this thing a believe, it’s using that parameter. And we’ve now get rid of this you can hear it more clearly. 

This is a kind of classic minimal techno weird delay type things, and so you can basically start pitch pending this doing weird things I mean just for the the crazy sake of it. Get the feedback right out. You can hear all these weird little glitchy mad things going on. So that goes on loads and loads and loads in minimal techno and that’s the way that you can time that to your project tempo so you can go right I want to go from here to this mad kind of behavior and move it around. Minimal techno is welshing keep thinking of the Q&A this so A-B. A variation B, A another variation B variation A/B, and you just start doing lots of little bouncing around between your Q&A and you can go from miles with that stuff. But have a listen to things on Richie Hortons Minus label, Geiser is another great artist who’s brilliant at these things and check those out. 

I’ve released a brand new, totally free ebook for you called Creative Strategies for finishing more music. It features some of the world’s top underground producers sharing their inside tips on how to be prolific, handle creative pressure, turn your inspiration into finished tracks, and give yourself that important edge in the music industry. The ebook has 15 pages rammed with insights and workflows from some of the world’s biggest underground music producers including John- O Fleming, Schlow MeHaba, Claude Young Jr, and Mark Jenkins, and there’s loads more. The ebook is totally free for you so dive over to finishmoremusic.com/ebook and grab yourself a copy now.

Thank you for watching

I really appreciate you tuning in and I hope you’re enjoying the tutorials and taking some real value into your music sessions.

If this video resonated with you and you feel it will have a positive impact on the people you know,  please share  it  by using the social media buttons you see at the bottom of this page.

To make sure you are always the first to know when a new video lands: Subscribe to the FMM Youtube channel here.

Let me know how you get on with the techniques I showed in the videos and if you have any suggestions for future tutorials, ping me a message on Instagram (@IamKeithMills)

Fattening Bass To Cut Through Any System

Have you ever noticed that professional sounding tracks always feel like their low end is rich, warm and sounds fat on any system? Well there are a few insider tips and tricks that can achieve this in any one of your tracks. Check out this week’s video where I show you some simple, but extremely effective techniques that can help fatten up your bass so it sounds great on everything from cheap iPhone earbuds to full club sound systems. If you’re a bass head like me, you will want to check it out!

Transcript

Okay so if we were playing a G for example, we can then come in and I’m going to use operator for this because it’s a fantastic tool. If you come into the oscillator section, you can select this number 16 is the one that you’ll need for bass and you can start drawing harmonics in, and that’s immediately gonna make this start to sound richer. Now I could widen just those upper harmonics, use a tool just to widen those that would make it fat and keep the bottom in mono as well. So if you have just the sine wave like or whatever the main base let’s call it, if you have that in mono but then you add A and other thing underneath it that is wide which is normally if you listen to techno, what’s going on underneath the kick drum can be sort of 30 to 40 decibels lower in volume than the kick and the bass, and that is the wide thing. So it’s very very low and if it goes into a club and it gets some dim, some to mono it doesn’t matter because the main base is still banging as hell. But if you listen to it on a system where it is wide, you get that extra kind of almost psycho acoustic kind of vibe to it, but that being said there are plenty of basses now that are appearing that are in live in stereo. As long as it collapses to mono, you’ll be okay.  And I often talk about my favorite tool for that which is BX Stereo Maker. Let me just start go in here and show you guys this tool as well. This kitty here, if you want to make stuff wide, this is the one to go for. It would take a mono signal and it will widen it so in this particular instance, I could take this bass sound and I can widen it, and I can come in and then I can mono the lower section, and that way, I end up with part of it wide and part of it in mono. And the best thing about this tool is it sums 100% perfectly every time to mono. So if it gets, if anybody needs to do it, if it gets some the low end in a club, that is going to resolve it immediately so that is a secret, was not a secret weapon I always tell you guys about it but it is super super cool and well worth getting. So let me just go back to this base. So straight away by adding these upper harmonics, I’ve made this sound richer and bigger and warmer you could be using a saw wave and just filtering it down for example and EQ in it to get the the vibe that you want. If you want to fatten this up you can add a second oscillator to this and octave down and the typical shake that we use for this is the triangle and this will fatten it up. 

You don’t want to overcook it but you can see those extra harmonics that are being added in. And these will again really start to fatten the bass up. You’re not gonna want this hump at the bottom that’s just been introduced that’s an octave lower so make sure you eq that out. If I just put this in front of the spectrum so we can see what we doing, no unfortunately that one is not a freebie. There you go, and that is going to give you a much much fatter base than if we come in here and let’s just for comparison sake go onto the first one, take that oscillator off, take those additional harmonics out, and…

One, two, you can hear straight away that it’s getting much richer. So that’s without me yet there’s no widening on that one, but that’s thickening it up with an additional oscillator. It’s adding harmonics above it. There is another tool that I haven’t tried yet which is again by the Brainworks guys. It’s called subfilter or something like that and a lot of people swear by it. They have a free version of that so if you guys want to try that out, that again does some clever kind of boosting and psycho acoustic effects to fatten up a bassline because a lot of it is to do with what you’re hearing above the bass that is making your brain create the information below the bass. It sounds a bit weird but that is part of the kind of magic that is going on so you’ve got additional harmonics and again in fact let me just dive back two seconds, the other things that you can use with this Cris which I didn’t mention here and I’ve turned this into a little little rack just the other day. Matt Bush put me on to this. I really like these plugins so I made a bottle three of them and turned them into a rack I strongly recommend that you do this. If you’ve got colouration plugins that you like and you use Ableton, and if you don’t use Ableton you can always keymap the on/off button of different plugins which is another way of doing it. So I like to have a number of processors that are already set up so I can dial each one into sound decent and then I can flick between them to see which one is actually sounding the best. So that is something that I would recommend doing as well on your efforts to fatten up anything in your track, get a number of different processes. I like these ones from Kershaw . They sound good and I’m a big fan of stuff that’s got one big dial in the middle of it and there’s very little for me to do other than tweak that. Don’t like much work when it comes to this stage. So yeah, that’s the sort of rack that you can add and that’s also gonna add various different harmonics noise, grit, bite, saturation, bit reduction, whatever you choose to throw in there, that’s going to fatten up your bass.

 I’ve released a brand new totally free ebook for you called creative strategies for finishing more music it features some of the world’s top underground producers sharing their inside tips on how to be prolific handle creative pressure turn your inspiration into finished tracks and give yourself that important edge in the music industry Deibert has 15 pages rammed with insights and workflows from some of the world’s biggest underground music producers including John Barlow Fleming slow me haba Claude Young Jr and Mark Jenkins and there’s loads more the ebook is totally free for you so dive over to finish more music calm /ii book and grab yourself a copy now. 

I’ve released a brand new, totally free ebook for you called Creative Strategies for finishing more music. It features some of the world’s top underground producers sharing their inside tips on how to be prolific, handle creative pressure, turn your inspiration into finished tracks, and give yourself that important edge in the music industry. The ebook has 15 pages rammed with insights and workflows from some of the world’s biggest underground music producers including John- O Fleming, Schlow MeHaba, Claude Young Jr, and Mark Jenkins, and there’s loads more. The ebook is totally free for you so dive over to finishmoremusic.com/ebook and grab yourself a copy now.

Thank you for watching

I really appreciate you tuning in and I hope you’re enjoying the tutorials and taking some real value into your music sessions.

If this video resonated with you and you feel it will have a positive impact on the people you know,  please share  it  by using the social media buttons you see at the bottom of this page.

To make sure you are always the first to know when a new video lands: Subscribe to the FMM Youtube channel here.

Let me know how you get on with the techniques I showed in the videos and if you have any suggestions for future tutorials, ping me a message on Instagram (@IamKeithMills)

Ableton Sound Design Tutorial – Habischman: My ‘Go To’ Plugins & Secret Weapons

Recently I had the privilege of welcoming one of House and Techno’s superstars, Habischman, for a live Masterclass inside of FMM. We opened up 2 of his projects, including his latest release on Dubfire’s label SCI+TEC, to discuss his approach to creating music and how to get ahead in the industry. During the call a bunch of questions from the community were fired at him, so I thought I would share one of his answers this week. If you’re interested in knowing Habischmans’s ‘go to’ tools and plugins from his productions, you will not want to miss this!

Transcript

Doesn’t really change, it looks like I was wasting time his studio just recording all these ideas and I was like okay, they don’t really sound good. I’m just gonna stick to this one, yeah that’s that’s odd words but that’s a good thing you know you just you just have all these ideas later so you can just for example. Let’s see now I can just come back to this I didn’t use any of these, I just try to keep it simple. Yeah, sounds like chirping bird. 

It’s interesting that cuz it’s really clear to see it, at least to me and I’m sure is to the guys as well that we have this technique like even when you jump to a different section there, I can kind of imagine that maybe you could use that if you wanted to that could have perhaps been a part of the breakdown you could have just shot between some of these extra frequencies so I can see the power of the technique. 

Yeah you have the freedom you know you have as I said you have to all these sounds and you feel like okay maybe here you need to change for example if here you need to change just do a small cut, and then just put it here and then you can just use a different color and every time you want to use that you can just copy and paste somewhere else. 

Do you find sort of audio clicks and pops where you’re editing the waveforms like this? 

Ah, sometimes yeah I know what I do I just use a clip option and just cut them out just like this. I just do this for example if there’s a click and I try to use like a clear, clean sound and then rather than just using something that you need to put lots of effects, I’m really using this plugin why there’s a good name yeah, this Rhino the LP. It’s very cool so for example, you just put it on anything it makes it a bit dirty and then [Music]. It clicks it’s from this, it has hum you can just add hum [Music]. So basically it makes it more like a bit like analogue sounding rather than just super digital. So yeah for example you can just put it on, we can put it on anything or you can just put it on a bus channel and just use a send in return but I use this a lot on sounds that are too digital and I wanted to make it make them a bit warmer so for example in this [Music]. 

There are so many options ago and you just need to know what what you want your track to sound like you know there are like so many effects out there that you can use but if you just want to spend so much time in the studio adding effects on tracks and then you’re gonna end up doing nothing. If you think you’re like there’s something in your sound that’s missing or your sound is too digital or you just want to added a bit of warmth to it, there’s so many cool effects there was this effect I watched a video by Garth Guy Gerber,  they put out a VHS effect in the in reactor I guess and it has these kind of muddy kind of tape feeling to your productions and it makes it bit dirty and then yeah there’s so many effects out there. 

A big big fan of all kind of coloration type effect so this ties him really nicely. Actually with a question from Ryan so Ryan was saying awesome track lovely vibe. Looking at your last track it seemed that other than the hardware you’re using mostly stock Ableton effects. Do you have anything in particular VST wise you use or happy with the sound that you’re produced with those effects obviously you’ve got a lot of VSTs there but we saw in the last track it was many Ableton stuff. 

Have you got any there any other ones that are sort of particular favorites I guess, outside of Ableton and what makes you reach for them. 

Yeah as I said I love this one by this friend Clave Grande, I guess I’m pronouncing that right. It has dark has set LP, I use lots of waves plugins and then for creating different sounds and make them noisy I use this one there, the cassette one is very cool. For example if I put this on the kick drum, [Music], it makes it dirty so you mentioned us putting this on anything and it makes it like a bit distorted. For bass, this is good because some of the bass sounds are way too low and you cannot really hear anything, so instead of using the for example the saturator from Ableton you can use this one or any distortion effect I use, what else I use, too many plugins. I really don’t use too many plugins these are just something I installed way back and then it’s like you know you’re just wanting like oh, it looks cool and just want to use them, but there’s one effect that I’m gonna show you. It’s very in my latest production it’s nothing here but I’m gonna show you because I love you guys. 

Legend, thank you. 

It’s this effect by, it’s called Portal. This is a sick thing I’ve recently found out. It’s called Portal. So you can create like amazing things with this one like for example, I’m gonna put this in my drum [Music]. I can go crazy with this I love you can just make it attract with even with this just one plugin it’s so good and there’s  there’re like options like this and because I’m like cycling movies and stuff like that it’s like and then they’re like itch. They turn might drop into something weird. But it’s really good for vocals actually if you have vocals try these ones if you if you don’t want to use like really clean playing vocals just use Porto on anything and then wreak, resample everything for example put it on hi-hat, resample it and then put it in the drum rack rather than just put everything on top like that. That’s just the way I did it because you don’t have enough time so I can show you just put it on, for example one hi-hat. That is crazy. There’s basically I’m just doing nothing I’m just playing messing around this is doing everything for me.

Okay new toy that’s for sure. Oh okay, brilliant. 

I’ve released a brand new, totally free ebook for you called Creative Strategies for finishing more music. It features some of the world’s top underground producers sharing their inside tips on how to be prolific, handle creative pressure, turn your inspiration into finished tracks, and give yourself that important edge in the music industry. The ebook has 15 pages rammed with insights and workflows from some of the world’s biggest underground music producers including John- O Fleming, Slow MeHaba, Claude Young Jr, and Mark Jenkins, and there’s loads more. The ebook is totally free for you so dive over to finishmoremusic.com/ebook and grab yourself a copy now.

Thank you for watching

I really appreciate you tuning in and I hope you’re enjoying the tutorials and taking some real value into your music sessions.

If this video resonated with you and you feel it will have a positive impact on the people you know,  please share  it  by using the social media buttons you see at the bottom of this page.

To make sure you are always the first to know when a new video lands: Subscribe to the FMM Youtube channel here.

Let me know how you get on with the techniques I showed in the videos and if you have any suggestions for future tutorials, ping me a message on Instagram (@IamKeithMills)