Let’s be honest: mixing kick and bass is difficult. But sometimes, we end up looking in the wrong place or trying to fix the wrong things, and that leaves us worse off than when we started.
So in today’s tutorial, we’re going to show you a simple trick that’s going to save you hours of mixing time. The truth is, your kick doesn’t need more volume. We’ll show you what you need to do instead.
As always, we’ve got Fabio from Noize to bless us with his production knowledge. Let’s dive in.
Our Tip for Mixing Kick and Bass
In this tutorial, we’re using the Navon remix of Avalon by Mike and Ginchy featuring Alessie Labate.
This track is very well-balanced. We like where the kick and bass are sitting. However, it is missing a bit of vibe.
But we don’t want to turn the kick up because that will upset the balance of the track. It doesn’t seem like the problem is actually in the low end.
One of the first things we’ll do when we’re mixing the kick and bass is add a shaper box preset called tight kick. Basically, this tightens up the decay of the kick. We’ve done this to prevent it from interfering with the bassline, because it’s already busy.
If the bassline was less consistent and more sparse, we would probably keep the kick in the low end in order to fill out some of that space. Even though it’s punchy and not sustained. It’s happening and rolling consistently and frequently.
We want to create as much space as possible, and by making the kick a little bit tighter, we get more of that bounce.
We still think the kick sounds dull. We want it to come out of the mix, but we don’t want to bring up the volume and change the balance in the low end.
We’re going to start mixing the kick and bass by opening Serum, which is a synthesizer that most people use. In Serum, we’ll copy the kick pattern, create a midi pattern, and we’ll do four to the floor kick.
Then we’ll turn the oscillator off, the noise on, and then go to Attacks>Miscellaneous, and go to icon_kick_a.
Now, we have a short kick sample in here, and we’re going to shape it to our taste. We’ll go to envelope 1, and pull down the sustain and the decay.
So we’re left with this click that we’re going to layer the kick with. There’s still a few low frequencies in there that we don’t want, so we’re going to send the noise to the filter.
Turn the filter on, then go to select noise, then change it to a high six. Now we’ll filter out some of those low frequencies.
We’re going to play this alongside the kick, leave the settings as they are, and flick through some other samples that we can play from the noise filter. Out of all the samples, we really like how kick_b sounds, so we’ll play that in context with everything else.
It sounds good, but we could tighten it a little bit and make it clickier and punchier. Now, let’s listen to the difference when we mute and unmute the sample that we’ve led the kick with.
Just by turning it on and off, our ear latches on to the punch and high frequencies of the kick in the mid to high frequencies, which makes us more engaged with the kick.
As a result, that makes the kick sound louder. But it isn’t. Just by giving it that presence and that energy in that part of the frequency spectrum, we feel it a bit more. Rather than the kick being this subby, airy, push, we now have something to listen to, rather than just feel the vibration.
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So remember, when you want your kick to be louder, you don’t necessarily need to increase the volume. Use the tip we’ve walked through in this post, and your kick will feel more prominent, even if it isn’t louder.
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