Mpc one mixing issues

Danoc wrote:I don't know what what you're mixing into.

1. Your bass shouldn't exceed pass -18.
2. Look at your EQ AND TAME YOUR BASS. Make sure it doesn't compete with the kick but blend it and the music.
3. Gain staging is essential.

I hope you know what l mean.

I use the Senn 600 HD and l have no problems

Wardner wrote:I've got the HD600s and find that because they're so flat (or maybe just because the low end is very weak), when I listen back on any other device I've mixed the low end way too high, or more specifically I've boosted the low frequencies with eq.

Any tips to get around this? Would a well-paired amp solve the problem or is it just a case of making them sound right in the Senhheisers and then cutting the low end on the master channel, which is basically how I do it now? (or something else completely.)

Monitors aren't an option BTW.

I've seen cases where someone starts everything at about -18 on the meter but increases from there. I'm not a pro at this stuff obviously, glorified bedroom warrior at the moment to be honest. Where can we find more tips like this on the web? I'm always interested in knowing what other producers use as a gauge for different sounds. Like your Bass is at -18, is that sub bass or like bass guitar/upright? What would your kick be at in that case?

QuentinB wrote:I've seen cases where someone starts everything at about -18 on the meter but increases from there. I'm not a pro at this stuff obviously, glorified bedroom warrior at the moment to be honest. Where can we find more tips like this on the web? I'm always interested in knowing what other producers use as a gauge for different sounds. Like your Bass is at -18, is that sub bass or like bass guitar/upright? What would your kick be at in that case?

Use your ears and what emotion you're trying to get across. You want the bass forward and drums back, do it. You want the kick drum and snare low but the high hat loud, do it. You want to fully distort the vocals but have everything else clean, do it. Learn the rules and then break as many of them as you can.

+1 for taming your bass

It's absolutely worth looking at the harmonics of your track in general, but bass can consume a *ton* of your dynamic headroom. It depends what sound you're looking for, but rolling off bass around the 60-100hz (or even higher) can really clean up your sound, possibly has no impact to your listening experience, and gives you more space for mid to high end range to work. So, not a must, but you need to understand if you are playing in a club and you want people a block away to feel the thumping... or if you're trying to keep the sound at the sound stage. There is absolutely a point where your ears cannot hear the low end, and it doesn't add anything to the track.

You also want to keep an eye because the bass and your kick/bass drums can absolutely clash with your bass line... and then you're just fighting an upwards battle for which one wins... certainly ducking can help here, but unless you want that pumping bass sound... well my opinion is that ducking is frequently the approach folks take who don't understand what they are doing. That said... I frequently don't care lately, because I usually make tracks for myself... but it's something to try and keep in mind at least.

In 2 cases where a person works with gear and ITB (ME).

An ITB person doesn't have to make theur levels hot, doesn't have ti deal with NOISE FLOOR, a person that works with gear has to go hot because the deal with noise floor. Electric humming and other noise so they tend to go over -18 .

Here's a video of me explaining GAIN STAGING. There are other vids too check them out.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=LYDu4wdqqr4&t=882s

Here's my Bass ducking the kick vid. Give me a like and subscribe
It will show you how to control the kick and bass together.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=aj0_Pl1Mgds&t=879s

Glad you told me your experience. That's why l asked. It won't be iver night, just learn techniques , watch vids, ask around. Go to a real studio etc. But practice hard if you wanna go that route.

A lot of times in today's music world we tend to buy what we really don't need, a year goes by and you look around and got all this stuff. I hope l can save you money in the process.

Oh speaking of saving you money l have a free bass controler to give you then you learn how to apply it to your kick or bass or anything that jumps over levels. I will holla at you tonight when l get home. You're going to like that.

Peace

QuentinB wrote:I've seen cases where someone starts everything at about -18 on the meter but increases from there. I'm not a pro at this stuff obviously, glorified bedroom warrior at the moment to be honest. Where can we find more tips like this on the web? I'm always interested in knowing what other producers use as a gauge for different sounds. Like your Bass is at -18, is that sub bass or like bass guitar/upright? What would your kick be at in that case?

NearTao wrote:+1 for taming your bass

It's absolutely worth looking at the harmonics of your track in general, but bass can consume a *ton* of your dynamic headroom. It depends what sound you're looking for, but rolling off bass around the 60-100hz (or even higher) can really clean up your sound, possibly has no impact to your listening experience, and gives you more space for mid to high end range to work. So, not a must, but you need to understand if you are playing in a club and you want people a block away to feel the thumping... or if you're trying to keep the sound at the sound stage. There is absolutely a point where your ears cannot hear the low end, and it doesn't add anything to the track.

Sometimes the point of leaving certain frequency in there, is because it's felt by our body. That where lots of joy come from when playing an Acoustic Upright Bass. Also the key is knowing what king of system and room the person is mixing for. Computer speakers vs ear buds vs Studio Monitors vs Arena vs Movie Theaters all have different elements.

NearTao wrote:You also want to keep an eye because the bass and your kick/bass drums can absolutely clash with your bass line... and then you're just fighting an upwards battle for which one wins... certainly ducking can help here, but unless you want that pumping bass sound... well my opinion is that ducking is frequently the approach folks take who don't understand what they are doing. That said... I frequently don't care lately, because I usually make tracks for myself... but it's something to try and keep in mind at least.

100%

I'll add ducking Vocals for Voice overs or for Movie and Television. The problem is many people actually don't know what ducking or side-chain compression really is. So they make videos without actually understanding what they're talking about.

Yes sir! Ducking is the key to the balance of the kick and bass. It sounds so sweet when done right.

NearTao wrote:+1 for taming your bass

You also want to keep an eye because the bass and your kick/bass drums can absolutely clash with your bass line... and then you're just fighting an upwards battle for which one wins... certainly ducking can help here, but unless you want that pumping bass sound... well my opinion is that ducking is frequently the approach folks take who don't understand what they are doing. That said... I frequently don't care lately, because I usually make tracks for myself... but it's something to try and keep in mind at least.

Yes you could mix in your headphones but it will be a hard and troublesome road which you could avoid by investing in monitors.

True, but I've been living in the same situation, no option for monitors because of working at night, neighbors etc.

But I learned to understand each pair of headphones, and I'm able to bounce proper mixes with nice low ends just from headphones, it just needs little adjustments afterwards when the sun comes up and I can pump it up aGAIN.

To OP: you might be new to the game (as you mentioned), but you are def made for it bro, keep it up. That snare in your sig song is slamming.

Ducking is NOT the key to balance the kick and bass.

If you want to balance the Kick and Bass Find a good composer, a good drummer, and a good bass player who knows what they're doing. In other words, find and tune the drum that your like and write the bassline so when the kick and bass do play at the same time, they're in harmony with each other. Then all you have to do is balance the levels.

After that, write the melody in a higher octave so it doesn't conflict with the lower octaves. Another option is to play in spread positions and drop the lower root note, because they're already being played by the drum and bass. Mr Duke Ellington did lot of that, people always wondered why he played lots of right hand and or in the middle and upper position. It's because he was leaving space for the Drums, Bass, and other lower registered brass.

So again, Ducking is NOT the key to balance the kick and bass. The key is writing a good composing and choosing the right instruments to occupy certain frequencies.

This turned into a really nice thread of knowledge! Lots for me to explore and consider. What’s hilarious to me is if I’m listening to my latest via headphones, on SoundCloud it sounds close to what it should.

But the car is really throwing me off, maybe I shouldn’t listen via soundcloud in the car, but listening to other artists on Spotify/the radio sounds great in the car.

I’m gonna try putting a file directly on my iPhone and see what that sounds like in the car to compare. Realizing that process of elimination will go a long way with figuring out some of the issues with my mix.

A friend of mine that does audio work for tv sent me a bunch of material on mastering in the modern age so that’ll be a bit of education too. I’ll keep chipping away and pushing forward

Soundcloud, Youtube, and other streaming sources process your track to get peak volume, average volume, etc... to be where they want it... then throw in compression algorythms to reduce the stream bandwidth and it can really color the sound...

All that is to say it is good to listen to those sources, but do not consider them for your final sound because you will go crazy trying to mix/master to a platform you have no control over the direct final output. So keep them in mind, but make sure your mix on the MPC/DAW sounds good first...

Also if you go down this rabbit hole you are likely to need multiple mixes... studio mix, fm radio mix... soundcloud mix... etc... it will drive you mad... this is why I was suggesting earlier to mix to sounding 80% good in general on different devices because otherwise you will never finish mixing.

NearTao wrote:Soundcloud, Youtube, and other streaming sources process your track to get peak volume, average volume, etc... to be where they want it... then throw in compression algorythms to reduce the stream bandwidth and it can really color the sound...

All that is to say it is good to listen to those sources, but do not consider them for your final sound because you will go crazy trying to mix/master to a platform you have no control over the direct final output. So keep them in mind, but make sure your mix on the MPC/DAW sounds good first...

Also if you go down this rabbit hole you are likely to need multiple mixes... studio mix, fm radio mix... soundcloud mix... etc... it will drive you mad... this is why I was suggesting earlier to mix to sounding 80% good in general on different devices because otherwise you will never finish mixing.

I can definitely see that happening lol and definitely do not want to be super distracted by this for long. It was hard enough gettting to the point where I finish tracks, and I’m finally having fun creatively thanks to the mpc one. Can’t tell you how many times with different daws to get to the progress I’ve made. So I’d rather be cranking out vibes

Hah... well crank out the vibes... and if you need to go next level then as long as you're tracking out to stems you can hire a mixing and mastering engineer

As far as finishing music, it all comes down to how much confidence you have and nothing more. No matter how much you mix and go back and forth. Someone will find something wrong with it. Vocal, Drums, Mix, Bass, blah blah blah blah. We all have an opinion! But you have to put your Middle finger to the "SKY" and keep going.

This what you need to focus on when delivering the final master to streaming services.

Lampdog wrote:https://www.productionmusiclive.com/blogs/news/mastering-tip-the-end-of-loudness-war

At least one thing to notice from the chart above (and you can see this all over the place such as TV, radio etc...)... is the Soundcloud -1 peak, well a lot of platforms will drop your volume down a db or so because then when they sell advertisements they can make them sound overall louder by removing the peak/cap from advertisements, so that they will get the listener's attention more. It might sound silly, but this has been the case in countless services, and there are plenty of psychological studies to show that it does indeed cue a listener to pay more attention. Annoying? Certainly! Something you can control? Well not directly, but again... depends how much you want to chase the rabbit versus just making your own music. If you're trying to figure out how to get 100,000 impressions versus 200,000 impressions... then yeah worth the time... but if you're just trying to get from 5 impressions to 10 impressions... then it's not like it's putting more change in your pocket.

Honestly, it's all good stuff to know, but on the other hand some of the info here is really only relevant if you're going to be making substantial revenue from target platforms.

EDIT: Also just wanted to note, you're getting a lot of good info here for sure... and goes to show how diverse a background a lot of folks have here. Definitely take notes on what is valuable to you in your current journey into music... and don't be afraid to ignore stuff that you don't care about it... some of it just doesn't have meaning to you now, and it may not in the future... and that is okay. Also it's totally normal for some of this stuff to not matter to you today and you'll have that "ah, now I know what they were talking about" moment in the future.

Cases wrote:To OP: you might be new to the game (as you mentioned), but you are def made for it bro, keep it up. That snare in your sig song is slamming.

That was very kind of you to say! Thanks for the support