Questions regarding filtering

[Someone]

I searched the forums, and I did find some relevant info, but it didn't really address the question I have.

This might be a very noobish question, but I've always wondered what do most dubstep producers do before a drop. For instance I've got vocals that I want to accompany the sweep/rise and I want them to get a bit louder before the drop to give it a sense of I dont know... that its actually going/moving somewhere up with the rise fx (check the little wip i have in my sig and you'll see what I mean...). I know I shouldn't be doing it the stupid way ie. automating volume levels before a drop , I've tried filtering the vocals out and nothing really works. They either sound too crispy or in general the whole effect doesn't work. Do any of you high pass/eq a vocal before a drop?

Also is it considered normal to filter out sub at a certain point in the track to make it quieter?

thanks a lot guys. (sorry if I'm posting in the wrong section)

[hutyluty]

whats wrong with automating the volume level to make them louder?- you could try automating the filters of everything else so that the vocals become more prominent in the mix as the drop approaches but your best bet to get soemthing to go louder is surely to turn it up?

by filtering a sub, do you mean hi passing it? cos if you do that you might aswell not have it playng tbh- if low passing then perfectly normal (not that what's normal should have any impact on what you do as aproducer ayway but whatever)

[Killamike49]

Bitcrusher getting more crushed (last resort)
Dry/wet of some reverb or delay or something.
Dry/wet of anything really.
I mean, it's your song man. How do you want the vocals to morph with the rest of the track?
Tbh, i think that if everything but the vocals are rising, it should be fine. My personal opinion is i like to have an "anchor" during rises and such. Whether it be a solid melody, a vocal, or steady percussion.
Unless the vocal is being obscured by the other elements.

[Someone]

Thanks to both of you! I'll try out the reverb trick and see how it goes. Otherwise ill just raise the volume a bit

Another random question, do you guys find yourselves high pass/low passing synths and other elements before a drop? I swear that in some tracks it can work well, a bit of panning doesn't hurt either.

[Killamike49]

Thanks to both of you! I'll try out the reverb trick and see how it goes. Otherwise ill just raise the volume a bit

Another random question, do you guys find yourselves high pass/low passing synths and other elements before a drop? I swear that in some tracks it can work well, a bit of panning doesn't hurt either.

Yeah man, filter sweeps before your main bit is really nice. Some people do a white noise rise every 16/32 bars to, just to get some foward movement and such. And yeah, starting a filter all the way open then slowly closing it, having everything build up, and then dropping it is pretty easy and it sounds pretty good. Just find interesting ways to do it, so it's not just everything slowly getting highpassed while your white noise has a low pass and some delay, everytime. Feel me?

[KnowWhatAmeen]

something i did on the track im working on now...put a real tight delay on the vocals (1/16th note in my case) with a long decay/high feedback and automate the wet/dry...signal is completely dry then right before the drop you have it slide up to close to 100% wet, gives it this cool timestretch dissociation type sound without sounding muddy like it would with a reverb. i had to play around with it for a while, i got these weird volume pulses when switching between wet and dry i ended up compressing the final sound to even some of that out.
like killa mike said though its your song, whatever sounds smooth and provides the right amount of tension&release