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Yeah my monitoring situation is pretty beat, and my neighbors are *insert explicit insult* But I just ordered some AKG 702's, and I know everyone has mixed feelings on mixing with cans, but that's what I'm doing. And I don't really use a filter to cut everything under 100hz, I use a three band EQ, set the low band to be everything under 100 and turn it off. Idk if that's bad policy or not.

You're the decider, if you get results that you are happy with, its good. Or even if you get results that you're less than happy with, if it isn't that important to you, that is all good too.

Mistakes are the best way to learn IMO

Get 1 or 2 nice kicks, tune accordingly, get a pitch modulated sine around 100 hz and hipass that (without hipassing 1 or both of the kicks). Many dnb guys do that apparently. My kicks sound excellent that way. But I make mostly crossbreed/drum & bass and I have many twisted reese sounds going all over the place pitch wise, so they fill out quite a lot sub-100 hz space.

All depends what you need the kick for in your music. I need it for punch and fast rhythms going all over the place (and my volume envelopes reflect that). But if they need to fill out more space in the track, are more there to keep the pace going of a track and your sub stays exclusively below 50/60 hz, you would approach it differently.

Two things. You can hear down to like 50hz, but below there you can't. If there was a way to cleanly cut from there onward with no slope, then I would say totally do that. But I have not found a filter with no slope yet... wait, I have seen one, I just cannot remember it's name.

gen_ wrote:Two things. You can hear down to like 50hz, but below there you can't. If there was a way to cleanly cut from there onward with no slope, then I would say totally do that. But I have not found a filter with no slope yet... wait, I have seen one, I just cannot remember it's name.

The new Ableton EQ's have a setting with no slope for LP and HP

I do this alot. One way to deal with the sub vs kick thing is to just have a high kick, cut the sub of the kick and leave those freqs to the sub, lots of people do it that way. Many times, kicks can sound tighter after cutting some sub.

Again, to beat a dead horse - in regards to low cutting a kick to tighten it - why not just use an envelope on the sound to quiet and end the sound earlier. Most kicks pitch slide down over time, so if you end the kick earlier, you are essentially cutting the sub content. Tightening in time, and freq content. Using an eq to do this can cost you SERIOUS headroom.

Can you elaborate a little noway? don't those frequencies you're cutting eat up headroom as well? I get what your saying with the envelopes because those low frequencies will obviously have a shorter duration. But put that aside and say EQ'ing out everything under 40-50Hz vs. just chucking the kick in dry with no editing, will the filtered kick be worse for your headroom than the dry one? Not trying to dispute here, just tryna get schooled with some knowledge.

I like to use one kick for the top with a high pass usually and then either the max for live kick synth on the bottom, this way I end up with a kick that's in tune with the song, either that or I'll use a kick sample for the bottom and low pass it but tune it to the root note of the key of the song.

zosomagik wrote:will the filtered kick be worse for your headroom than the dry one?

Yes, very likely. You can gain 2-3 db by not filtering.

But if you are enveloping, the pitch slide never gets down to that low sub, it might slide down to like 80hz and then the envelop shuts the sound down.

zosomagik wrote:Can you elaborate a little noway? don't those frequencies you're cutting eat up headroom as well? I get what your saying with the envelopes because those low frequencies will obviously have a shorter duration. But put that aside and say EQ'ing out everything under 40-50Hz vs. just chucking the kick in dry with no editing, will the filtered kick be worse for your headroom than the dry one? Not trying to dispute here, just tryna get schooled with some knowledge.

Most high pass filters have some level of resonance, and you don't really know if they do as you cant hear subsonic frequencies and due to the difficulty of plotting them on a spectrum EQ (their very long wavelengths mean that it is pretty hard for an spread spectrum to map them without huge latency/lookahead). This makes me usually end up ignoring them as far as kick is concerned unless I specifically pitch down a subby kick sample so I know that something will be dropping into subsonics. I'd much rather deal with that on a track-wide level at the mastering stage.