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Hello everyone. I have a problem that's been bothering me for a while now. Whenever I make a song, the feedback is generally positive, but on almost every song, I've been told that it needs a "harder" drop. I have no idea of how to achieve this. Got any tips? And here's a link to my WIP, so you guys can tell me what I should do differently to get a harder drop. Thanks!Soundcloud

Hey Man,

one thing that could definitely help is to fatten up your basslines. I use massive a lot, and for heavy bass lines i always use all 3 oscillators and make sure they are all filling the right space to craft my sound. Punch it up with an EQ. Sugarbytes wow is a good plugin, and camel audio has some good one's. I think your base sound is there, you just need to work on the mix a bit and it will start to fill out nicely.

How should I eq the bassline?

Add a crash cymbal every quarter note during the drop to fill it up.

sounds ok.

Might just be what I'm listening through but it sounds like the midrange you have on your drop doesn't have any sub under it. Do you put a sub underneath your midrange lines? In dubstep, the drop is pretty reliant on the sub giving you that punch when it comes in. Also like chad said, hats and crashes fill up a track nicely.

Yeah the sub is there. Just can't get it to sound perfect.

How are you making your subs? Are you EQing it to pick up the proper low end?

Your drop sounds pretty hard to me. Tweak the sub as mentioned above. Also if you're using massive you might want to try to add unison voices under the voicing tab, and use the pan separation a bit. Dimension expander helps to make it sound 'big' too.

It's not eq'd at all. I just made a bassline and layered the sub under that, then exported it as a wav file, and then resampled that.

And yea I am using Massive.

add a riser with a gap of about a beat/half beat before the drop, builds more tension into the transition.

narrator wrote:add a riser with a gap of about a beat/half beat before the drop, builds more tension into the transition.

Exactly.

Your drop lacks power because there is not much of a build up.

With a proper build up you can make a drop sound hard even without bass.

Work on the sound, fatten it up, maybe layer another synth or something. It sound kinda thin to me.

i could barely hear your kicks. sub needs eq. add a crash every bar or so when the bass kicks in. keep your sub bass separate from your resampling. what DAW you using?

Thanks for all the help everyone! I'm on FL at the moment. But I'm planning on buying Reason soon, and then, eventually, switching over to logic. And sorry for the extremely noobish question, but what exactly is a riser? And how should I eq my sub?

riser is like a sound effect that sounds like its rising... kind of a cliched way to approach a drop, but if you are working on standard dancefloor fare, then its good to use... sometimes whooshes with a high pass filter sweep up , or pitch bends upward. funny thing about a riser or incidental/crescendo effect is you can make them a thousand different ways and put your own touch on it. but there are samples also available floating around


as per EQing sub, basically you don't, if you're using a low sine, but if you use other tones as sub maybe you just want to low pass it at about 100Hz or so. depends where its come from.

Around what frequency should my sub be? And thank you. It looks like I've got some work ahead of me

hard crompress and eq ur kick with an accent at around 100 hz and at about 2k for some top end click. and maybe make a few cuts at around 500 and 1k.
another thing that i occasionally do is layer a kick on the first kick of the drop soak it in reverb and then low cut it so it doesnt interfere with anything. u can also put this at the end of the build up as a kinda impact sound and then insert ur vocal so it doesnt create complete silence but it gives that feel of tension. besides that i dont really know what to say because your basses actually sound fairly decent.

kejk wrote:

narrator wrote:add a riser with a gap of about a beat/half beat before the drop, builds more tension into the transition.

Exactly.

Your drop lacks power because there is not much of a build up.

With a proper build up you can make a drop sound hard even without bass.

what, I always thought the best drops are, where the bass appears out of nowhere... also, OP, try adding a fourth of silence before it hits. And don't forget ride cymbals, they make everything hard-hitting.