interesting, this is some dan worrall / kush audio level of content yet totally under the radar. I feel super lucky to have found your channel and please keep it up!
Considering also the tracks are destined to be played in large spaces its amazed me how much traction this idea got ... Contrast is key to the bass end
Thanks James, I know this is a year on but length of kick is definitely one of the problems I have with a recent track, I will look at this tonight. Your channel is the one that makes me really regret getting rid of Ableton earlier this year (using FL) I feel I would learn so much from your packs and arrangements.
It was something i worked out way too late - Not just kicks too - we're in an era of very short druym sounds at the moment - take a look at the lengths of all of your principal percussion and test a few things out - Kick a must though - I alwasy remember how good the DMX kick on Blue Monday sounds even now and it's an amazingly short kick as they all were in that era . I'm not suggesting going that short, but see how far you can go - your bassline will love you for it !
Great great video packed with so much knowledge. I thought I knew it all. I was wrong. Time to revisit all those tracks that didn't quite sound right and were left half finished!
Keep them as short as you can - let the 808s or basses have all the room they need - Also they can take some serious punishment with clippers. etc when nice and short ... more vids to come
You're a true master James. I love your products, and own several of them. That and your immense knowledge that you share here on YT, is pure gold. Thanks for everything so far. I'm looking forward to many future releases.
Some of the best kick drums I’ve ever heard come from a Drum & Bass producer called Alix Perez, James... Mate go and listen to tracks like Ravana or Deep Six, his drum processing is next level. There’s also an older track called ‘Recall & Reflect’ which has a stereo kick, amazing mixdowns Always good to see new videos from you
Hello James i've been a F9 Product supporter. My f9 kicks & packs are my got to folders.This is by far one of the best tutorials i have seen you make. With my experience and research for the last 6 years this is straight honest truth. JUST GOOD STUFF TY AGING FOR SHARING.
Hi James, Great video and thanks for sharing. Wanted to ask that you consider doing a video on Tip 9. I personally have developed a very complex mixing structure over the years, although I am quite comfortable with it I am always looking to shave off baggage and simplify where I can. Would be great to see you go a bit deeper on the topic, your approach and what Kevin taught you. Many Thanks
Hi Daniel - I asked Kevin once to try a drum bus Compressor on a stem mix of mine and he flat out refused … We had a session compatibility system so I grabbed the master file and tried it myself and at no point could I ever get it sounding as good as his page where all the drums just went to 2 bus - I was amazed as I’ve played with all sorts of routing plots over the years and just thought there was something to it … We then had a conversation and over the next few hours I suddenly came to realise that compounding the attack and release timings of multiple dynamics processors was the root cause and it just sounds un-wholesome … I then went on a mission to learn how to balance drums better and concentrate on great source sounds - basically to mimic what Kevin was doing and have never looked back .. every now and again I give drum buss compression a go and then always revert back as I now find it easier …. I will use parallel compression regularly and the individual sounds get a LOT of work ( have also found Sonnox’s envolution to be ever so handy for adding punch rather than dynamics but I would highly recommend testing a simpler system - it removes the constant firefighting and gainstaging that multi layered bussing naturally creates ( for me at least - I know some are more disciplined ) That’s the great thing now though - we can try literally everything and discard what we don’t like
@@F9Audio Thanks for taking the time James, Much appreciated. Will certainly have to put together an alternative template and give it a go. Will also check out that Sonnox Envolution too, their inflator is always making its way into my structure.. my misses is looking at me funny as I wrote that.. lol.. Thanks again James, Happy Knob twiddlin! 🎶
@@DanielStaff_ only one thing I would add Daniel ( and this is a mantra for me these days ) You are an individual and never take another producer’s point of view as gospel - Try everything and cherry pick what suits you - if this means your current workflow ends up the best for you then it is right .. I can only talk about my experiences as it’s all I know but am also fully aware how different we all are in approach , ears and life experience Good luck sir - do let me know how you get on with this
@@F9Audio Cheers James, I couldnt agree more! will certainly try it and let you know. even if it doesnt fully work for me it can always spark some new ideas in relation to my approach. One of the things I really strived for in recent years was refining my setup to really allow for a smooth workflow. So I love discovering new approaches like this. Thank you
It's the Rupert Neve Headhone amp - Had it hnady ( as well as my SPL Monitor controller so was lucky enough to have a decent setup ... There are others for sure that I might get a few ounces more out of, but at 49 years old and over a decade of DJing behind me, the extra details may be lost on me
Great question - for bass end, I'd nearly always suggest open back as obviously here there is no reverse pressure against the drivers... However - there's one major caveat to what I just said - All of our ears are every so slightly different, as is our aural history ( which can cause damage in some areas over time ) .. with this in mind I always say that headphones and speakers are an immensely personal choice and you absolutely must try things out before you buy ... What suits some will not suit another and this is nearly always overlooked ( as all producers tend to talk as if their very personal sets of tastes and journey should be a universal rite of passage when it's nearly always utterly unique to them ) ... So please take everything as advice, not gospel and go out to try and test as much as possible and when you find that one thing that fits you like a glove, run with it.... This is what I did finally after realizing even the people I admired the most had no idea of my life, needs and ears, and I've never looked back.
Amazing video, great tips! However on your last one with regards to being in key, I keep seeing so many mixed reviews on this. Many producers swear by it being in key, for example there's a video from Martin Ikin where the kick plays a part in the bassline, so therefore needs to be in key or would sound off. Also theres a video from Robert Etherson in which the kick was playing at the same time as some of the bass notes and in effect made a 2 note chord (the note of the kick wasnt the same note as the bass but they were in the same key). Whats your thoughts on those? My take is that it depends on what youre making...
HI Alex - I would never suggest you try perfectly tuning your kick to the tonic note of your track - if your kick and bass is created to be one instrument like extreme versions of EDM then that's a different concept ( Animals by Garrix the most commercial / known example I suppose ) ...BUT in general you want to avoid this like the plague as unless you are fully versed and competent in every area of phase you can get yourself into a terrible mess with serious issues during either production or mix - I'll copy and paste a very long answer here to someone else on this subject and hopefully it will show you the issues ... It just causes you loads of issues you do not need in the subsonics.
Full disclosure here - I'm a veteran Grammy Nominated producer with 27 years of experience and university-level training in Physics and Audio video systems - I've worked with the world's best engineers and talk regularly with those mixing at the highest levels of pop, EDM, etc. So please trust me when I say - this theory is utterly, utterly flawed and I please ask you to stop listening to the terrible advice thrown around by those who should know better ... We are not talking about 80hz here, we are talking about much lower frequencies and under about 60HZ, things change very, very quickly. The whole idea here is that tuning your kick drum to the exact Tonic note of the scale will result in the frequencies working together positively and harmonically - In other words, you are applying music theory whilst totally ignoring the bipolar problems of Phase. The moment the human voice cannot vocalise a sound, our relationship with it changes. Harmony is only important across the human vocal range - Your senses are delivering 100 times the amount of information your brain can handle and we filter out everything not considered needed. Under a certain frequency, we no longer have a harmonic relationship with the audio and it all becomes more about interacting waves. This gets extreme in the very lower octaves, also for a very simple mathematical reason. Let me explain further. 30-60hz is actually an entire octave - that gives only 30HZ to carry all 12 notes - an average of 2.5 Hz per note ( please note - this is an average and the actual spread is non-linear but it will give us a measurable point of comparison ). In the well-known 440-880hz octave we have 440Hz for all 12 notes - that’s 16X the resolution. Between 880HZ and 1760Hz we have 880HZ, 32 times the resolution. This is why tuning issues become so apparent in the midrange ( also where our human hearing is concentrated physiologically so we can hear instructions from other humans ). The sound and audio can be completely described using physics and none of it is linear - It’s exponential ( viewing it going up ) and logarithmic ( viewing it going down ) . With these physiological and mathematical responses, harmony below a certain point is not viable for the human condition ( I’m sure larger species like elephants or Blue whales might have a differing relationship than we do as they can vocalise at a much lower point, but even this will reach a point where the resolution between frequencies breaks that down too ) We can forget harmony down there ( and test this, create a perfect sine and start playing chords from C0 upwards - all you will hear is beating tones, not a major or minor chord ) … Now try listening to C0 and C#0 - can you really, honestly hear the difference of a half-tone? There’s a joke in Hip Hop - “The 808’s out of tune” - this is because they often are on so many records as many are tuned by hand or pulled from sample packs and the note of the filename believed when they are often a way off - The reason these make it all the way to the mix is that it’s so frankly terribly hard to tune down there by ear - impossible in some keys and sounds for the very reasons above. What is important is Phase - and again for mathematical reasons, this gets more and more important the lower down the audio spectrum we go. The energy carried by a frequency increases exponentially the lower we go. Right now we are using fundamentals every single day that are under 60hz ( like those shown in this video ). This creates enormous blooms of information down there ( which are easy to see in waveforms views) and one thing is key to their interaction- Phase - and as this video shows it can cause you major issues that are not consistent and difficult to diagnose.
>> Now we come to the really bad bits of information - Every single workaround from this problem creates issues either at that time or later on and you must absolutely remember that these issues dissolve very quickly indeed when the two interacting frequencies are tuned apart. 1 - Phase locked bass - this is a classic argument by those who are digging in on this concept. They say - ‘You make sure you are using a synth where you can re-trigger the phase of your bass every note” , Then you line it up with an oscilloscope and you are all good. BUT - This works only if your bassline plays exactly the same rhythm of the kick - or say -a constantly repeated offbeat with an identical distance from the kick every note ( not the funkiest of rhythms ). The moment you have a bassline that has any other rhythm, where the notes fall on other divisions within the bar, you will have to work note by note to slip those notes about too to keep them phase aligned. Phase is a function of time. These movements will interfere with your grooves and you have this process dictating where your bass notes should fall - Also - It fixes you to one sort of bass sound. It means you cannot use free-running analog sources It also presents another equally vexing problem - If you are heavily using the tonic/root note against a perfectly tonic/ root note tuned Kick, and you are perfectly phase aligned ( bearing in mind it only has to slip a tiny bit for any cancellation to start to occur ), every time they play together they will create additional blooms of information as they interfere positively. This in extreme cases can cause a 6DB jump in level - Should your production suddenly move to another note in the bass, this synergistic level bump will reduce dramatically and the other notes will all sound weak in comparison - this is just simple wave mechanics - It’s the 100% reverse of the cancellation and is just as unpredictable as the negative phase effects shown in this video - In fact, if I’d rendered out say 100 bars, at some point there would have been a massively loud bloom of bass information. None of this is good - the only way to control it is dynamics and quite extreme dynamics at that Even after all this, it’s then nearly always forgotten that when you come to mix and apply an EQ to your kick or Bass and start making changes, you will instantly shift the phase. All digital EQs use delays to work and this will instantly shift things about and you will have to start the alignment again to keep your balances. Also - some plugins don’t report their Latency correctly under mix circumstances, so they can actually slip sounds backwards or forwards in time - Phase is a function of time so this will cause you phase issues once again meaning you have to re-align everything although in practice, you’ll probably never be aware of it and will be unknowingly losing power within your balance Let me be 100% clear - You don’t have to worry about any of the above the moment you tune your kick away or use a kick with tail in motion ( Tail pitch dropping over time ). You can then also use any bass source you wish to without any problems.
2 - Sidechaining It’s human nature to assume all producers make and like the same music as we do personally - It’s simply not the case. Side-chaining is a vital step in some genres, but in many others, it’s avoided, and in some it’s an absolute no-no. My job here is to talk to everyone across multiple styles and genres. Without a doubt sidechaining can help reduce the phase issues on both ends ( cancellation and frequency blooming ) but lets just be realistic here - Phase cancellation of perfectly tuned fundamentals happens even at low relative levels as it’s at the point of synergy. The only way to 100% ensure no phasing effects are happening to your perfectly tuned kick is to use 100% sidechaining - in other words - Completely get rid of any bass for the entire length of the kick - If you bring the volume back early using a dedicated sidechain envelope based plugin, or a threshold set higher than the fall-off of the kick you can cause these cancellations or blooms at the end of the tail of your kick creating modulation within the general bass end, or force you to play offbeat bass only. These are two extremely big production restrictions and you should never produce yourself into a corner like this - The art is what people respond to, not the technicality. With extreme sidechaining like this, you also lose the bassline completely for the 1st beat of every bar ( and please also remember you will need to either sidechain or High pass all synths and other sounds that may have subtonics in them too that play root notes ) … This means that if you have any form of chord sequence in your production and you are following it by playing root notes of the chords on that bass instrument, you are losing that all-important 1st beat musical change and replacing it with a very large Tonic tone - no matter what the chord. This concept also completely forgets the end result - We are nearly always talking here about tracks heading to clubs, but we’re mixing on midrange monitors in a small room ( so we’re not hearing it how it will end up ) . If you tune everything to the precise tonic note in the subsonics ( where the resulting wavefronts coming out of the club or festivals’ system have the most energy ) these tones will reverberate around the club and overlap enormously to the bass and the combined effect of both being perfectly tuned can create droning tonic resonances and rumbles without definition - You’ll then get all kinds of weird cancellations due to the 3D nature of sound interactions as opposed to the Quasi-2D nature of audio interactions in our DAWS. I’ve heard this so many times in clubs and it’s what DeadMau5 was referring to in his “rant about kicks’ ... "All you're going to hear is 30HZ across the board" ( might be paraphrasing here, but you get the idea ) . Once again - all this falls away the very moment there is the secret sauce in your bass end - Contrast. Tune your kick away from your tonic ( or principal root if your track never reaches the tonic - Stardust - 'Music Sounds better with you' a perfect example ) . OR - Use a kick with tail in motion. If you head out online and do a round-up of every single major mix engineer’s interviews ( and now we have a ton of them in electronic and club music thanks to the explosion in club music and extreme hip hop ) you will always find variations on the same idea for the amazing bass end these guys bring … “ I always find a unique place for the Bass and kick so they can live together without getting in each other's way” .. They actively search out contrast between the kick and bass - that’s made 100% harder with the fundamentals in the same place. Now here’s an interesting point - Many people claim to be using tuned kicks when they are actually not - for two reasons 1 - Most of the kicks in circulation are completely inaccurate in their labelling 2 - Many ( including nearly everything from Kick 2 ) use tails in motion The second point is extremely important. Kick 2 is a brilliant device that uses pitch envelopes with breakpoints on it you can control and edit - so many people I know pick out the breakpoints and claim this is the key without realising it’s a point on an envelope that also may have a curve applied. In these cases, the pitch of the tail is controlled by a vector, not a static integer, so claiming any part of that as a precise value for the duration of the kick is the same as claiming the earth is flat. Given the control rates of plugins these days, any pitch controlled by a modern envelope or curve will not even be at that pitch for an entire cycle, so these proposed ‘keys’ are not information - they are just garbage. What’s interesting though is that for this very reason they will often create way less in the way of dangerous phase interactions - Phase problems occur at their apex with 2 ( or more ) perfectly tuned sources being at differing parts of the cycle - this cannot occur if the cycle length is constantly in motion .. As a result - Kicks with tails in motion can be a killer weapon - Ironically - so many producers who claim to get amazing bass end with Perfectly tonic-tuned kicks are not using tuned kicks at all - they are using kicks with Tails in motion and that’s why it sounds so good ( and because they have put their attention to the bass end extensively )
So with all this is mind - what do we do ? It’s so simple - 1 - Use your ears and stop using your eyes or perceived flawed theory to produce your bottom end ( e.g. looking at the key labels on audio files or presets ), Every single track is different and unique as a fingerprint so will need a different approach on the bass end ( where all the energy is ). If I were to suggest you “sniff’ your kick drums first to see if they’d work, this would seem nonsensical. Don’t place all the importance on your sight either - we only experience sounds with our ears ( and sense of touch way down the bottom ) so concentrate your efforts there and stop discounting kicks and presets because of a key label - you might be discarding the perfect kick ! You can only truly do this when you have a monitoring system capable of replicating the sounds correctly and many monitors fall off very fast under 50HZ due to the unavoidable physics of cabinet design ( all cabinets act as physical high -pass filters ) .. This can be sidestepped with w really good pair of headphones ( as an example - My current Focals go all the way to 5HZ - somewhere I would never be able to go with Monitors ) 2 - Try as many kicks as possible and don’t be afraid to swap out halfway through production - We al use conformation bias as we produce so we don’t want to admit we might have chosen the wrong kick at the early stages - it takes minutes to try a change of kick and we must learn to just bite the bullet and do it occasionally. Go for contrast every time . 3 - And this is the big one - play with your kick’s length - make it as short as you possibly can for your given genre and then you will have a ton of room for your bass to rise up going warmth, funk and musical movement ( Remember the kick is a percussive element and bass is for bass ) .. This is the most important piece of advice I can give you and I promise it will make your life better - It will stop the tail of your kick resonating out across large rooms, taking up a ton of room and stealing your basses’ place and will help bring your mix together in a way more pleasing way - Also it stops you having to use hugely long sidechain phases if your are using it creatively, and gives more room for the music and art to come through - No one will leave a club humming your Kick drum - so don’t let it eat up 40% of your drops’ space. There’s a reason Hip Hop and Drum and bass use ridiculously short kicks at the moment - it allows the sub bass sounds on these productions to come flying through - Let's face it - these genres sound amazing in clubs ( also check the hip hop kicks on splice - you won’t see any key information on them - hmm - maybe they’re onto something ) We have only in the last 30 years ( and only the last 15 in earnest ) started utilising this area of subsonic as in the past, having the currently fashionable amount of subsonics in your mix / production would not be compatible with Vinyl cutting , the analog equipment or tape storage. It’s human nature for all sorts of bad concepts to bubble up but this whole thing about Keys kicks needs to be called out It’s dangerous, has no basis in musical, technical or accepted engineering theory, experience or expertise and throws restrictions on your work Please please please stop doing this and start using your ears again - you will set yourself free
Interesting about sub grouping. I usually group drums minus the kick into a group to glue them and everything else is pretty much separate. Would love a more in depth video about your approach to this! Cheers
I always encourage everyone to embrace exactly what works for them - we are all such individuals it's vital that we find and perfect the workflows that suit us so if you have a method that gets you great results then don't ever shift it due to advice ( and certainly don't ever feel you may be doing something wrong ) ... I did notice people stacking up grouping workflows a few years back and this is very complex to deal with at any stage ( I mean here groups, into groups , then into more groups even before the master bus ) and in those cases, the transients are nearly always facing multiple compression layers with differing attack functions which is dangerous - I know as I used to do it for a while until I learnt that taking that workflow apart and creating simpler routing worked better 100% of the time so I just wanted to address that here .. obviously what you mention here is nothing like that ... As always a voyage of discovery every day - one of the reasons why after all these years I find all this so exciting
James can you elaborate how headphones can physically create sub frequencies when speakers and monitors need to be physically larger why or rather how can headphones seemingly escape this necessity?
Yes - All monitor speakers are in cabinets - Also all speakers have to move backwards and forwards from a central position as they work - this means they push backwards into an enclosed space - This causes physical high pass filtering and the corner frequency of this is determined by the size of the cabinet - Bass porting does help, but also the size of the port is confined by the cabinet size - As you go down in frequency the wavelengths created get longer and the amount of energy increases on the wavefronts - the mixture of all of this is what causes the fall off - the bigger the box, the lower the effect start to occur which is why you need really big boxes for the best subs ... Headphones sidestep this in two way - 1st - the speakers in headphones don't have to move anywhere near as far as they are a few centimeteres from our ear drums so even closed backed systems will be spared some of this choking, but open backed headphones don't exhibit any of this effect so can go as low as the manufacturers can reproduce with the diaphragm materials
I'm in the process of putting a video together on phase that will cover how sound works and it will make more sense once you see that - it a very strange thing to visualise as air is invisible
@@F9Audio I will certainly watch it regardless as i love your content and I'm so glad i stumbled upon f9 on fb where i have left more comments haha but in regards to phase and wavelengths i am knowledgeable in these areas just never got my head around the physics of headphones themselves in regard to being physically smaller so if your phase video ends up going into this then happy datys that's a brucey bonus indeed. P.s. what is the best way to contact you or f9 as i wanted to ask a couple of things but don't want to put them here as I'm conscious of keeping these particular posts to topic. Thanks. Day H
In key drums rarely made sense to me. Unless you're doing some sort of melody on toms like an 80's song, why even? You think the Beatles thought about the key of their kick? It's supposed to be an atonal instrument.
I'm totally with you and I think a lot of this came about because we 'could' - not 'should' ... I've now been through every single argument that's 'pro' for this so will create a follow up video - Basically all of them are flawed and increase the amount of work needed - sometimes to ridiculous levels ... Also people keep on pointing me to their productions with "keyed' Kicks and it turns out they're using kicks with the tail pitch in motion so i think some real clarity on this issue is needed
@@F9Audio the only reason I would or have ever keyed a drum is for use as a melodic instrument. 808 basslines are fine, but not every drum is that. I almost wish a huge electronic act would break out a real drum kit for an entire project just to break the scene from this habit.
the information here relies on years of experience in every kind of room and setup imaginable and a lot of it revolves around physics - what’s your angle ?
This guy really knows what hes talking about love his videos
Absolutely precious & valuable free advice from a legend…Thank you
This is Pure Gold. Thank you so much.
A wealth of information in here. Thank you James, you are a master and I trust every word you say. So grateful you are sharing the knowledge.
Thanks so much for the kind words … I love this end of F9 and will try to get as much info out as humanly possible in the coming years
interesting, this is some dan worrall / kush audio level of content yet totally under the radar. I feel super lucky to have found your channel and please keep it up!
yes! love anything F9 and James put out. class act.
What a gem of information!
James could talk about the phone directory and I'd listen. Best musical knowledge and tips on TH-cam.
Some excellent tips in this video. It deserves more views.
Last but not least advice is the best ever. Those guys who tune everything in same key are crazy
Considering also the tracks are destined to be played in large spaces its amazed me how much traction this idea got ... Contrast is key to the bass end
Thanks James, I know this is a year on but length of kick is definitely one of the problems I have with a recent track, I will look at this tonight. Your channel is the one that makes me really regret getting rid of Ableton earlier this year (using FL) I feel I would learn so much from your packs and arrangements.
It was something i worked out way too late - Not just kicks too - we're in an era of very short druym sounds at the moment - take a look at the lengths of all of your principal percussion and test a few things out - Kick a must though - I alwasy remember how good the DMX kick on Blue Monday sounds even now and it's an amazingly short kick as they all were in that era . I'm not suggesting going that short, but see how far you can go - your bassline will love you for it !
Great helpful video for everyone James!
Brilliant stuff James
Absolute Legend and master for making these videos James. Thank you so much. Your production sound is still miles ahead of most
Great watch as always - thanks James
Wow! This video is so helpful. Amazingly well explained. Thank you.
So gald it was useful . It's an ongoing project with Kicks - Some just have a magic and we're trying to find out why
Great great video packed with so much knowledge. I thought I knew it all. I was wrong. Time to revisit all those tracks that didn't quite sound right and were left half finished!
Thank you so much - I wish you all the best with the tweaks - nothing like nailing a track that was causing issues in the past
Priceless, thank you!!!!
Our pleasure!
Your channel is the tits. Thanks for sharing your knowledge in such a beautifully presented way.
Thanks for the information I make rap beats and always have problems with long tails on drums.
Keep them as short as you can - let the 808s or basses have all the room they need - Also they can take some serious punishment with clippers. etc when nice and short ... more vids to come
You're a true master James. I love your products, and own several of them. That and your immense knowledge that you share here on YT, is pure gold. Thanks for everything so far. I'm looking forward to many future releases.
Wonderful tips! Thanks
Awesome content! THX for that... 🙌🏻 cheers 🥳
Absolutely love these videos James. Incredible generosity of these industry techniques and knowledge.
Some absolute GOLD here - Thanks James!
Fantastic 👍🏾
Thanks so much James!
Thank you for your videos !
Love it! Thank you guys!
So glad you love it - a favourite pack to develop ( learnt a ton whilst doing so ) and helped us create a technology workflow we can use again ..
Amazing video, thank you.
Thank you too!
Absolute Legend
Superb as ever, really informative 😊
More tips please James, maybe do a Top tips for Reverb & Delay!!
I agree with this suggestion
Great idea !!
looking forward for the phase video
On It right now - Hopefully Wednesday next week
Some of the best kick drums I’ve ever heard come from a Drum & Bass producer called Alix Perez, James... Mate go and listen to tracks like Ravana or Deep Six, his drum processing is next level. There’s also an older track called ‘Recall & Reflect’ which has a stereo kick, amazing mixdowns
Always good to see new videos from you
Excellent tip Jack - on the case now - always someone out there doing awesome things
@@F9Audio The guys unbelievable, seems to come with a release every couple weeks and the sonics are always so on point haha
Awesome, thanks James 👌
No problem 👍
These sound amazing! Top tips, thank you James!
Great video sir
Super useful information. Thanks🙏🏻
superb video james
Hello James i've been a F9 Product supporter. My f9 kicks & packs are my got to folders.This is by far one of the best tutorials i have seen you make. With my experience and research for the last 6 years this is straight honest truth. JUST GOOD STUFF TY AGING FOR SHARING.
Hi James, Great video and thanks for sharing. Wanted to ask that you consider doing a video on Tip 9. I personally have developed a very complex mixing structure over the years, although I am quite comfortable with it I am always looking to shave off baggage and simplify where I can. Would be great to see you go a bit deeper on the topic, your approach and what Kevin taught you. Many Thanks
Hi Daniel - I asked Kevin once to try a drum bus Compressor on a stem mix of mine and he flat out refused … We had a session compatibility system so I grabbed the master file and tried it myself and at no point could I ever get it sounding as good as his page where all the drums just went to 2 bus - I was amazed as I’ve played with all sorts of routing plots over the years and just thought there was something to it … We then had a conversation and over the next few hours I suddenly came to realise that compounding the attack and release timings of multiple dynamics processors was the root cause and it just sounds un-wholesome … I then went on a mission to learn how to balance drums better and concentrate on great source sounds - basically to mimic what Kevin was doing and have never looked back .. every now and again I give drum buss compression a go and then always revert back as I now find it easier ….
I will use parallel compression regularly and the individual sounds get a LOT of work ( have also found Sonnox’s envolution to be ever so handy for adding punch rather than dynamics but I would highly recommend testing a simpler system - it removes the constant firefighting and gainstaging that multi layered bussing naturally creates ( for me at least - I know some are more disciplined )
That’s the great thing now though - we can try literally everything and discard what we don’t like
@@F9Audio Thanks for taking the time James, Much appreciated. Will certainly have to put together an alternative template and give it a go. Will also check out that Sonnox Envolution too, their inflator is always making its way into my structure.. my misses is looking at me funny as I wrote that.. lol..
Thanks again James, Happy Knob twiddlin! 🎶
@@DanielStaff_ only one thing I would add Daniel ( and this is a mantra for me these days ) You are an individual and never take another producer’s point of view as gospel - Try everything and cherry pick what suits you - if this means your current workflow ends up the best for you then it is right .. I can only talk about my experiences as it’s all I know but am also fully aware how different we all are in approach , ears and life experience
Good luck sir - do let me know how you get on with this
@@F9Audio Cheers James, I couldnt agree more! will certainly try it and let you know. even if it doesnt fully work for me it can always spark some new ideas in relation to my approach. One of the things I really strived for in recent years was refining my setup to really allow for a smooth workflow. So I love discovering new approaches like this.
Thank you
Excellent video. Definitely need more videos from you James, keep the knowledge flowing 👌
More to come! ... on the case with the phase video next - It's a very big subject
What a great guy James is, on top of great skills and knowledge. Top notch products from F9 in my experience - and I don't say that lightly.
Once again thanks James :-)
Great Advice! Thank you! it's actually more than Kick drum advice, you might want to re-think the video title
Thanks, great video. Best/Mathias
Amazing and useful insight!! Thank you James, Will love to see you make some Kick Samples for Sonic Academys Kick 2
What's the headphone amp you're using with those Focals? That can add clarity, or not if the headphones aren't getting enough power.
It's the Rupert Neve Headhone amp - Had it hnady ( as well as my SPL Monitor controller so was lucky enough to have a decent setup ... There are others for sure that I might get a few ounces more out of, but at 49 years old and over a decade of DJing behind me, the extra details may be lost on me
Cheers james x
For headphones to monitor the low end, would closed back be better than open or semi-open headphones? Thinking of ATH-M50X's versus DT880 Pro's.
Great question - for bass end, I'd nearly always suggest open back as obviously here there is no reverse pressure against the drivers... However - there's one major caveat to what I just said - All of our ears are every so slightly different, as is our aural history ( which can cause damage in some areas over time ) .. with this in mind I always say that headphones and speakers are an immensely personal choice and you absolutely must try things out before you buy ... What suits some will not suit another and this is nearly always overlooked ( as all producers tend to talk as if their very personal sets of tastes and journey should be a universal rite of passage when it's nearly always utterly unique to them ) ... So please take everything as advice, not gospel and go out to try and test as much as possible and when you find that one thing that fits you like a glove, run with it.... This is what I did finally after realizing even the people I admired the most had no idea of my life, needs and ears, and I've never looked back.
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Amazing video, great tips! However on your last one with regards to being in key, I keep seeing so many mixed reviews on this. Many producers swear by it being in key, for example there's a video from Martin Ikin where the kick plays a part in the bassline, so therefore needs to be in key or would sound off. Also theres a video from Robert Etherson in which the kick was playing at the same time as some of the bass notes and in effect made a 2 note chord (the note of the kick wasnt the same note as the bass but they were in the same key). Whats your thoughts on those? My take is that it depends on what youre making...
HI Alex - I would never suggest you try perfectly tuning your kick to the tonic note of your track - if your kick and bass is created to be one instrument like extreme versions of EDM then that's a different concept ( Animals by Garrix the most commercial / known example I suppose ) ...BUT in general you want to avoid this like the plague as unless you are fully versed and competent in every area of phase you can get yourself into a terrible mess with serious issues during either production or mix - I'll copy and paste a very long answer here to someone else on this subject and hopefully it will show you the issues ... It just causes you loads of issues you do not need in the subsonics.
Full disclosure here - I'm a veteran Grammy Nominated producer with 27 years of experience and university-level training in Physics and Audio video systems - I've worked with the world's best engineers and talk regularly with those mixing at the highest levels of pop, EDM, etc. So please trust me when I say - this theory is utterly, utterly flawed and I please ask you to stop listening to the terrible advice thrown around by those who should know better ...
We are not talking about 80hz here, we are talking about much lower frequencies and under about 60HZ, things change very, very quickly.
The whole idea here is that tuning your kick drum to the exact Tonic note of the scale will result in the frequencies working together positively and harmonically - In other words, you are applying music theory whilst totally ignoring the bipolar problems of Phase.
The moment the human voice cannot vocalise a sound, our relationship with it changes. Harmony is only important across the human vocal range - Your senses are delivering 100 times the amount of information your brain can handle and we filter out everything not considered needed. Under a certain frequency, we no longer have a harmonic relationship with the audio and it all becomes more about interacting waves.
This gets extreme in the very lower octaves, also for a very simple mathematical reason. Let me explain further.
30-60hz is actually an entire octave - that gives only 30HZ to carry all 12 notes - an average of 2.5 Hz per note ( please note - this is an average and the actual spread is non-linear but it will give us a measurable point of comparison ). In the well-known 440-880hz octave we have 440Hz for all 12 notes - that’s 16X the resolution. Between 880HZ and 1760Hz we have 880HZ, 32 times the resolution. This is why tuning issues become so apparent in the midrange ( also where our human hearing is concentrated physiologically so we can hear instructions from other humans ). The sound and audio can be completely described using physics and none of it is linear - It’s exponential ( viewing it going up ) and logarithmic ( viewing it going down ) .
With these physiological and mathematical responses, harmony below a certain point is not viable for the human condition ( I’m sure larger species like elephants or Blue whales might have a differing relationship than we do as they can vocalise at a much lower point, but even this will reach a point where the resolution between frequencies breaks that down too )
We can forget harmony down there ( and test this, create a perfect sine and start playing chords from C0 upwards - all you will hear is beating tones, not a major or minor chord ) … Now try listening to C0 and C#0 - can you really, honestly hear the difference of a half-tone?
There’s a joke in Hip Hop - “The 808’s out of tune” - this is because they often are on so many records as many are tuned by hand or pulled from sample packs and the note of the filename believed when they are often a way off - The reason these make it all the way to the mix is that it’s so frankly terribly hard to tune down there by ear - impossible in some keys and sounds for the very reasons above.
What is important is Phase - and again for mathematical reasons, this gets more and more important the lower down the audio spectrum we go.
The energy carried by a frequency increases exponentially the lower we go. Right now we are using fundamentals every single day that are under 60hz ( like those shown in this video ). This creates enormous blooms of information down there ( which are easy to see in waveforms views) and one thing is key to their interaction- Phase - and as this video shows it can cause you major issues that are not consistent and difficult to diagnose.
>> Now we come to the really bad bits of information - Every single workaround from this problem creates issues either at that time or later on and you must absolutely remember that these issues dissolve very quickly indeed when the two interacting frequencies are tuned apart.
1 - Phase locked bass - this is a classic argument by those who are digging in on this concept. They say - ‘You make sure you are using a synth where you can re-trigger the phase of your bass every note” , Then you line it up with an oscilloscope and you are all good.
BUT - This works only if your bassline plays exactly the same rhythm of the kick - or say -a constantly repeated offbeat with an identical distance from the kick every note ( not the funkiest of rhythms ). The moment you have a bassline that has any other rhythm, where the notes fall on other divisions within the bar, you will have to work note by note to slip those notes about too to keep them phase aligned. Phase is a function of time.
These movements will interfere with your grooves and you have this process dictating where your bass notes should fall - Also - It fixes you to one sort of bass sound. It means you cannot use free-running analog sources
It also presents another equally vexing problem - If you are heavily using the tonic/root note against a perfectly tonic/ root note tuned Kick, and you are perfectly phase aligned ( bearing in mind it only has to slip a tiny bit for any cancellation to start to occur ), every time they play together they will create additional blooms of information as they interfere positively.
This in extreme cases can cause a 6DB jump in level - Should your production suddenly move to another note in the bass, this synergistic level bump will reduce dramatically and the other notes will all sound weak in comparison - this is just simple wave mechanics - It’s the 100% reverse of the cancellation and is just as unpredictable as the negative phase effects shown in this video - In fact, if I’d rendered out say 100 bars, at some point there would have been a massively loud bloom of bass information.
None of this is good - the only way to control it is dynamics and quite extreme dynamics at that
Even after all this, it’s then nearly always forgotten that when you come to mix and apply an EQ to your kick or Bass and start making changes, you will instantly shift the phase. All digital EQs use delays to work and this will instantly shift things about and you will have to start the alignment again to keep your balances.
Also - some plugins don’t report their Latency correctly under mix circumstances, so they can actually slip sounds backwards or forwards in time - Phase is a function of time so this will cause you phase issues once again meaning you have to re-align everything although in practice, you’ll probably never be aware of it and will be unknowingly losing power within your balance
Let me be 100% clear - You don’t have to worry about any of the above the moment you tune your kick away or use a kick with tail in motion ( Tail pitch dropping over time ). You can then also use any bass source you wish to without any problems.
2 - Sidechaining
It’s human nature to assume all producers make and like the same music as we do personally - It’s simply not the case. Side-chaining is a vital step in some genres, but in many others, it’s avoided, and in some it’s an absolute no-no. My job here is to talk to everyone across multiple styles and genres.
Without a doubt sidechaining can help reduce the phase issues on both ends ( cancellation and frequency blooming ) but lets just be realistic here - Phase cancellation of perfectly tuned fundamentals happens even at low relative levels as it’s at the point of synergy.
The only way to 100% ensure no phasing effects are happening to your perfectly tuned kick is to use 100% sidechaining - in other words - Completely get rid of any bass for the entire length of the kick - If you bring the volume back early using a dedicated sidechain envelope based plugin, or a threshold set higher than the fall-off of the kick you can cause these cancellations or blooms at the end of the tail of your kick creating modulation within the general bass end, or force you to play offbeat bass only.
These are two extremely big production restrictions and you should never produce yourself into a corner like this - The art is what people respond to, not the technicality.
With extreme sidechaining like this, you also lose the bassline completely for the 1st beat of every bar ( and please also remember you will need to either sidechain or High pass all synths and other sounds that may have subtonics in them too that play root notes ) …
This means that if you have any form of chord sequence in your production and you are following it by playing root notes of the chords on that bass instrument, you are losing that all-important 1st beat musical change and replacing it with a very large Tonic tone - no matter what the chord.
This concept also completely forgets the end result - We are nearly always talking here about tracks heading to clubs, but we’re mixing on midrange monitors in a small room ( so we’re not hearing it how it will end up ) .
If you tune everything to the precise tonic note in the subsonics ( where the resulting wavefronts coming out of the club or festivals’ system have the most energy ) these tones will reverberate around the club and overlap enormously to the bass and the combined effect of both being perfectly tuned can create droning tonic resonances and rumbles without definition - You’ll then get all kinds of weird cancellations due to the 3D nature of sound interactions as opposed to the Quasi-2D nature of audio interactions in our DAWS.
I’ve heard this so many times in clubs and it’s what DeadMau5 was referring to in his “rant about kicks’ ... "All you're going to hear is 30HZ across the board" ( might be paraphrasing here, but you get the idea ) .
Once again - all this falls away the very moment there is the secret sauce in your bass end - Contrast.
Tune your kick away from your tonic ( or principal root if your track never reaches the tonic - Stardust - 'Music Sounds better with you' a perfect example ) . OR - Use a kick with tail in motion.
If you head out online and do a round-up of every single major mix engineer’s interviews ( and now we have a ton of them in electronic and club music thanks to the explosion in club music and extreme hip hop ) you will always find variations on the same idea for the amazing bass end these guys bring … “ I always find a unique place for the Bass and kick so they can live together without getting in each other's way” .. They actively search out contrast between the kick and bass - that’s made 100% harder with the fundamentals in the same place.
Now here’s an interesting point - Many people claim to be using tuned kicks when they are actually not - for two reasons
1 - Most of the kicks in circulation are completely inaccurate in their labelling
2 - Many ( including nearly everything from Kick 2 ) use tails in motion
The second point is extremely important. Kick 2 is a brilliant device that uses pitch envelopes with breakpoints on it you can control and edit - so many people I know pick out the breakpoints and claim this is the key without realising it’s a point on an envelope that also may have a curve applied.
In these cases, the pitch of the tail is controlled by a vector, not a static integer, so claiming any part of that as a precise value for the duration of the kick is the same as claiming the earth is flat.
Given the control rates of plugins these days, any pitch controlled by a modern envelope or curve will not even be at that pitch for an entire cycle, so these proposed ‘keys’ are not information - they are just garbage.
What’s interesting though is that for this very reason they will often create way less in the way of dangerous phase interactions - Phase problems occur at their apex with 2 ( or more ) perfectly tuned sources being at differing parts of the cycle - this cannot occur if the cycle length is constantly in motion ..
As a result - Kicks with tails in motion can be a killer weapon - Ironically - so many producers who claim to get amazing bass end with Perfectly tonic-tuned kicks are not using tuned kicks at all - they are using kicks with Tails in motion and that’s why it sounds so good ( and because they have put their attention to the bass end extensively )
So with all this is mind - what do we do ?
It’s so simple -
1 - Use your ears and stop using your eyes or perceived flawed theory to produce your bottom end ( e.g. looking at the key labels on audio files or presets ), Every single track is different and unique as a fingerprint so will need a different approach on the bass end ( where all the energy is ).
If I were to suggest you “sniff’ your kick drums first to see if they’d work, this would seem nonsensical.
Don’t place all the importance on your sight either - we only experience sounds with our ears ( and sense of touch way down the bottom ) so concentrate your efforts there and stop discounting kicks and presets because of a key label - you might be discarding the perfect kick !
You can only truly do this when you have a monitoring system capable of replicating the sounds correctly and many monitors fall off very fast under 50HZ due to the unavoidable physics of cabinet design ( all cabinets act as physical high -pass filters ) .. This can be sidestepped with w really good pair of headphones ( as an example - My current Focals go all the way to 5HZ - somewhere I would never be able to go with Monitors )
2 - Try as many kicks as possible and don’t be afraid to swap out halfway through production - We al use conformation bias as we produce so we don’t want to admit we might have chosen the wrong kick at the early stages - it takes minutes to try a change of kick and we must learn to just bite the bullet and do it occasionally. Go for contrast every time .
3 - And this is the big one - play with your kick’s length - make it as short as you possibly can for your given genre and then you will have a ton of room for your bass to rise up going warmth, funk and musical movement ( Remember the kick is a percussive element and bass is for bass ) .. This is the most important piece of advice I can give you and I promise it will make your life better - It will stop the tail of your kick resonating out across large rooms, taking up a ton of room and stealing your basses’ place and will help bring your mix together in a way more pleasing way - Also it stops you having to use hugely long sidechain phases if your are using it creatively, and gives more room for the music and art to come through -
No one will leave a club humming your Kick drum - so don’t let it eat up 40% of your drops’ space.
There’s a reason Hip Hop and Drum and bass use ridiculously short kicks at the moment - it allows the sub bass sounds on these productions to come flying through - Let's face it - these genres sound amazing in clubs ( also check the hip hop kicks on splice - you won’t see any key information on them - hmm - maybe they’re onto something )
We have only in the last 30 years ( and only the last 15 in earnest ) started utilising this area of subsonic as in the past, having the currently fashionable amount of subsonics in your mix / production would not be compatible with Vinyl cutting , the analog equipment or tape storage. It’s human nature for all sorts of bad concepts to bubble up but this whole thing about Keys kicks needs to be called out
It’s dangerous, has no basis in musical, technical or accepted engineering theory, experience or expertise and throws restrictions on your work
Please please please stop doing this and start using your ears again - you will set yourself free
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Doesn't dynamic eq need a some kind of second signal to make it work? Kind of like a sidechain input?
It can use either the input signal as the trigger or an external side chain …
Interesting about sub grouping. I usually group drums minus the kick into a group to glue them and everything else is pretty much separate. Would love a more in depth video about your approach to this! Cheers
I always encourage everyone to embrace exactly what works for them - we are all such individuals it's vital that we find and perfect the workflows that suit us so if you have a method that gets you great results then don't ever shift it due to advice ( and certainly don't ever feel you may be doing something wrong ) ... I did notice people stacking up grouping workflows a few years back and this is very complex to deal with at any stage ( I mean here groups, into groups , then into more groups even before the master bus ) and in those cases, the transients are nearly always facing multiple compression layers with differing attack functions which is dangerous - I know as I used to do it for a while until I learnt that taking that workflow apart and creating simpler routing worked better 100% of the time so I just wanted to address that here .. obviously what you mention here is nothing like that ...
As always a voyage of discovery every day - one of the reasons why after all these years I find all this so exciting
Superb
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James can you elaborate how headphones can physically create sub frequencies when speakers and monitors need to be physically larger why or rather how can headphones seemingly escape this necessity?
Yes - All monitor speakers are in cabinets - Also all speakers have to move backwards and forwards from a central position as they work - this means they push backwards into an enclosed space - This causes physical high pass filtering and the corner frequency of this is determined by the size of the cabinet - Bass porting does help, but also the size of the port is confined by the cabinet size - As you go down in frequency the wavelengths created get longer and the amount of energy increases on the wavefronts - the mixture of all of this is what causes the fall off - the bigger the box, the lower the effect start to occur which is why you need really big boxes for the best subs ... Headphones sidestep this in two way - 1st - the speakers in headphones don't have to move anywhere near as far as they are a few centimeteres from our ear drums so even closed backed systems will be spared some of this choking, but open backed headphones don't exhibit any of this effect so can go as low as the manufacturers can reproduce with the diaphragm materials
@@F9Audio lthanks i will need to research this more to familiarise myself with what you saying, thanks for the time though mate appreciate it.
I'm in the process of putting a video together on phase that will cover how sound works and it will make more sense once you see that - it a very strange thing to visualise as air is invisible
@@F9Audio I will certainly watch it regardless as i love your content and I'm so glad i stumbled upon f9 on fb where i have left more comments haha but in regards to phase and wavelengths i am knowledgeable in these areas just never got my head around the physics of headphones themselves in regard to being physically smaller so if your phase video ends up going into this then happy datys that's a brucey bonus indeed. P.s. what is the best way to contact you or f9 as i wanted to ask a couple of things but don't want to put them here as I'm conscious of keeping these particular posts to topic. Thanks. Day H
Another point about affecting transients, it makes the kick naturally brighter without eq
The noise of LA traffic has the opposite effect, let me assure you....
In key drums rarely made sense to me. Unless you're doing some sort of melody on toms like an 80's song, why even? You think the Beatles thought about the key of their kick? It's supposed to be an atonal instrument.
I'm totally with you and I think a lot of this came about because we 'could' - not 'should' ... I've now been through every single argument that's 'pro' for this so will create a follow up video - Basically all of them are flawed and increase the amount of work needed - sometimes to ridiculous levels ... Also people keep on pointing me to their productions with "keyed' Kicks and it turns out they're using kicks with the tail pitch in motion so i think some real clarity on this issue is needed
@@F9Audio the only reason I would or have ever keyed a drum is for use as a melodic instrument. 808 basslines are fine, but not every drum is that. I almost wish a huge electronic act would break out a real drum kit for an entire project just to break the scene from this habit.
Massively, massively short kicks then?
I nearly re-voiced that a couple of times, but it made me chuckle so much I thought I'd leave it in
Dude, u got opals and treated room, but ..james ...
the information here relies on years of experience in every kind of room and setup imaginable and a lot of it revolves around physics - what’s your angle ?
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