S2E05 – EXAMPLES of Low-End Bass Clashing

The low-end of your song is make-it-or-break-it.

If your low-end sucks, you song will never be at its BEST!

It honestly comes down to wise sound selection to achieve the absolute best sounding mix, but wise sound selection is also luck of the draw.. you cannot perfectly select the right sounds every beat.. you can be mindful of it, but when the right sound selection does happen, you will instantly know it… your beat becomes much easier to mix, the arrangement just works, and the beat is more fun to work with than usual.

In this episode, we build off the previous S2E4 on SHORT-TAILED and LONG-TAILED DRUMS. I wanted to now break down how low-end bass sounds when it clashes.

When you play a kick drum with a long-tail too fast, its tail overlaps on itself, and essentially a bunch of duplicated audio gets played for a short bit until all drums are done playing. (The example was hard to hear in this example, sorry, but there was a difference.)

This instantly messes up your song’s bass, and overall balance of your mix, because the bass will either be WAY louder for a second, or it entirely skews the low-ends phase response.. giving you that horrible wobble sound.

The final example I gave you is when we use different notes on our bass that overlap.

This overlap can happen if the RELEASE is TOO LONG on our BASS’s ADSR when we talk about sound design, or it can be when we change notes on our 808’s.

To prevent bass overlap, we can use Cut Itself.. it’s really easy in FL Studio.. simply right-click any sound in the Channel Rack, and select Cut Itself.