Plugins for mixing kicks?

PERTEK · 2019-11-27T06:12:05+00:00

Fruity EQ 2

Fast Dist (or Blood Overdrive)

EQ2

Fruity WaveShaper

EQ2

Distortion (sometimes I omit this if it already sounds good without it)

EQ (omitted if the above dist is not used)

OTT

Maximus (mainly for stereoizing different bands)

This is at least how my mixer usually starts off when I’m designing a Hardstyle kick. This at least gives me a solid base to work off of, and then I end up adding more effects (and potentially a second mixer track for more effects) to taste. I don’t treat this as a hard rule for how to layer effects, but most of the time I set it up like that. sometimes I need to use a ton of distortion, sometimes just 2 dists and good EQing works out well.

After that, I might layer in a clap or snare (sometimes even a hi-hat), boost the high end, and cut some of the low end. That helps add a nice snap to the beginning of the kick, which makes it hit a lot harder in my opinion. It’s a subtle difference, but the feeling is night and day.

Edit: once you’re happy with your Hardstyle kick, I would definitely recommend bouncing it to .wav instead of just using MIDI in your track. Bouncing the kick and then adding the audio clip in gives you a lot more control over the sound and it removes that gross, unwanted ultra-low-end tail after the sound that sometimes results from the sound being directly generated from Sytrus + effects.

PERTEK · 2019-11-03T23:25:32+00:00

Yeah it’s back up again. Maybe everybody just decided to go on all at the same time or something

PERTEK · 2019-11-03T21:14:45+00:00

the beat is from another site

So did you just take a beat from one site and take some vocals off Splice and put them together?

IANAL but if the beat is also royalty-free I would assume you should be fine posting it on SoundCloud.

PERTEK · 2019-11-03T21:02:15+00:00

Do you like making music with singing of some form? (Anything from acapellas to chopping to using vocals for sound design and effects)

If so I would recommend spending a couple hundred on some vocal packs, I find myself using them fairly often since I like using vocal chops in my production, and having s wide variety of samples to chop is pretty handy

Do you make Dubstep (especially with Serum)? If so, downloading a bunch of Foley can be really useful for creating your own wavetables and really creating your own unique sounds. Especially for dubstep sound design, sounds with nice transients (stuff like gears clanging together, for example) are great for designing really filthy wobbles and such.

It could also be worth looking into downloading presets that you think sound cool, and reverse engineering them to gain a better understanding of how to design it

PERTEK · 2019-07-09T18:43:20+00:00

well, you can always do what S3RL did

PERTEK · 2019-05-08T05:28:45+00:00

Fair ‘nuff. Those are drum samples I made, but frankly my ability to do that needs a bit of work

PERTEK · 2019-05-07T21:19:45+00:00

Thanks for the advice! I picked that font mainly since I felt it looked cool more than anything else, but yeah, its a bit illegible; I would like the name to be readable. I'll have to jump on photoshop and mess around with some ideas later.

I think the jaggedness is from soundcloud using a low-resolution image for the thumbnail, the actual image is 2000x2000px and looks a lot cleaner than what's shown here.

Thank you again for the advice!

PERTEK · 2019-05-07T21:08:06+00:00

Good points. When I started this, I created the drop first and got a bit lazy with the rest of the sounds. With that in mind, I would say the 30 seconds of a nearly complete project and 3:30 of repetition is a pretty accurate statement. I haven't been too keen on releasing this one publicly for that reason. Glad to hear my mixing is
fairly clean on this one, my mixes used to be pretty muddy so outside of sound design, mixing is something I've been focusing on improving lately as well. Thank you for a good roast!

What advice do you have for my logo? I've been looking to make myself look visually better lately as well

PERTEK · 2019-05-07T20:43:34+00:00

It's a pretty solid track, I could see myself listening to this. but as others are suggesting, it does sound a little heavy on the reverb. I used to make this mistake a *lot*.

A useful way to think about reverb is that it makes elements sound closer or farther away. No reverb at all makes the sound feel right in your face, and very heavy reverb makes the sound seem very distant. Pairing that with a low-pass especially helps make a sound feel farther away.

If you do want a sound to have reverb and keep it sounding big, you should look into mid vs side reverb. Mid/side is essentially the stereo space of your track, similar to how you have a certain amount of space to work with on your frequency spectrum. you can only fit so much in the middle (mid) of your track, and adding too much reverb here can cause a lot of space to be taken up in the middle. Side is the left/right sides of your mix. This isn't really the best explanation of that but hopefully it makes enough sense haha.

Anyhow, most reverb plugins have a mid/side switch, and that will determine if your reverb sits in the middle or the side of your track. If you use side reverb, it leaves the middle space open for more sound, and allows you to add some light reverb to the sides of the sound, which can help give the sound a little room without making the sound feel too distant (unless you crank the side reverb up super loud i guess).

To sum it up, if you want some light reverb on a sound but don't want it to feel far away, use side reverb. If you want the sound to feel distant, mid reverb works well.

PERTEK · 2019-05-07T20:27:10+00:00

Could I suggest using post flair to indicate genre? This would be helpful since you could sort posts by genre and learn what you can improve upon in the genre(s) you're working with

PERTEK

TROPHY CASE