Ok, first of all....i would like to say that i "searched" this topic...before people start yelling at me like people on this forum only know.

anyways, ive been doing research on mastering...ie. dithiering and what not and im finding it hard to understand what exactly does what and why. I use wavelab for my mastering and i learned about the dithering tool: UV22HR and not sure how it works.

http://r-audio.hyperlink.cz/image/2...1658_UV22HR.png

I've read up on it, i play with it, render it....and nothing seems to happen...( noticably anyways). I click to normal, then 24bit. Is there something else i can use for wavelab that would better the SQ in any way....

And another question is about clipping. Ive researched and it states clipping is when the bass threshold exceeds 0db, something or other. With reason 2.0, when ever im mak'n a bassline...it always seems to get muffled when i put a kick with a layed bassline on it...what is the best way to get nice and clean basslines??? I am forced to make basslines inbetween the beat in order to keep it clean, but that limits me.

Any help on these topics would be much appreciated.
thanx guys

___________________
MYSPACE HOMEPAGE

www.conradrogers.com

That Reason-question - what kind of bassline you're trying to do clean? A rolling or an offbeat?

An offbeat-bassline isn't that hard to get clean.

When it comes to rolling it can become a bit hard to get it sound clean if your bassnotes sounds on the same time as the kick. I hope you understand what I mean.

The way I do, is to eq my kick and my bassline (rolling) different. On the kick I boost somewhere between 30 and 125 hz and cutting somewhere between 250 hz and 1k. Then I do the opposite on the bassline. Works pretty good for me.
Then I make an offbeat bass and do the same eq-settings like on the kick.

Then I mixing the three sounds together.

Last edited by Danne__85 on Mar-04-2005 at 16:56

i know exactly what u mean...but how are u changing the hertz of the bline??? i think thats exactly my problem with rolling blines...
I tends to sound sloppy

___________________
MYSPACE HOMEPAGE

www.conradrogers.com

quote:

Originally posted by Mr Rogers i know exactly what u mean...but how are u changing the hertz of the bline??? i think thats exactly my problem with rolling blines... I tends to sound sloppy

In reason it would be with the paramatic equalizer.

___________________
My Soundcloud

quote:

That Reason-question - what kind of bassline you're trying to do clean? A rolling or an offbeat? An offbeat-bassline isn't that hard to get clean. When it comes to rolling it can become a bit hard to get it sound clean if your bassnotes sounds on the same time as the kick. I hope you understand what I mean.

its not that hard. if it starts to sound blurry with a rolling bassline its because the decay and release envelope on the bass synth is too high. in which case drop the decay a bit to stop the notes bleeding into each other so much leaving only this sub bass sludge.

with regards to the kick and bass note hitting together. duck the velocity of the bass note. with sidechains you can do this automatically but its not much harder to just manually lower the note velocity of the bass sound.

if your bass and kick are EQed properly there should be enough room for the kick to punch through a frequency notch in the bassline or vice versa. if both your kick and bass are sharing large amounts of the same frequencies you are doing something wrong.

also, force your bass synth to play monophonic. on most synths you can do this on the synth control surface (i think in hydra you can and some others. in vanguard just set the poly to 1). if you cant record it separately and disable polyphony in your host. that will stop the note when the next one triggers since the synth is forced to only play one note at a time.

both of those together with good EQ and compression and a touch of filtering - you will never have problems with rolling basslines.

wow...i got some learning to do.
thanx

___________________
MYSPACE HOMEPAGE

www.conradrogers.com

quote:

Originally posted by Mr Rogers i know exactly what u mean...but how are u changing the hertz of the bline??? i think thats exactly my problem with rolling blines... I tends to sound sloppy

Like Rob said - use the Parametric equalizer.

and where would i find this equalizer?

___________________
MYSPACE HOMEPAGE

www.conradrogers.com

Look in the Create-menu and look for "PEQ-2 Two Band Parametric EQ". That's the equilizer.

sweet...thanx guys

___________________
MYSPACE HOMEPAGE

www.conradrogers.com

Heyas,

You've touched on a couple of topics here. I'll just pick two for now.

I'm pretty sure I'm going to go deeper than you want, but I hope that the information I present is useful.

1. Bassline muddiness. there are a couple of solutions to this. One which has been touched on already is making sure that both sounds do no occupy the same frequency range. This can be fixed with EQ, or another idea is to use two basslines. One sub bass under the kick, and a higher frequency part above he kick. Same idea, but will usually sound "Fuller".

Another trick I use often, bu I don't know if it's possible in Reason is to have a sidechained compressor on the bass line. You set up the compressor with a side chain input from the kick. This means that every time the kick hits he Bline gets ducked in volume behind the kick. If you get the settings right and with the right sounds you don't actually realise it's happening due to frequency masking. The net result is the two never collide in the same part of the spectrum at the same time which produces clarity. If you can set this up then try it, if not then simply use EQ for now. I usually use both EQ and compresson and careful sound selection to get this to work. this little problem is one of he blacker arts of getting mixes to sound great..

2. Dither. Oh my, this is a giant can of worms. The VERY short synopsis of this is:- When ever you are reducing bit depth you should dither. ie if you go from 24 bits to 16 bits 9ie cutting a cd) then you should apply dither to 16 bits. Dithering a 24 bit signal to 16 bits but not reducing the bit depth will simply force you to have a 16 bit signal contained in a 24 bit file. Dithering once applied cannot be taken of so be careful.

Now what does it do? Well, basically through some clever maths and some knowledge abou how the human ear works it actually introduces carefully calculated DISTORTION into your signal. this produces the perceived effect of increasing the dynamic range to greater than is actually possible wih the number of bits that you have. U22 dither get's its name from the fact that Apogee claim that it gives the equivalent of 22bits of dynamic range from a 16 bit input.

Unless you have great ears and an awesome listening environment you probbably won't hear much of a difference.

So why dither? If you don't dither when you drop bit depth you simply chop off the low order bits. ie from 24 bit to 16 bit you simply ignore the lowest 8 bits. this can produce unpleasent audiable artifacts due to truncation.

if I haven't los you by this point I suggest you read this EXCELLENT paper by Nikka Aldredge. He really knows his stuff..

http://www.cadenzarecording.com/dither.html


Cheers,


Rob

PS. Good gear helps, but Great Talent & poor gear is better than Poor talent and great gear.

thank you for the info...
I tried to eq the kick but it looses the power when you cut the high freqs.

___________________
My tracks:
The Darkone - You Come With Power
The Darkone - Falling Stars Part 1 (Original Mix) *NEW*