You should eq both the kick and the bassline/basslines.

quote:

Originally posted by Derivative 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.

crazy ass post man...lotta info!
i think i need mastering for dummies that are dummies.

This stuff is hard to grasp when ur learn'n on ur own.

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Do what ever works. As a suggested starting point try:-


Kick
100Hz, relatively low Q (Wide band), 2 db gain
250-350 Hz relatively high Q (Narrow band), 3 db cut
and if you want the kick to be clicky add
1-2Kz relatively low Q (wide band), 3db gain

Bass
250-350Hz relatively high Q (Narrow band) 3 db gain
if the bline isn't a sub bass add
600-1.2KHz relatively high Q, 3 db gain

this won't be prefect as it depends on your sounds and the key your track is in, but it should give you a starting point.

oh gosh... too much of the wrong understandings....

mastering is a complicated process (usually) of making your music sound great on any medium it might be played through. SO you need to give it the right dynamic range and frequency enhancements to do so.

I'm gonna try to water down this stuff as much as I can....

Dithering is a very important process to undergo as you master in the digital realm. You want to have high quality samples and VSTs and synths and everything so that you have high bit rates. These bit rates determine how precise your volume levels are seen by digital encoders and decoders. (ex: an mp3 player is a digital decoder). It's better to have high resultion bit rates prior to your final product, because in mastering you do what is called "dither down" to whatever medium you're mastering for... in most cases, CD, which is only 16bit. SO it would make sense to have everything at 24 bit before mastering. And so the LAST thing you do to your final track is dither it down to 16bit. IT's just as easy as saving it as a 16bit wav file instead of 24 bit which is what it should be before. the 24 bit resolution gives you more precise control over the quality of dynamics in your track. This whole thing works the same with sampling rates. Try to work in something higher than 44.1kHz, such as 48kHz or more, and then "sample down" (also just as simple as saving as) 44.1kHz (CD standard).

As for clipping.... you "clip" when you force a waveform SO LOUD that it's cut off by the digital zero. Digital Zero is at 0dB, in digital realm, and there's to be nothing beyond it. If you try to make things lounder than digital 0db, they will distort. Keep your volume lower for the bassline and kick. But keep in mind, clipping applies to all parts of the frequency spectrum. The best way to go about it, it to compress it, so you keep it's un-distorted form, but lower it's dynamic power, and make it seem louder with gain compensation.
Try EQing out some room for the bassline and kick, to live near the same frequencies but not steal space from one another. Inthe final mix of your track, it's usually not noticeable.

do a search on mastering.... there's loads of info inthese forums.
and also... try www.tranceproduction.com lots of great articles there

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