Sublimator wrote:You have to decide where to put the emphasis: on the bassline or the bass of the kick. You cant have a big bassline with big 909 kick mushing into that
This is true. Boomy bassline combined with long boomy kick results in too much low end energy especially in techno music where the bassline can be quite busy. Recently read about this topic on some forum somewhere. Some guy suggested shortening the kick decay or/and highpassing it to avoid the problem. Subtle sidechainig can help also i guess.
this is exactly why i said early that this is not a simple issue.
so many people have said things in this thread, and all of it is relevant,
(i think some people haven't read through the whole thread and come in late and simply reiterated what has already been said)
there is no magic solution, because no -one is making identical tunes here, we use different notes, different note arrangements, different amounts of attack, decay, sustain,release on our bass and our kick, different waveforms, different amounts of harmonics etc etc etc.....
i just dont accept that anyone can come in here and say outright 'you shouldnt do this or that'
ive made tunes with big kicks and big basslines that work, its not easy to get right, but it can be done if thats what you want to achieve.
you have to experiment, and not assume because you read somewhere that you should sidechain or whatever, that that will work on the particular tune you are working on. i approach every single tune differently, and dont have some default set-up, otherwise all my tunes would sound the same.
there are no rules other than ' if it sounds good, it is good, if it sounds sh!t it is sh!t.
if you think you know all about sub bass, try going to to a Tibetan Monk concert, and listen to the crazy sh!t that is going on there. Minimal techno doesnt even scratch the surface, and mostly doesnt have any sub bass in it at all.
or how about the Kodo drummers ? theres all kinds of mad low frequencies going on, some below 20 Hz, most of us dont have speakers that can even reproduce most of the fundamental frequencies of those drums clashing around and banging in to each other.
you know all i'm trying to say is - come on guys lets all explore the wacky world of very low frequencies
edit ;; i'm only saying all this because i think low frequencies are sometimes neglected in our music, the term bassline in itself is a give away, theres so much more that can be done in this part of the spectrum than your predictable bassline with short decay kick.
even a piano goes down to 27 Hz for gods sake.