Made this song, and it would be helpful with some feedback. I have to different mixes on my soundcloud page. I dont have the best acoustics in my room at the moment, so the first one was a bit to bass heavy.
So please, give me the good, the bad and the ugly!
due to my crappy connection I can't really listen to more than the first 40 seconds of both your versions, but I think that's enough for me to at least give you a few ideas. First of all, the rythm and sound in itself is good, nothing to say there except for "this is nice and minimal".
But, you could do your bass a little differently and probably get a better overall sound of the production. From what I gather the "C6 Techno M" version is about the same as the "C6 Techno" but without some sort of compression on the kick, yes no? Anyhoo, if you want a more conventional techno sound of your production you can't really solve it on that track with just compression.
The bass synth is very low in frequency and does not have much harmonics, and also I think it "bleeds" into the kick. The first step to go about this would be to make sure that the bass is absolutely silent when the kick plays. Either do it with quantisising, with an envelope, gate or sidechain. Also make sure that there are a few milliseconds of silence between the two, this makes for a much more swingy sound.
Also, either shift the bass up an octave or so, because the kick carries so much low freq energy that the track will have plenty of oomph even without the bass. If you still want the bass that low, I would consider adding some harmonics to it, or just higher frequency sounds syncronised with the bassline.
You can do this by either copying the bass clip and playing it with a synth at the same time, layering the two and mixing to your satisfaction. Or you could add overdrive and distortion to the bass and then lowpass it to your likeing (this technique can work really well, but also sound absolute shite). The most complex - and possibly best way of doing it - is that you use the synth itself to create the harmonics. Either add a saw-wave and lowpass, or if you want to get nitty gritty and have the resources, use a ringmodulated sine-wave.
Also, for the love of God, make sure that the kick and bass plays in harmony. Perhaps I am mistaken, but is that an unmodified 808 kick that you are using? If so, it translates to the note of G. If your bass plays in keys that aren't directly in harmony with G (these things gets emphasised in the low frequency domain) it will sound very bad.
Thanks for your feedback. Ill try to make a new version soon.
On the C6 techno M, i just put the kick on a seperate track, instead of bus compression together with the perc tracks. And i removed some bass with eq, to remove some of the boomy bass. So this is the latest one.
On the bass riff, ill try to remove some of the bottom end with eq, and bring in some more high frequency content. My idea was to have a clean sub bass, but ill try out different things.
I didnt use an 808 for kick. Its the Waldorf Attack plugin. (My favorite drum synthesis!!) I did use the same frequency as the fundamental pitch, but after applying pitch envelope, i guess the frequency has shifted abit off. Tried using the cubase "tuner" plug in to analyze the key of the kick, but it didnt work. So gonna work some more with that one.
