Mix Kick and Bass LIKE A PRO!

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Today I am showing you how to use reference tracks to mix kick and bass like a pro. This can help get your low end as big, clean and punchy as your favourite pro producers. I'm using Ableton Live, but all of these techniques and principles are applicable to Logic, Cubase, Reason, FL Studio, Studio One, Bitwig and all other popular DAW's.

ᐅᐅᐅGEAR I USEᐊᐊᐊ
STUDIO SOFTWARE ●

● STUDIO HARDWARE ●

● DJ EQUIPMENT ●

● CAMERA EQUIPMENT ●

Contents:
00:00​​​ Intro
01:10​​​ Level The Kick
03:10​​​ Sidechain The Bass
03:46​​​ Reference Track Selection
05:17​​​ Analyse The Reference
08:31​​​ Where To Reference
10:46​​​ Process Kick & Bass
12:46​​​ Stock Plugin Alternatives
15:31​​​ Template Routing

I am a DJ, producer and Engineer living in Berlin. Music That I have made for myself and my clients has been released on labels including Toolroom, Spinnin, Defected, Mother Recordings, Saved, Realm, Solotoko and many more.

Whether you make tracks like Fisher, Solardo, Chris Lake, Camelphat, Artbat, UMEK, Solomun, Purple Disco Machine, Claptone or David Penn you can learn something from this video. And make sure you check out my other music production tutorials.

[jamalyannicguzmansierra]

Wow that's a golden nugget! Thx, helped me a lot..!
So you start with the kick&bass after the first gain staging process, to define de fundamental balance of your track? After that you go ahead and use your method with SPAN(which is also a golden nugget)?

[treemusicprod]

I feel like I learned more from these 15 minutes than I did in the past year ... fantastic content right here!

[gustavopompeo]

This technique of isolating the elements to know the volume of each one with the Spectrum is amazing... thank you very much for sharing your knowledge!

[gonzo]

Got yesterday super confuse i saw a video where a ”pro producer with signed lot of labels” said u should never group ur kick and bass. But then i have seen and tried myself this glue trick and i think it sounds better. When listening ur tracks i like the energy and the vibe. Cool example track that bassline gives me Samu.L have it like that groove similarity 😅

[rommynine]

I Really like and enjoy Dilby’s tutorials, even I don’t work in Ableton. Especially this intro tracks. You doing a great job man. Thank you.

[djstevyvee]

Next video, mixing and dj read mastering. Thanks and thumbs up as always

[JimJuno]

Mixing Theory is BY FAR the hardest thing in my music production to apply correctly often makes things worse. The biggest problem I run into is that it sounds (to my audio skill level) perfect in my headphones (BD 770 pro X) but when I play it on my Yamaha monitors it sounds too loud on bass. The same thing happens when I play in my car. The journey continues which I consider part of the fun. Your YT quality content helps but these things take time to get right.

[jpmoosic]

Hey, as an additional tip with setting the kick volume, remember, if it has a click on it that will influence the peak. So you may want to filter (low pass) the kick first, before setting the level, to be sure that the peak of the sub is setting your reference point and not the additional influence of the click. You'd only need to do this once if you already have a kick sound you're happy with. It's not super important but can become an issue if you're working with a loud click or especially one with a harsh transient in the high end. Alternatively, another way to do this without filtering at all is to use a spectrum analyser to level the kick instead, where you look for the sub of the kick to hit a pre-defined range (from the visual)

[TonyChurch]

Absolute gem! Do you have a video on mixing mids and high end?

[dandemanseyonara]

Why am I only discovering your channel now?? Super helpful, thanks a lot for this! :)

[djmono]

Yeah Dilby! Some great tips learnt through experience.

[abdulj]

Nice Tutorial, great help for beginners

[LeftCat]

wow. this is a great approach. many thanks!

[aleyummusic]

I think you mention the importance of sample selection, this is probably the first thing I always do, instead of trying to make the kick and sub work, they should already be close to working. Also sidechaining can get complex with different kicks and sub patterns. Would love to see a deep dive on this

[markevansdj]

Another fantastic tutorial. I’ve paid thousands on music production courses and none of which have explained the process as well as this.

Question: do you check for phase cancellation in kick and bass? How do you detect and fix if so?

[de_coco]

Could you PLEASE, do a tutorial of how twocolors does their classic slap bass baseline. They just do it so well so if you could go through how they achieve that sound, that would be amazing.

[Robsessive]

I realised that I used Saturator in a wrong way. Thanks for this Video, all tutorials on your channel were very useful during producing my tracks. Thank you and take care !

[danmar]

Ok, the magic seems to be referencing and metering comparison... Never done that before... But i am not sure if it will solve my issue since i have this topic with every track... In the end the low end is a little bit too loud... I think i will need to start comparing more 😅🍻🐣

[GeryRydell]

When you analyze a "reference track" please remember that this track is already mastered, meaning that maybe compression, multiband compression and limiting occurs. So the relation between bass and kick might be a nice starting point but after limiting etc, this relation changes. This is always my biggest struggle with A/B comparison. Because I compare a mastered with an unmastered track. In theory, if your kick is the loudest element in your mix and you give it a 3 db gain reduction on a limiter, the difference between the bassline and the kick, after limiting, surely isnt 3db anymore.

[MODENESS]

i dont have this red lines on my plugin by the way - it's something in settings