Drum loops and bass mixing

R

renegade77

New member
Hi all!
I have a drum loop which is pretty cool, but also pretty unchoppable. Please dont get hang-up in why its unchoppable becuase my question is this: How do you go about to mix a track which has a drum loop (contains everything from lowend to highend) together with the bass? Is this possible? Any techniques which works better than others?

I was thinking about filtering out the lowend and sidechain it to the bass. Other techniques out there?

Would appreciate to get some insight to this.
 
I would split the drumloop into 3 separate tracks and eq them individually into a Low, mid, and high. Process them individually, and them mix them back into each other. This would allow you to sidechain the bass to the low material of the drum loop and not the high stuff.
 
Thank you for your reply!
Where would you define whats low,mid and high? I guess it depends on the loop and the sample itselfs being used in the loop, but would you place snare in low? Or would you do a highcut before lets say 180-200ish to get the snare out? And how far up would you take the mid?
Sorry if I sound like a retard, but I am in a way at this point..
 
It depends on if you want the bass to duck the snare a little too. cuttoff at 180-200 is a good place to start for the low. I would say to use your ears to decide where you want to make the cuts. Your never gonna completely isolate the individual parts, but processing the different cuts individually will make the whole sound more full, you would just want to try to accentuate the main element in the different cuts (ie kick/low, snare/mid, hhats/high). I actually used this method in the song in my signature, I just made 2 cuts rather than 3.
 
A Compressor with a sidechain filter will get the job done as well if you've got one. I have no idea which daw you are using so can't say for sure.

It's sound advice to split your loop up into those bands and do some tweaking if you need to!
 
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However there is a potential problem you should be aware of.

If you simply split your loop up into 3 bands like that, more than likely there will be some leftovers from the sounds you are trying to isolate from one another in the split version, particularly the mid since its most likely contains a little bit of lows and highs too, so when you mix that back you might be boosting some of the things you don't want.
 
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Great ideas above.
I'd like to add that times like these it can be good to use an external sidechain triggerer not routed to the master, and trigger it at the same time as you hear the kick, since you have a lot of other peaks going on in the lowend except the kick, such as snares.
 
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