How do producers like Lex Luger and Southside get the perfect bass levels?

ScorchinBeats said:
IMO this is only viable advice if you already have a name. Nobody want to buy a beat off some nobody that sound like ass.
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Your beat should still sound decent even without a professional engineer's touch. The sound should be in the production to begin with. When people hit me up to mix their production I usually only charge for 2-3 hours of work because it generally doesn't take long to get a good production sounding really really good. Given what I can do in 2-3 hours comes with about a decade of experience behind it, but the point stands. If I took twenty minutes to set the levels the production should still sound "ok." From there it's just a few touches, nothing big. And that's where the producer should draw the line. For me, I'll take it a little further - but then again I was hired to do so and I specialize in doing so. But sure ain't like mixing a song.

The one thing I'll say for cats doing production - spend a little extra time with arrangement and with making it "you." Make a spot for a hook, make an intro, put in drops and one time events, make a spot for the verse, make builds and transitions. Don't think of it as "making a beat" think of it as "inspiring an artist." That's what artist's buy - something that inspires them to go in.

---------- Post added at 09:40 AM ---------- Previous post was at 09:19 AM ----------
SoundHustle said:
I noticed over the years from listening to there stuff that thier bass which is usually pitched 808's, always knocks so hard and loud in the car (atleast from a loudness perspective). If his bass levels are low why does it still sound loud in the mix? Or if his bass levels are just turned up higher why does it not rattle you're car but still sound prevelent in the mix?

So what is that they are doing? I've come to a couple conclusions.

I'm guessing they high pass or by pass a lot of the other sounds so the bass get's isolated and will sound louder. Or maybe they compress the bass? Does compressing you're bass help with this?

I also noticed limiting the ceiling on my bass almost to squash it makes it vibrate less physically but still sounds just as loud.

What do you guys think?
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I realized I didn't even answer the original question. With Sonny's stuff, I do have a couple little tricks I use and things I listen for:

How to Approach Mixing Trap Music


There's no competing bass, so rather than negotiating between the 808 and the bass, it's more about making the kick feel as big as possible. Part of this is about making sure the tone of the kick is present, not just the punch - so the sustain needs to be full, and the overtones need to be present. On the Gorilla Zoe one, I used two instances of a bass enhancer on the kick. I used one in the upper bass range (150hz ish) - and one in the lower range (50hz ish). I wanted to excite the tones of the kick. I don't recommend doing this on every song, it really depends on what's there - and you have to be really careful with enhancers. The other thing is that in the mastering phase, the track was hi-passed. My kick on the track was originally mix was deeper - but it became a question of deep low end vs. maximum punch - and we ultimately all agreed that we wanted the track loud but as punchy as possible.
 
Ok guys, it took me a long time to figure this out, but I realized it while watching an unrelated mixing video on youtube. It's actually not too complicated, but it is a different route from what you might think initially. First of all, it's not an 808 kick, OR a kick with a sine wave. Instead, It's actually a SQUARE bass, with a lowpass filter to round off the edges of the wave. This with a short kick drum, creates the kind of sound you are hearing in Lex Luger's beats. The reason for the square wave is apparently because of the nature of a sine wave. Since sine waves are extremely hard to reproduce in real life, when you try and EQ it, you probably won't get the effect that you're looking for. But with a square wave, with low pass filter, you get that fuller sound that you hear... I think.

Cheers,
MacTurner
 
It seems to me that a good trap bass that sounds both loud and punchy like Lex's bass depends on what bass-drum sound you use. A regular sine wave bass works well for some songs, but is too low and smooth for most trap songs. In other words, Lex's bass tends to be a bit "raspy." It has enough low end to shake a car with descent speakers, but it is raspy enough to be heard at reasonably lower volumes (especially noticable on earbuds which lack much bass response). Punch + Rasp = Win.

A quick and dirty way to get punchy bass is to layer a quick-attack-quick-release bass drum kick right above a long-sustain 808 bass drum. EQ the kick so that it's bass peaks around 110hz to 150hz. Wherever you raised the dB on that Kick, lower the corresponding frequency on the 808 bass drum. This way, the kick can occupy its own low frequency, and the volume-hungry 808 bass can have the surrounding lower frequencies. (An alternative to this is to use side-chaining so that the volume of the 808 bass ducks down very quickly whenever the kick drum hits)

Ok, so to make the bass "raspy" simply means to give it a bit of a distorted sound, which can be accomplished in a number of ways. HardCore or AmpliTube can be effective plugins for distorting the sound with a bit of experimentation. Another thing to try is to just turn up the bass and do some hard limiting to push it back down, thus making the volume consistently loud. These are methods that I use, I have no clue what the "pros" do. As I stated earlier, it depends on what drum kits and drum sounds are already at your disposal. Hope this helps!
 
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Здравствуйте! подскажите куда лучше всего вкладовать сейчас деньги? банки естественно не предлогать ! толька интернет проекты с высоким депом, пишите в личку.
 
Must be the life to have professional engineers taking care of everything else. I know that a johnny juliano mixing tutorial used the metronome as a reference for track levels and then he had enough headroom for the 808's to lay default, didn't even have to turn it up. ;)
 
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