Uhhh... this thread has turned into a complete trainwreck!
What none of you picked up on is that the guy is working on
mainly dance and
some top 40 stuff. The point is, in dance music, you're not tracking a live drumset and there is no live electric bass. We're not talking about tracking/recording a band! We're mainly talking about electronically generated sounds and samples.
@ doncol07: Kicks in dance tracks (I'm assuming house, trance, techno, fuckno, whatever) are not just one sample or instrument. They're in fact composed of several layers, which
at the sound design stage are EQ'd, filtered, distorted, compressed, and otherwise mangled to fuck. The key here is knowing and picking what sounds/samples to layer in order to achieve the composite whole. They each have to add a certain element to the overall sound, and the whole works needs to be processed so that it doesn't sound like a bunch of unrelated samples tacked onto one another. You may need to use
a TR-909 sample for the bottom end and punch, maybe use a higher pitched sinewave out of a synth controlled by a pitch envelope to do the "chirp", maybe add an acoustic kick either from a sample or even cut from a drum solo (in which case it will invariably have other hits such as hi-hat or snare or both) along with it to add some midrange definition and "snap". All these elements will require low-pass filtering, high-pass filtering, EQ, distortion, compression... what you apply to what will depend on what it does for the overall "kick" sound. Then you'll need to compress the overall mess to make them "gel" with each other. It's possible that you'll need to mess with the envelopes of the individual samples too, maybe to shorten them, or sometimes give them slightly longer attacks as it's possible you'll need their body but not the attack. Again, having a good idea of what you want your finished "kick" to sound like to begin with is important so you can choose the constituent elements properly. Once you get the sound sorted, then you bounce the whole mess, load it in a sampler, and off you go.
Once the
sound design stage is over, you should require very little EQ and perhaps some gentle compression, to make it sit in the mix. If you need to apply drastic processing
at the mixing stage then you didn't do it right at the
sound design stage.
My original contention was that you found yourself applying "boost by about 4-6 dB around 80 Hz and 4-6 dB around 11-12 Khz" on your
overall mix. And I stand by my statement that if you need to apply that much EQ on your
stereo mix then there was something wrong with the mix itself. If the individual sounds themselves are programmed/recorded/processed properly during the mixing stage, your stereo mix shouldn't need that much EQ, if any.
"With the bass line, as the notes change, does the frequency change, or is there a difference between pitch frequency and EQ frequency?"
This is a good point, and you're definitely onto something here. Again we're talking about electronically synthesized "bass" not the electric bass guitar variety. The generic "cut some here, boost some there" that might be good starting points for electric bass don't mean a thing when it comes to synthesized sounds, as these are completely different animals and you can have infinite varieties of sound that can be thought of as "bass" in this context. You're on the right track when you think that choosing the right notes to begin with is a good start. The bass parts in most electronic music are relatively simple, sometimes too simple if you ask me (from pure listening point of view), but then again, on the dancefloor with a bunch of drunk, high and tripping mofos simple, repetitive, pumping and punching is usually just the ticket. So, most basslines consist of what 2-3 notes most of the time? In any case, it's rare that a bassline will range more than an octave. Come to think of it, it's rare that it will range more than a 5th. So, with these kinds of constraints, it's easy to have a (sub)bassline that just roams somewhere around 60-80Hz. (For those that tend to not work much with dance music, anything below 100Hz is pretty much considered subbass). In fact, some of this simplicity is
because you want your bassline to occupy limited amount of space in the frequency domain, which then makes the whole mixing thing much simpler. So, let's take this further. If you're using say a TR-909 as the main "meat" of your kick, it usually hits around 40-50Hz. This gives you enough room for your bassline to play notes around 60-90Hz range (about A2-F#3). For the bass sound itself, it's a commont trick (just like with the kick) to separate it into 2 or 3 parts. For the sub 100Hz range you might just use a simple sinewave, which will give the deep bass sound. Or you may use a heavily low-passed saw, square or triangle wave. Whatever. You will want to low pass this down to probably just below 100Hz. (Obviouly the filtering doesn't apply to the sinewave, as there isn't anything to filter). Now you can have another more complex richer sound playing an octave above that. Which if your subbass was playing around 60-80Hz will mean that this part has fundamental frequency around 120-160Hz. You have effectively created a hole around 100Hz where you can have the lower end of a snare (again this is electronic, composite mess most of the time), or some higher part of the kick. Furthermore, separating the subbass from the "midrange" part of the bass sound allows you more freedom with processing and FX. If you wanted to apply things such as chorus, flanging, phasing, reverb, delay, whatever, it's better to apply these to higher frequencies as to prevent things from muddying up.
These are general ideas. Nothing that I've said is a "rule of thumb", and can obviously be broken. More than the frequency ranges and whatnot, I want to convey to you the idea that a lot of times mixing begins at the sound design stage with electronic music. In this sense it's similar to picking the right mic, the right pre, etc, when tracking more conventional instruments. So if you pay very close attention to your sounds when designing them, and couple them with the proper arrangement, your life during mixing will be a lot easier.
To end this, I'd like to guide you to two forums that I've personally found very helpful and beneficial to people that are mostly doing electronic music.
http://forum.isratrance.com/index.php
As the name suggests, this is a forum dedicated to trance. There are a couple of threads that you might find specially useful: The Mother of all Kicks, and The Mother of all Bass.
If you're interested in breaks oriented stuff, head on over to
http://www.dogsonacid.com/ It is a DnB oriented forum, with a very active and helpful community. Even if you don't do DnB, you'll still find a lot of useful advice.
