Here are 2 masters of the same track. Listen to how much louder I can get the master that has the perfect low end mix. To tell the story of how to get the perfect low end, we need 3 chapters.
First, I'll show you how to get that perfect low end, but then I'll show you why it's almost impossible to do that in a real track. And then last, I'll show you how to take this knowledge and use it to make your own mixes a lot better. So to get the perfect low end, I'm gonna start with kick and a bass.
First, I'm gonna trace the shape of the kick in this volume shaper plugin. Then I'll copy that shape to the bass track. Then I'll just invert that and now the bass has the exact opposite shape of the kick.
But let's look at the kick and bass together. This is an oscilloscope that shows volume over time and it's showing a big problem here. We have the same kick playing and the same bass playing every time.
So why are the sound waves constantly changing? To answer that, we gotta go into the synth where the bass sound is coming from. The sound you're hearing is this sine wave.
All a synthesizer does is loop this wave over and over again at different speeds. You can see that wave looping over and over again in the oscilloscope. The thing is you have control over where you wanna start this loop.
You can start it at the beginning of the wave or the middle or towards the end. You can also randomize it. So every time you hit a new note, it's starting in a different place.
That makes the bass hard to control 'cause it's unpredictable. So we want to turn that randomness off and start it at the same place every time. So now when I play the kick and bass together, the sound wave doesn't move around.
But you can see there's another problem happening here. You see that dip in volume right there - that's gonna make the low end sound really uneven. So let's look at the kick and bass as separate colors.
If we look at where the problem areas were and then look at the same points over here, you can see what's going on. The problems are happening when the kick and bass are opposite of each other. This is what people mean when they say "out of phase" If you have a basic sound wave, then you duplicate that same sound wave, you've just doubled the volume.
But if I change the phase of the second sound wave here, it slowly turns down the volume until the two waves cancel each other out completely. There's 2 sounds playing right now, but I can't hear anything and that's exactly how noise canceling headphones work. These tiny little AirPods have microphones in them so it listens to what's around you.
Then there's a little computer inside that takes that sound, flips the phase, and then plays the new sound into your ears. So it cancels out the outside noise. It's wild to think that when you're listening to these, music isn't the only thing playing in your ears, it's also blasting outside sound into your ears.
It's just that the phase is flipped so you can't hear it. Anyway, we have to move the starting point of the wave around to try to fix it. Look what happens.
We have this perfect sausage looking low end. The kick and bass are mixed together so perfectly that it looks like one cohesive sound, but now we gotta talk about why this perfect low end is almost impossible to get in a normal song. Watch what happens when I change the pitch of the bass.
We get all the same problems again. To understand this, we gotta understand pitch. Remember, all a synthesizer does is repeat the same wave over and over again.
How many times that wave repeats per second is what determines the pitch. This sound is a low C note, so it's repeating 32 times per second. Then as we increase the pitch, you can see the cycles per second is increasing and that's what gives you a higher pitch.
And high pitch sounds can have hundreds or thousands of cycles per second. That's what the measurement hertz is. Hertz means cycles per second.
That's another thing that's wild to think about. When you listen to music, you're listening to millions of different sound waves that are repeating at different speeds and have different volumes and shapes and all those factors combine to make music. Anyway, this bass is playing that low C, which means it's cycling around 32 times per second.
When we change the pitch, the speed has changed, which messes up that alignment between the kick and bass. And it's not just the pitch of the note that matters, it's the rhythm too. I'll go back to that low C note, but if I just slightly move these notes off the grid, you can see that messes up the alignment too.
So any song where you have multiple different bass notes playing at different rhythms, which is pretty much any song, it's almost impossible to get a perfect low end. You'd literally have to go in and change the phase for each individual bass note and then change the pitch of the kick each time to match up with that. If you look at a kick, you can see lots of cycles in the very beginning and then it slows down into the classic sine shape.
So you'd have to perfectly match up the pitch of this part with the phase of your bass every time the bass plays a new note. So technically it's not impossible, you just have to be an absolute psychopath to do that. So why did I just go into all that detail?
Well, now I can show you how to use this knowledge to make your own mixes better. Every sound in this track is from my new serum preset pack. Vol.
1 was used in some huge tracks like 0800 Heaven by Joel Corry. You can try the new pack for free at www. bigzstudios.
com. I also have a really in-depth mixing course on there that you can try for free too. Anyway, back to this track.
We're never gonna spend the time to make the perfect low end, but we can get decently close. Here's what we can do. So I'm gonna take the kick and I'm just gonna outline the shape of it now.
I'll copy that over to my bass track and then I'll just flip it. Now this is our bass sound. I know for sure I want the bass to start from the same place every time.
So I'm gonna take that random phase knob and turn it all the way down, and now I'll move the starting point of the phase to the point where it looks the least messed up. I say that 'cause it's always gonna be a little messed up when the pitch and rhythm of the bass are constantly changing. You could be an absolute psychopath and change the pitch of the kick and the phase of the bass for every single note.
But let's be real - music has never been about being perfect anyway. Thanks for watching. Peace.
