Sometimes your kick drum and bass guitar fight each other for space in the mix. It’s natural since both instruments have a dominant presence in the low frequencies. But with all that masking going on, you can easily lose the punch and clarity of both instruments, which is no good.
Carving Complimentery Holes
Mixing is all about compromise, and EQ in particular is all about cutting out what’s getting in the way. So when it comes to kick drum and bass guitar, try to cut/boost opposite frequencies and watch things clear up nicely. Let’s take a look!
Comments
The opposite EQ curve is good too. That is, boost kick up and bass down around 50-60Hz, and kick down and bass up around 100-120Hz. All depends on the recorded tone, and which one you want to feature in that low frequency, chest pounding range.
Thanks Graham, this just helped to take me out of a muddy kick/bass mix issue on a track i’m working on !
Hey Graham, love your website! I got rethink vocals and its fantastic, your videos have given me alot of confidence and helped me find direction, thank you for that. Just one question about todays video…should we really be boosting the bass guitar at 60Hz,would’nt that cover up the kick?!
Stu, it really just depends on your bass and kick. Both instruments can take up information around 60 hz, so you have to choose which instrument gets to shine where. It can’t be both.
Ah, now I understand, Thanks for clearing that up for me! keep up the good work
Just what I needed!
If I’m cutting out some noise at 60hz on the kick, would it be wrong to come back later and boost that same frequency with a signal generator like mentioned earlier in one of your tips?
The exact frequencies aren’t what matter as much as the fact that you do the opposite for the bass guitar. In this example I cut 60hz. It might be 100 hz another time.
Graham, what a great site, that 500hz thing on loops……….. it just works, haha!
What if I have 3 kicks? I already have these kicks eq’ed to make one kick, one has the bottom end took out for example.
Should I send bus these to a separate mono aux, apply eq (to all 3), and then bus that to the drum aux?
Thanks for your time, excellent stuff!
If I had three kick drum tracks, I would route them all to one mono Aux Track and treat THAT track as my only kick drum track. Just for simplicity sake.
Ok, thanks for clarifying. Much respect.