Hey a,

I have bad news for you: 95% of what you've learned in tutorials about mixing low-end is terrible advice.

I bet you've been told to…

… use a filter to separate kick and bass

… "carve out frequencies" from the bass to make the kick punch through

… use side-chaining with maxed-out settings to get that pumping low-end effect

And while these techniques make technical sense, they rarely get you a low-end that holds up against your reference tracks.

Here's why.

All of these techniques assume that there's a battle going on between kick and bass.

But that fight is optional.

The best tracks I've worked on as a mixing and mastering engineer had a low-end in which kick and bass complemented each other instead of fighting for space in the mix.

Like yin and yang, one had qualities the other didn't.

Here's the good news:

You can deliberately design your low-end like that.

And of course you can still use filters, EQs, and side-chaining to get there.

But using them while you're crafting a low-end with intention is very different from using them as a last-ditch attempt to rescue a messy mix where kick and bass simply won't fit together.

So how do you actually get this "fits-like-a-glove" type of low-end?

Here are three rules I follow:

1. Only one element can dominate the sub-bass.

That doesn't mean you have to completely filter out the low-end of the bass when you have a deep kick.

But you should clearly prioritize one over the other.

2. Decide whether you want your low-end glued together or punchy and separated.

This tells you whether to group kick and bass and compress them together, or keep them on separate tracks and maybe even rhythmically displace the hits.

3. Design your envelopes with intention.

Just slapping together a bunch of kick samples and bass presets can work. But it's more luck than purposeful sound design.

That's why I carefully pick kick samples, or design my own kicks, with a pitch and volume/filter envelope that does exactly what I want it to do.

Same goes for the bass. A kick with a long, boomy tail needs a bass that stays out of the way until that tail has decayed.

A short, tight kick leaves room for a bass with more sustain.

Dial in your envelopes so kick and bass are “hugging” each other instead of fighting for attention.

One quick word on metering.

Yes, oscilloscopes and FFT spectrum analyzers are helpful.

But I'm seeing more and more producers trying to design the perfect kick and bass with their eyes, not their ears.

Use meters as a learning tool. They're great for understanding how the changes you make to your sounds show up in the waveform and the frequency spectrum.

But make your final decisions based on what you hear and feel.

Your music matters. Make it count.

Philip

PS: "Trust your ears" is easy advice to give and hard to follow when you're not sure your ears can be trusted yet. That's exactly where 1:1 feedback makes all the difference. In our coaching program, we listen to your actual tracks, point out what's working in your low-end and what isn't, and help you calibrate your ears until you can make these calls on your own.

If you want to find out whether that's a good fit for you, book a free discovery call here. We'll look at your goals and obstacles and figure out together whether the program makes sense for you.