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Woo stupid question time... right, im really new to all of this so excuse my lack of knowledge. I am using FL studio and my bass lines seem to totally mask the noise of the drums? i can just about hear the snare, i wasnt really sure what to do so thought id ask, im sure there is proabably a very obvious answer.

And also when playing things in the playlist theres this really annoying crackling sound? i appreciate it may be my computer as its not the best, maybe try and wipe it and see what happens.

Thanks

* I have already tried to turn up the volume of each individual instrument, but this hasn't done much.

yeah not as it seems, should really put this in the description, but i tried to turn up the volumes of each individual instrument and it didnt really do much...

did you mix the drums and bass in properly with eq? Example?

well first make sure you have your drums EQ'd correctly, and not clashing with the sub bass (which should generally be just a single sine wave covering only one frequency at a time).

Then set your kick and snare to an equal volume. I set mine to about -12 or -13. Then set your sub to around 2 or maybe a little less than 2 dBs below your drums.

have you tried turning the volumes down in stead of up...?

ive turned all the bass instruments down and you can now hear the drums through them, but to hear the bass clearly i have to turn my speakers up quite loud, wont the finished product sound this quiet if i do that?

Trust me, make all of your tracks to where the master peaks at like -6 dB, and it'll be much MUCH better/cleaner.

Idk what's wrong with your sub+drums, sounds iffy.

rigghtt, this will definitely show my ignorance and naivety but what exactly do you mean by EQing the drums? :L

You could even try sidechaining the bass to get the kick to punch through

lol, not a problem.

EQing stands for Equalization. EQing is controlling the frequencies of certain elements, such as the drums, the leads, the basses, etc. You use EQs (VSTs) to cut some frequencies out, or boost some frequencies. I'm sure the DAW you're using comes with an EQ Plugin. Just load up the EQ and assign it to one of your instruments.

The human ear can only hear frequencies from 20 Hz to 20,000 Hz, or 20Khz. 20 Hz being the lowest frequency, 20Khz being the highest.

You use EQs to tweak the sound of things so that they all mesh together, and sound nice together.

Here, read this article. Everyone should read it, and most people have. It's great.

http://www.dnbscene.com/article/88-thin ... tutorial/1

Also, just youtube some EQing tutorials, they'll help you understand.

the frequencies that the drums hit at are also being hit by the bassline. so you gotta eq those frequencies out of the bassline to get the drums clearer and more audible in the mix. and its not just drums you need to do this for.

The bass is fighting the drums for room in the mix. You need to separate the frequencies as mentioned.
Try high passing your drums around 100hz (rough estimate), and low passing your bass below that. You just need to work on mixing is all. Don't turn stuff up to compensate.

Get a frequency analyzer and check out the ranges they are hitting, there's probably some bass in your hi hats even though you don't hear it. In FL, use the Parametric EQ 2 with the spectrum on.

Thankkkssss, ill have a go after feeling very stupid haha :L any suggestions on the crackling noise? cuz its pissing me off big time

Cracking noise? Limiter or Compression might patch that up nicely. Or sweep it with an EQ and reduce it.

Crackling is probably your soundcard settings. Just google it because it's different for every DAW.

ChadDub wrote:Crackling is probably your soundcard settings. Just google it because it's different for every DAW.

Ah, yeah.

Is it distorted cracks that seem to appear randomly, skip and jump? Make sure you have it set to 41k (there were optimal settings for every DAW, but I forgot them. YouTube might help.).

Yeah soundcard sounds a good shout, ill have a look, thanks for all the help nicee one

asdfjkl wrote:ive turned all the bass instruments down and you can now hear the drums through them, but to hear the bass clearly i have to turn my speakers up quite loud, wont the finished product sound this quiet if i do that?

Don't worry, everyone learns the valuable lesson of putting volumes down in stead of up, once you have finished a track, and no channel is clipping (going into red) and have put an equalizer(EQ) on each channel to cut away the unnecessary frequencies of each channel, this will create space for other channels and prevent them from interfering with each other, then it will go through the mastering process, which is basicly the final volumes and making the track louder in general.

It is either that or your soundcard/speakers/crackedDAW

Hope this helped.

I generally go for:

• sub -10 db
  kick -6 db

Depending on the type of snare, it will go where the kick is. Keeping the beat pumping and cutting through the bass.