Original subtitles

Hi! It's Alan Meyerson, Mix With The Masters.

I want to talk to you about low end a little bit

and how do I create a little bit of extra low end

when I want to add a little bit of size to something.

So I've got a piece of music here from the video game Gears Of War.

It's got a really, really cool title, it's called "1m1."

So we have a nice, big drum sound here.

It's got, like, nice snap to it and everything.

And somewhere in the sound there was a bit of a hump which I took out.

Hear that kind of nasty little thing?

It's in there, you hear a...

That makes it much clearer. So one way I'm getting low end

is by taking away boxiness, a higher frequency.

In this case, it's 119 Hz,

and I'm going to make a nice, narrow bandwidth,

and by taking that out,

I'm actually leaving more room.

It's amazing how that works...

...to make it more focused. So now that I've done that,

a couple of things I can do. I can obviously add a little bit of EQ,

which is not always the worst idea in the world,

but in this case,

it's really not adding an interesting kind of low end,

so what I would do is do some sort of sub-harmonic thing.

And to my ear, the first thing I would do with this

would be the MaxxBass from Waves,

which I'm going to listen to just the low end emulation,

the synthesis that it's doing.

And I'm going to sort of find...

...something that gives me a little thickness-wise.

That's got a nice kind of tone to it.

So now it's out.

And...

That's a little bit too much.

So that's doing a nice job.

I think that that's adding a nice amount of low end.

Now, on this, one of the other techniques that I use sometimes

is to actually use the Lowender,

but I don't think it's going to work so well on this one

because it's too low.

It's really just something I use mostly on an LFE channel,

but actually trying to connect it to the signal,

it sounds just a little bit too low,

so what I might add to the MaxxBass

is a little bit of RBass.

So I'm going in both directions.

The RBass actually brings stuff from below into it,

the MaxxBass brings stuff from above into it.

My favorite frequency is 42 Hz.

I'm going to take it all the way out.

So that has added a beautiful amount of low end now.

It added a nice amount of body.

That's adding a ton of body. That's really, really great.

So what else could we do to add a little bit more body and low end

to this whole, overall groove?

That's not too low, but we might get something out of that.

Not really. But, you know, on this one, what I might do with this

is I might duplicate this track.

And this is an experiment, right?

And then, I'm going to take this...

First of all, I'm going to get rid of the beginning of that,

and then from here on out...

I'm at the wrong track here. I meant this one.

I have a duplicate of it,

and I'm going to go in there and I'm going to drop the pitch.

My favorite amount is half an octave, six semi-tones.

I'm going to do it kind of faster.

Right.

Now I have this signal,

which originally sounds like this.

And I've got this.

So let's see if this works.

So I'm going to roll off the top

using my FabFilter Pro-Q2.

Boom, get rid of it all, all the way down to there.

Right. I got some nice...

...subs there.

Now I'm going to put that into my RBass.

That's nice.

So even though that sound itself did not have a lot of...

I mean, it wasn't a super low end-y sound,

if I wanted to create some additional low end,

create a little bit more size,

this might be something I might do to...

...add some size to it.

I'll give it a little more output.

Yeah, that actually works really well.

But what I need a little bit more from it

is some more frequencies now that I've rolled off all the top.

So, Lo-Fi adds a tiny bit of distortion to it in a very elegant kind of way.

Give it a little bit more.

So there's a couple of quick ways

to just generate a little bit of extra low end,

one of which is just taking the low end that's there on a particular signal

and using a couple of good plug-ins.

One is actually creating another element

that isn't changing any rhythm or anything,

and creating something out of that

that can actually give it some more size on the bottom.

And if it's the right sound, it might be the appropriate choice.

In this case, it actually worked really well.

So there you have it.