Kickdrum EQ'ing

[deccard]

i had the decency to made a point. i said distortion = compression. why is explained in the links.
hm i think my post clearly helped a lot especially for beginners what compression is and where it all occurs and how it can be achieved with different methods.
better than i could ever explain it (especially the 2nd link to a thread from a guy who teaches that stuff).
so to quote the first sentence from my first link: "There is compression and limiting in every overdrive, distortion, fuzz, squash, saturation or crunch circuit. There is no way around it." and the it gets explained pretty good.
cause you said:"EQ and compression is totally unnecessary to make any component of electronic music if you synthesize your sounds correctly, and that takes practice and experience." but with using overdrive, saturation etc...you have compression and you said are using overdrive and saturation.
and a eq is just a special set of filters. you use filters...

[steevio]

hm i think my post clearly helped a lot especially for beginners what compression is and where it all occurs and how it can be achieved with different methods.
better than i could ever explain it (especially the 2nd link to a thread from a guy who teaches that stuff).
so to quote the first sentence from my first link: "There is compression and limiting in every overdrive, distortion, fuzz, squash, saturation or crunch circuit. There is no way around it." and the it gets explained pretty good.
cause you said:"EQ and compression is totally unnecessary to make any component of electronic music if you synthesize your sounds correctly, and that takes practice and experience." but with using overdrive, saturation etc...you have compression and you said are using overdrive and saturation.
and a eq is just a special set of filters. you use filters...

great, we have a discussion.

can i just bring us back to styyn's (the OP) post in which he said-

'i'm having trouble eq'ing my kickdrum. the kick sounds good when i'm sitting behind my desk, but when i walk around in my room it sounds really vaque and a little distorted. i've eq'd and compressed it a lot but can't get that full sound everywhere in my room.

we all know what he was talking about when he said EQ and compression, he was talking about the same things i was talking about when i said i didnt use EQ and compression.

so why do we need to go through this farce of trying to be clever, i didnt say i didnt use distortion and filters, i said i didnt use compression and EQ, because i know that 99.9% of people on this forum know what i mean, in fact 99.9% of anyone who deals with music production of any sort know exactly what i mean.

if you want to take your argument to the limit i could quite easily say that anything thats used in music production which causes a waveform to be altered in any way is distortion, what about wave folding, wave shaping, frequency modulation etc.
we wouldnt get very far having discussions about music production if anything that caused distortion in a waveform was just called distortion, or that anything which changed the balance of frequencies in a sound was just called EQ.

they have different names for different reasons.

its really obvious to me, and probably anyone reading this thread that you knew exactly what i was talking about.

its not the first time you've done this either, i remember you doing exactly the same thing in a discussion about filters.....

now i'm bored with this.

[deccard]

sorry you made a remark and said overdrive is not compression etc...i just thought thats wrong like some other guy did too. you didnt accept his opinion. in prinicipal i said he is right and just gave some links. i saw no reason to make a big fuzz about that and have a stupid offtopic discussion again which we have now cause you seem to have a preconcived opinion about me and get wind up from nothing. so if you think i did misunderstand you in the context than say that instead of getting all jiddie and start calling the internetpolice.
i remember you getting so wind up from some other guy you dont wanted to post here anymore etc....so please look at yourself instead of pointing fingers.

[tone-def]

yes distortion will compress the signal but generally speaking, distortion and compression are used for different applications. the main use for distortion is to add harmonics to the signal. compressors will flatten the sound in a much cleaner way.

if you were using a distortion unit to control the dynamics of a vocal or sax solo it will most probably sound like sh!t.

[deccard]

yes distortion will compress the signal but generally speaking, distortion and compression are used for different applications. the main use for distortion is to add harmonics to the signal. compressors will flatten the sound in a much cleaner way.

if you were using a distortion unit to control the dynamics of a vocal or sax solo it will most probably sound like sh!t.

sure if you want clean compression use a compressor. colored compression you can use tubes or something like that or both in combination. i run my dark energy for a bassline through a culture vulture channel (for tube distortion) and gave it just some saturation and also pretty tight compression. turned the bassline into a whole new beast.

so getting back to the topic i never compress a bassdrum also when using a sample (or some bassdrums i record my self from my library). eq it slightly cause i often dont start with a bassdrum and so the mbase is just to 50% the right machine to make the appropriate sound for me. sometimes i just use the sub of the mbase and use a sample for the right top sound. i guess if i had 5 different drum machines to synthesize my bassdrums i still would end up using a sample sometimes cause you get drumsamples that are already processed in a certain way you cant do with your equipment.
thats why i´m looking at gear with transformers at the moment so i can get that kind of saturation in my setup too. like someone here running his mbase through the golden age pre which has a transformer (but i want that in stereo so maybe just radial jdk di).

[::BLM::]

i guess if i had 5 different drum machines to synthesize my bassdrums i still would end up using a sample sometimes cause you get drumsamples that are already processed in a certain way you cant do with your equipment.
thats why i´mualooking at gear with transformers at the moment so i can get that kind of saturation in my setup too. like someone here running his mbase through the golden age pre which has a transformer (but i want that in stereo so maybe just radial jdk di).

Yep. I actually came on here saying the same thing, asking for recommendations for pre amps and I was told that they were not needed even though I have samples that have been run through some high end preamps and they are so good.

[s.k.]

distression comptortion who cares

i've been thinking for example for the 909 kick. does anybody understand the schematics enough to know if some sort of equalizing has been employed in any part of the generative process? or can someone for a fact tell if equalizing has been used on the kick sound? slight, extreme... just any kind of EQ? i dont know.

but if it has been, this would mean that the people who designed the nine's kick are not shy to use equalizing together with synthesis. so why wouldn't i, right? when thinking about generating sounds i don't differentiate in my mind between a 'synthesis process' and a 'mixing/engineering process'. that was what i meant...

my posts often come rude too, i never mean it really

[deccard]

distression comptortion who cares

i've been thinking for example for the 909 kick. does anybody understand the schematics enough to know if some sort of equalizing has been employed in any part of the generative process? or can someone for a fact tell if equalizing has been used on the kick sound? slight, extreme... just any kind of EQ? i dont know.

but if it has been, this would mean that the people who designed the nine's kick are not shy to use equalizing together with synthesis. so why wouldn't i, right? when thinking about generating sounds i don't differentiate in my mind between a 'synthesis process' and a 'mixing/engineering process'. that was what i meant...

my posts often come rude too, i never mean it really

ok here some excerpts from wikipedia:
Subtractive synthesis is based on filtering harmonically rich waveforms.
Subtractive synthesizers use a simple acoustic model that assumes an instrument can be approximated by a simple signal generator (producing sawtooth waves, square waves, etc.) followed by a filter.

Equalization (British: equalisation) is the process commonly used in sound recording and reproduction to alter the frequency response of an audio system using linear filters.

so if you take an oscillator and put behind that an eq...what do you have then?
using an eq as part of the synthesis. nothing wrong about that and doesnt mean you havent synthesized your sound carefull enough etc.....doing that with software you can automate the eq and voila even better.
and yes there are eqs in modular world:
http://www.cwejman.net/vceq-3.htm
http://www.cwejman.net/res-4.htm (modified eq4 module)

in the 90ies we used a juno 106 in combination with the mixer eq to sweep through the frequencies as part of the sound. you make a chord sequence and cant use the filter anymore of the juno cause it would change the sound into something else. so the eq as 2nd filter comes into play and not as correction of making the juno fit better into the mix.
i did that also a lot long time ago when i only had a dynachord sampler which had no filter. so i needed to use the mixer eqs as filter.