A thought/Idea that I have yet to try.

[NoAffiliation]

you can widen the bass to resolve issues. imo it's not so much of a problem with the frequencies but it's gonna sound flat if everything is dead center on top of each other and you will spend alot of time trying to make it work

before someone says bass is supposed to be mono, the definition of mono is that it's the exact same thing coming out of both speakers, that's it. this is why modern DAW developers like ableton only give you "stereo" channels to work with because mono isn't just single channel audio. you can have a super wide bass that still works in mono. yes for vinyl pressing the subs should be mono but JUST the subs, there's alot more frequency content in kicks and bass that can be played with in the acoustic space. the subs mixing together a little isn't going to be a problem, the problem is when you have two big sounds like kick and bass dead center, the envelopes fight each other much more than just those super lows

just load up your favorite track from favorite artist on a good phase scope and watch it as it plays

there's a ton of badass plugins that do all kinds of widening magic, pair one witha phase scope and it's on

i think alot depends on whether your music is meant to be played in clubs or not. all the fancy stereo effects virtually dissappear in a big club, where unless you're standing dead centre between the sound system stacks, and that might only be 20 people in the whole club, (if the systems are even in stereo)
in fact they might only weaken the sound, and sounds panned widely will be totally lost on one side of the club.

what sounds amazing in headphones, might not translate into the places where the music is meant to be heard.

i'm not sure what you mean by envelopes fighting each other, i call that tightness, and punch. i'm often more concerned about smearing the sounds too much in the stereo field, and cluttering it up. dead centre is also part of the field, and it provides solidity to have powerful sounds residing there.

like you say it is only absolutely necessary to centre the low bass for vinyl pressing, the rest is down to personal taste. i quite like to have a more 'mono' sound to my tracks, it seems more punchy and focussed that way, but i can also appreciate super-wide effects too, but theres no compulsion to use them like everything else inproduction

everything im talking about translates 100% to mono because it is mono, just really wide mono, not stereo tricks. IMHO using space is the most important part of music production. i can tell within half a bar of a track if the person grasps this or not

[steevio]

anyway. this what the important part in my post

if my kick is a G where should the root note of the bass line be? everyone says they should be a 4th or 5th apart but that doesn't seem very helpful if your bass is a bit melodic and goes up and down in pitch.

i'm not sure everyone says that, i know i do that, but its in relation to the root, it doesnt matter if the bassline goes up and down, if its in key. if the track was in say E, i'd probably have a B or A for the kick fundamental, and i'd probably avoid the kick note and the tritone in the bassline. but its just one way to do it.
i always consider the kick and bass together.

[ray parry]

how do you know what key a kick is? spectrum analyser?

I have never really thought too much about putting bass on top of kicks. if it sounds right then i use it, if not ill move onto something else. thats really how I work. im always just using my ears. I tend not to work out the math, but its really interesting to see other people working like this.

[AK]

how do you know what key a kick is? spectrum analyser?

I have never really thought too much about putting bass on top of kicks. if it sounds right then i use it, if not ill move onto something else. thats really how I work. im always just using my ears. I tend not to work out the math, but its really interesting to see other people working like this.

In terms of the kick itself, it will be a certain frequency which may or may not be a hz value of some chromatic note but the kick itself can't be in a key. If you're making your own kicks, then obviously you can tailor the sound to be whatever frequency you want - and any additional harmonic content can also be controlled ( at least by some methods )

I know what you mean by just using ears. I have always done that myself to a certain extent. I've tried to pitch kicks before when using sampled kicks and used the old technique of upping the pitch by 12 semitones to hear any tonality better, fine tuning and dropping back to bass registers again..It was only some time back that I started to appreciate the value of knowing frequency to note relationships and harmonics too.

This is what I use for reference: http://www.phy.mtu.edu/~suits/notefreqs.html

All music is maths if you think about it, intervals/chords etc are all based on some form of ratios.

My first 'real' attempts at this began after I had an initial musical idea ( which I never finished ) but it was in the key of E minor. I started building a kickdrum and began with a fundamental sine wave pitched at E/41hz. The method I'm familiar with when making kicks invloves the use of a 'ramp' parameter ( essentially a pitch envelope ) to get the initial punch. Here, the use of that could potentially throw the pitch away from that initial 41hz frequency at the attack phase but I used a ramp based on step values and opted for 24 semitones after first trying 19 semitones. Whilst not going too much into this as it's a diff subject, the envelope is basically 'ramping' from a higher pitch down to the fundamental and decay which was where the real sense of tone is. But I deliberately chose to ramp down from the same frequency, albeit 2 octaves higher ( the other one which just sounded right was based on a perfect 5th interval an octvae higher but didn't have enough initial punch for me )

So anyway, aside from additional 'clicks, noise' that I might have dialled in, I came up with a kick that was pushing out a definite 41hz frequency. The lowest note in my bass sequence also happened to be E/41hz, I had an 'E' an octave higher, a 'B', a 'G' and I think there was an 'F#' in there too all using low notes and the odd note in the next octave. I tuned the kick to E/41hz as I thought it underpinned the tonal centre better than other pitches. Also, in any key, there are an order of the 'strongest' intervals. First you have the unison, the perfect 5th and then the perfect 4th. The I-V-IV in roman numeral music jargon, hence the popularity of that chord chord progression too, so it makes sense in a harmonic way to at least try the root or 5th first.

I can't remember the order of notes in the bass pattern but I know I didn't have a low E/41hz happening on a kick event, I wasn't avoiding that, I had the bass pattern before I did the kick but I liked the way it all worked together, the low end sounded punchy and clear to my ears.

I don't use a huge amount of decay on my kicks so a lot of it could be seen as placebo, but it does make sense anyway when you think about it even if you can't perceive the tonality of the kick.

[AK]

anyway. this what the important part in my post

if my kick is a G where should the root note of the bass line be? everyone says they should be a 4th or 5th apart but that doesn't seem very helpful if your bass is a bit melodic and goes up and down in pitch.

If a kick was G/49hz, it could potentially work in a harmonic way in a number of keys as it's just a single sound. I like to have the kick 'underpin' the key after my experiments, so for me, G minor, C, minor and D minor ( or other modal scales with those roots ) With 'G' it would be tuned with the root, with 'C' it would be tuned with the perfect 5th, with 'D' it would be tuned with the perfect 4th.

I'm not saying those would be the only scale roots that the kick would work in, not by any means but they are the ones that are immediately obvious from a harmonic perspective due to the strength of the unison, perfect 5th and perfect 4th in a given key.

[Toloache]

I noticed that besides the tuninig, pushed very hard in this forum (for good reasons), one other equally important thing is the phase relation of the bass and the kick when they hit at the same time.

Not owning any hardware, i find myself using samples very often for my kicks. When i started using a signal analyzer phase problems became very apparent for me.

Let's i have my kick in G and my bass in D tuned perfectly, but there is something sketchy in how they sound togheter. In this case i usually open my signal analyzer or smexoscope and often i can see that the bass is cancelling kick frequencies or viceversa. You can hear this even without a signal anlyzer tool because when the two notes plays togheter you can hear and see a decrease in volume on the master.

What i do after the tuning is to check for this, then i turn slowly the phase knob of the bass until the master channel reach the maximum volume and start to decrease again. At the maximum volume is the correct phase. Then i change the velocity of the hits hitting on the kick to not peak to much. At the correct phase the two togheter should look almost a triangle pointing forward, if you see a line, then decrease in volume and something similar to a diamond, you have phase problems.

Another thing you could do if you dont know pulse waves patterns (like me) is using fm. Say you have like the previous example your kick in G0 at 49 H, you put the carrier at D1 with the envelope you like, and the modifier at D0 with another envelope. In this way you can control exactly how much sub and low mids you have, and in the spectrum analyzer the thing will look like two peaks with a valley in the center, in this valley will sit clearly audible your kick. I tend to use the oscillator above the kick with a short envelope, so i have a sort of initial high that make it audible on most systems. Then the other will have a longer envelope, maybe with a bit of attack, that introduce lows slighty laters without interfering with the kick.

[Toloache]

Deleted, double post

[AK]

Another thing you could do if you dont know pulse waves patterns (like me) is using fm. Say you have like the previous example your kick in G0 at 49 H, you put the carrier at D1 with the envelope you like, and the modifier at D0 with another envelope. In this way you can control exactly how much sub and low mids you have, and in the spectrum analyzer the thing will look like two peaks with a valley in the center, in this valley will sit clearly audible your kick. I tend to use the oscillator above the kick with a short envelope, so i have a sort of initial high that make it audible on most systems. Then the other will have a longer envelope, maybe with a bit of attack, that introduce lows slighty laters without interfering with the kick.

See this is why I love this forum, I always pick stuff up that can be useful. I like FM as well but damn, I'm so retarded at programming it.