You're listening to the Inside the Mix podcast with your host , mark Matthews . Hello and welcome to the Inside the Mix podcast . I'm Mark Matthews , your host , musician , producer and mix and mastering engineer .
You've come to the right place if you want to know more about your favorite synth music artists , music engineering and production , songwriting and the music industry . I've been writing , producing , mixing and mastering music for over 15 years and I want to share what I've learned with you . Hello , folks , and welcome to the Inside the Mix podcast .
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A big welcome back and , of course , the viewers as well , a big welcome back . On the 22nd of November , I dropped my new track , waves , and there's two versions . There's a full length which is about six and a half minutes , and then there is the radio edit , so it's been played on BBC Introduced and some other places as well .
So it's doing all right considering the time of year , and I haven't released anything for probably about a year . If you haven't done so , click the link in the episode description , give it a spin , add it to your progressive house or your house or melodic house , deep house , whatever it may be playlists .
So in this episode I'm going to demonstrate how I took the kick drum to this , and I achieved that with a free plugin . So let's dive in . So I completed the first mix and I sent it across to my good friends R9 and Neon Highway for some feedback . They've been on the podcast numerous times probably more so in 2023 .
And the general consensus was that the kick drum sounded good , but it just wasn't powerful enough . And shout out to R9 in particular here he pinpointed , or rather he pointed me in the direction of this Plugin Alliance plugin called BX Subfilter , and it's a free plugin and it's a fantastic piece of kit . Now there is a caveat to this .
This will not fix a poor choice of kick drum samples , so get that right first . So don't think I'll settle for this kick and then I'll use sub filter to fix the issues I've got with this kick sample . Get the kick sample right first , and this is just like sweetening it , and a little does go a long way . So what is the BX sub filter ?
In short , it is a resonant high pass filter with a changeable frequency . It's got five controls gain in , tight punch , low end , gain out and resonant . When I first used it , or rather when I used it on this track , I started with the bass drum , extreme preset and it sounds like this Okay , bit too much for my liking .
So the first thing I did was I changed the resonance and this is where it's extenuating the resonance of that high pass filter and you've got low , high and extreme . Obviously , from low it's going to be less , extreme is going to be more , and I now like to start with it in the middle . So I changed it to high .
I then changed the tight punch frequency and this is where the high order high pass filter is set . So it's going to be attenuating unwanted frequencies and also extenuating the wanted lower frequencies as well . I just swept around , basically , until that bass drum just really popped out . So I'm going to solo it this time and then I'm just going to sweep around .
I think I got to about 50 hertz last time , so let's give that a go . Yeah , hopefully . You heard that I dragged it down to about 35 hertz and it just lost some of that power .
So I'm looking , or rather I'm listening for where it just jumps out of me , that bass , those low frequencies just jump out in my headphones and also the sub and the speakers when I was mixing this .
So , yeah , 50 hertz is what I settled with and then I moved on to the low end parameter and this is a fixed bandpass filter at 55 hertz and it's post tight punch and it's just going to boost those frequencies around there . And I think I had it set to six , if I remember rightly .
So I'll play it and I'm going to play in the context of the mix and then I'm just going to sweep around because you kind of want it , you want to get that sweet spot where it's not too much but it's there and it's powerful enough . Yeah , so I settled on six there . I dragged it back to two . You could feel it was losing its power .
So the final parameter we're going to do here is , obviously we've added this extra sort of signal level to this and we've got to think gain staging right . So I want to gain match it before and after . So I'm going to drag it down . I think I got to about minus 4 dB on the output in total .
So let's play it , and I'm just going to drag the gain out down until it gets to where I want it to be . So let's play it before or after . And let's play it before or after and let's see where that kick drum is in terms of loudness . Okay , it's about minus 22 . It's quite . It feels quite low in the mix now , doesn't it ?
So I'm going to play it with the sub filter enabled . Yeah , I got the output down to about minus five this time . Probably I might be inclined to go a bit lower , but I'm going to leave it where it is . Now . When I solo this , you'll notice that there's kind of like a bit of a squelchy noise on the kick drum , so I'll play it .
It's right at the tail of the kick . It's going at the end of the kick . I was happy with the kick drum sample . Now when you solo it you can hear it , but in the context of the mix I was happy that it was inaudible , so I just thought I'd throw that out there .
It was more prominent just now when we were playing it , when I hadn't adjusted the gain output , and you could hear this sort of squelchy sort of sound at the end , but it's less prominent now . I've brought the gain down , but obviously it was louder in my headphones because it was 5 dB louder . So let's do again a before and after .
So this is without the sub filter and this is with the sub filter . So there we go . It's a free plugin . It's got five parameters and really easy to use . But again , make sure you get your kick drum sample correct first before using this . You can also use it on bass .
You've got the sub-synth , which is like its bigger brother , if you will , and this is like one portion of the sub-synth , and I use the sub-synth on the bass . That's a great plugin , but it's not free , but this one is . So give it a go , folks . Fantastic piece of kit .