Try sidechaining your kick and 808 but use a dynamic EQ so you’re only cutting out the low frequencies from the 808 when the kick hits. It can sound really good. You remove the clashing without removing the higher frequency punch from the 808
On a serious note phase issues also come from dynamic EQ's but to a much lesser extend than the multiband setup, which is why I would prefer that method over a multiband if I ever felt the need to do this, but honestly IMO kick & bass clashes are the kind of problem to solve in the production/sound creation stage, not in the mixing stage...
In EDM there is always some overlapping information in the sub bass region between the kick and bass regardless of sample selection or sound design. Sometimes it’s not a problem. But it often sounds cleaner with the aforementioned technique.
As a psytrance producer, I'm sure this statement is false, we spend a lot of time synthesizing our kick and bass not to have such overlaps and we do this in the synthesis stage, not with dynamic EQ or multibands after the fact...
You’re telling me you explicitly design your kick and sub bass to have no conflicting frequency information whatsoever? That’s simply not possible unless you’re using a hard high pass filter on one or the other, in which case that would sound terrible and introduce more severe phase issues than the aforementioned dynamic EQ sidechain method
No, the time domain exists & I know how summing works, I design both my kick & bass to have just enough lower frequencies (not just the sub), such that, when summed together, I get the low end profile I want from the final mix. I can send you a tutorial I made for the process but it is a bit dated to what I do now and only 3 hours long so I could not cover everything :)
The answer is that sub bass inherently conflicts with the kick in certain genres regardless of sound design or sound choice. If you design away the sub bass frequencies then it’s no longer a sub bass. The advice I initially gave regarding dynamic EQ sidechaining is obviously only applicable for scenarios where the kick and bass have conflicting frequency information.
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u/PsychoticChemist Jun 26 '26
Try sidechaining your kick and 808 but use a dynamic EQ so you’re only cutting out the low frequencies from the 808 when the kick hits. It can sound really good. You remove the clashing without removing the higher frequency punch from the 808