THE 808 MIXING TRICK | How To Mix 808 And Kick Like A Pro

VIDEO TRANSCRIPTION

Welcome back. It's me, Streaky again. Today, I've had some comments asking me how to get an 808 really popping in a mix. So I'm going to show you exact technique that you need to do to really get your drum sounding good. Now, also at the end of this, make sure you watch right to the end because there's an extra bonus tip that's going to really pull your tracks out and make your mixing sound superb. So watch till the end. So here we are inside of pro tools. I'm going to show you how to get your 808 totally banging in your drums. What I've got here is a separated loop. So let me play you what it is, and then you can hear how I mess around with it to get it working. So it sounds insane. Okay, here you go. (Music playing).

So you can hear it's a little bit wimpish. Sounds quite nice, but not too great. So let's listen to the 808 in solo, and then let's get this sounding a little bit better first of all. Now, when you've got an 808, when you got to think is, this is dealing with the subs, obviously, and it's going against the kicks. So we don't want it to influence the kick too much because there are frequencies that are happening in the same area as the kick. So what we want to do is make this pop out of the speakers a bit more. In my studio, it's fine because I can hear super low, but on car speakers and on earbuds or whatever, you need the 808 still come through. So the best way to do this is to shape it first of all. So let's get a shape going. What I'm going to use for this straightaway is a bit of saturation. Now this is Softube saturating plugin. It is free. So if you want to get it, go to Softube and get it free. But there are obviously loads and loads of others saturators you can get. But this one, this is how you get this one going. So let's just press play. I'll play around with it. And then you can see what I'm doing. (Music playing).

So you can hear there's a nice bit of distortion going on there. So that's what we want. We just want to bring out some of the resonant frequencies from the top end of the 808. I don’t want it to distort too much. If you hear there it’s a little bit too edgy. I still want to get the essence of the 808. (Music playing). So you can just hear it's bringing out those top frequencies a bit more. If you're listening on headphones, you'll really be able to hear the difference of what it's doing. A little bit of crunch. It's a bit too much. That's a nice bit of distortion going on there. So that's the saturated first of all. Now, what we want to do, it's really nice to get a Pultec plugin and really give it some energy in the low. So boost it, the 60Hz frequency range with a Pultec EQ. There's plenty of these around. This is just a passive Pultec. There's loads of different styles. This is UADs one, but there are loads of others you can get hold of. So grab yourself one of these and then pump up the low end.

You can also bring up the high frequency a tad too. I’m obviously go pretty broad with this. So it's grabbing some of that higher stuff. So you can hear, that's really starting to pop through now. Saturation's probably a little bit too much. Yeah. A little bit less distorted. So that's sounding good. You can hear that really cut in through those top ones if I just shut that off. (Music playing). You can hear that’s now starting to boom through. What we want to do is next up, we are wanting to side chain, a dynamic EQ against the kick. Because what we want to do is make some space for the kick. So you can see here where the kicks happening. We want to duck the sub at this point. So it leaves some space for the kick. So let's listen to how it sounds at the moment with the kick in place. (Music playing).

You can hear that getting a bit messed up together, aren’t they? What we want to do is open up. I'm using the Pro-Q 3. There's plenty of other dynamic EQs out there that will side chain. So I'm going to use a send on the kick channel and I'm going to send this to bus 1 and 2. So then I'm going to go into the Pro-Q and use the key trigger here of bus 1. So basically, what that's doing is it's, I'm just having a, send this one here and it's sending it directly into the trigger on the Q3. So when this goes into dynamic mode, which I have this frequency here in dynamic, the kick will just be ducking this frequency every time it comes in. And so that means this, cause this is on the sub channel. So then the sub will duck in that position when it comes in. But what I'm doing, I'm also adding a little touch below as well. This is 20 Hz.

We don't lose too much of this lower frequency because we still want this to be fairly subby. So we don't want to lose too much of that, but we want it just to duck out the way of the kick. Let's see how that sounds and how that works. (Music playing). So on the Pro-Q, which is a lovely feature, it'll show you the side chain. If you've got it on analyzer here, you'll see the side chain and then you can actually just then move that around to where you can see the side chain actually kicking in. (Music playing). So we can see it’s there. You can see it’s ready. We want to take that down quite a bit. You can hear that it's really working well. (Music playing).

So if we just take the plug-ins off. So you can hear that's giving it some really good separation between the kick and the snare. So now let's listen to all the drums together so we can hear exactly how that all fits together. And then listen to how it was previously. (Music playing).

So there you go. Given these loads of space to the 808 and the kick at the same time, so the kick is really getting poked through. Now as a little bonus tip. What I do here at the end then is I've got them all going through into a drum bus. So they're all playing into buses 3 and 4, which is then going into here, which is on an input 3 and 4. So what we want to do now is just glue all of the drums together. So they all sound as one. So classic drum bus compressor, which is ratio 4:1, and it's SSL style compressor.

There is another video which I'll link above, which will show you exactly how to use gluey compression. So check that out, because that's exactly what I'm doing here. Let's listen to how this sounds when it's all together. (Music playing).

You can hear that gluey compression really makes a massive difference. So let's listen with all the plugins out. (Music playing). So from having an 808, there's hardly there at all, suddenly everything all sounds together. So don't forget to check out the gluey compressor that's coming up next. I'll link that at the end until next time. Thanks for watching. Bye.