How to Enhance 808s in a Hip-Hop Mix

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• published: 23 Dec 2013
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Instant access to every in-depth mixing course from Matthew Weiss: http://theproaudiofiles.com/members Learn to mix hip-hop: http://mixinghiphop.com Learn compression: http://learncompression.com Ear training: http://quiztones.com Drum samples: http://weissdrums.com Mixing articles: http://theproaudiofiles.com How to use parallel processing to bring out the tone and character when you mix an 808. --- More on mixing 808's: http://theproaudiofiles.com/808/ More on mixing low end: http://theproaudiofiles.com/mixing-low-end/ Today we're going to combine a few different ideas and relate them to our favorite subject in the world: mixing 808 kick drums. Now, this is a little bit of a weird technique, it sort of involved concepts learned in both the Mixing Hip-Hop tutorial tutorial (http://mixinghiphop.com) as well as the Mixing with Compression tutorial (http://learncompression.com), but I'm gonna show you how you can mix an 808 a little bit differently than usual. Now for me personally, the interest in an 808 kick drum is generally what's living the upper octaves. The lower octave is usually just a fat sine wave, but the upper octaves are where the distortion and character start showing up. Now, what this tutorial is gonna show you is how to bring out a lot of that character in a very transparent but bold way. The thing you have to keep in mind is that it's all arrangement dependent. When you have a very dense track with a lot of lower-mid content, or even just general mid-range content, sometimes you just want that deep sine wave 808, and that's fine. But when you have a more open arrangement without a lot going on, that's usually when you want to play up the character of the 808. Sometimes you find yourself in an arrangement like the one in today's track, where it could kind of go either way, and so you have to make a judgement call. In this tutorial, i'm using parallel processing to target and bring out the tone of the 808. * Step 1: Use a High-pass filter to get rid of the sub tones (we ended up around 180 Hz and used linear phase mode on the FabFilter Pro-Q to keep the low end more consistent when both the original and processed 808 tracks are playing back simultaneously) * Step 2: Our next step is to target just the tone, which is that sort of buzzy distortion, but I don't want to add extra punch to the 808, so what I did was grab the FabFilter Pro-G, which is a gate/expander, which has a very unique function called ducking. Ducking is kind of like compression, where when the volume exceeds the threshold it's going to pull the level down. But the difference between ducking and compression is it's going to pull the level down more than what a compression could. Instead of pulling it down based on the level of the threshold, it's going to pull down based on a pre set range. And if I set that range down to 100 dB, that means that if it absolutely breaches the threshold, a high ratio will pull it all the way down 100 dB. So what we're doing is trying to remove the attack of the 808 using this ducking mechanism. Once we get it dialed in, we'll turn up the output gain. What we've essentially done at this point is isolate the buzzy quality coming from the 808. * Step 3: Now we listen to our processed 808 track in the context of the mix, and decide how much of the extra buzz we want to blend in to the original 808 track, and also decide if we want to do anything else to it. --- Software/Plugins used: - Avid Pro Tools - FabFilter Pro-G - FabFilter Pro-Q