Hardstyle production gossip

[psychosis]

hmm not exactly, i think it's more complex than this, those older kicks were just made different ways, not with a lighter distortion, light distortion will only give a weak thin bass.

These days kicks are mostly made by using 1 source sound, such as a 909 or whatever and creating the bass with fx (taking a lot of distortion to get it fat), but in the past mostly people sampled sounds and layered many bases together with timestretching and filtering to achieve a fat sound

I actually meant (by "more simple") that older kicks were less processed (less fxes in the chain etc, dont know how to say it precisely ), not by the amount of layers involved in the final sound, because I agree that it sounds like there's quite a lot of layers sometimes. But I'll say again that there was less distortion used, like you said fat sound was achieved by layering many (but less distorted) basses ;] You also can't get proper punch with nice impact, like in most of older kicks, if you overdo the distortion and it happens in nowadays kicks sometimes (or even more often ).

[thesh3ll]

@Psychosis oh yea I know what you mean now, I think you're right too

hmm not exactly, i think it's more complex than this, those older kicks were just made different ways, not with a lighter distortion, light distortion will only give a weak thin bass.

Distorting the bass will most likely kill it, I wouldn't advise distorting below 90hz, certainly not any lower! It will destroy the fundamental frequencies and therefore weaken the sub end of your kick, it is important to distort kicks to gain more upper harmonics though!

Obviously if you have ears to be able to eq properly and know how much distortion to use each time,you won't kill it, if you distort too much on low frequencies in the bass (say 300hz and below) there is the chance that the low end becomes too saturated, and ...dies basically, but if you use some distortion/overdrive/eq on the low freqs you can make your bass have a nice dynamic and style

the mid/high part of the bass is much different though because that requires a lot of fx to get it to sound nice

[Shellshock]

I wouldst say they need a lot of fx to sound nice, just get the distortion balanced, a little subtractive EQ, and hit the compressor correctly and you get a nice result i think!

That's what i do anyway for all my kicks, there is method in my madness x)

[SCH]

I normally keep my subbass as free from distortion as possible to keep the tonality clean, to further help the tonality on the combined mixer channel.. But then I use alot rougher distortion then you guys, most of the time