Professional Bass and Drum Bus Processing with Odrizz
Odrizz is a mixing and mastering engineer based in Berlin, Germany. Early in his career, he participated in a seminar with MixedByAli in Los Angeles, CA, where he captured Ali's interest and had the opportunity to follow and learn from him.
Throughout his career, Odrizz has worked with international artists such as Vory, Vince Staples, Westside Boogie, and many more. He is currently the in-house engineer for FUTURA, working out of his own room directly next to Miksu/Macloud in their newly built studio. His latest work includes mixing and mastering songs for Levin Liam, Ski Aggu, Gola Gianni, and others.
In the second part of this interview, we talked about his bass and drum bus processing on the song "so k.o." by Levin Liam, Miksu/Macloud, and JEREMIAS.
"If a certain signal is very dynamic in specific parts of the record, I'll try to tame said parts using clip gain instead of compressing too much. It is always better to go back to the source to fix an issue than to apply the band-aid on the whole signal."
Bass Bus Processing
1. Teletronix® LA-2A Leveler Collection
"I like to use this compressor as the first part of my bass bus. In this particular song, I aimed for 1-3 dB of gain reduction to smooth out the bass after already clip gaining certain parts."
"With the Pro-Q, I make a slight dip in the lows to create more room for the kick, removing the bass in the frequency where the kick is most dominant (in this case, 62Hz)."
"No compression. Only used for gain and saturation. Experiment to see which mode works best. Nickel, Iron, and Steel each boost different harmonics and fundamental frequencies."
"I used the preset 'Low-mid rescue.' The bass was very jumpy, causing issues around 200Hz. This setting worked very well in that situation taming those resonance that happen on certain notes."
"This step is similar to the previous one but focuses more on the low end of the bass. Certain notes had sub-bass frequencies that jumped out, so I took a dynamic approach by applying slight gain and compression in this frequency range."
"Soothe is also a great tool for sidechaining specific frequency spectrums to avoid masking. In this song, there was a drum loop, so I didn't have the individual drum sounds. I isolated the kick from the drum loop and used it to sidechain the bass with this setting. This creates space and separation between the kick and bass in a very musical way, as you only sidechain the necessary part of the spectrum."
"Here, the key is the "Unity" button. Gold Clip essentially acts like a compressor but without attack and release controls. It reduces peaks and enhances low-level information without altering the attack and sustain of the material. Additionally, it saturates the signal with odd and even order harmonics. The clipper and box tone are turned off."
"It rounds off transients and increases the perceived loudness of the drums by saturating the signal. This has become a classic technique for drums. The mix is set to 70% to allow some of the original signal to come through."
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