Demo of Bass Drum ducking Bass with the Carve RE

[jappe]

Hi,

this is another demo of how I use Carve: here I'm letting the bass drum duck the bass.

Feedback on this demo is much appreciated!

I'm using a trick here:
the kick drum is rather weak in the mid frequency range, but instead of boosting the kick drum in that area I am instead boosting that frequency region in the Carve Ref in signal instead - allowing the bass drum mid frequencies to shine through because then Carve will duck those frequencies more than other frequencies in the bass sound.

Prerequisites: All stock Reason devices, except Carve...

How to test:
Play the example loop and A/B check with Bypass/On in Carve (its on bypass by default)

I recommend using a pair of fairly good headphones rather than monitors. (It's amazing the increased level of details I can hear with my Sennheiser HD 25-1 II, Ultrasone, ATHM50 headphones compared with my Genelec 8010 monitors)

Download the reason file and remove the ".txt" suffix (only a few file types allowed to upload - @admin: perhaps that filter can be removed?)

Carve BDduckingBass_example1.reason.txt

(1 MiB) Downloaded 55 times

Good to know when testing:
[*] You will hear some filtering artifacts on the bass sound in the mid range area coming from when Carve ducks it. That's entirely expected, and if you don't like the sound of it (I do) then just increase the Carve attack knob a little bit to reduce it.

[*] If you want to experiment with tweaking how much different frequency regions in the bass drum will duck the bass sound, then just use the EQ in the "P1: Ducker BD4RefIn" channel strip to do that. (that channel only goes to the Carve Ref in - not to the master bus. The sound from it is only used to duck Carve)

[*] Please also note that this is not a "good mix" in that it's not final in any way. My aim here is only to show how Carve can contribute, and skipping the other tweaks that you'd do in a normal mix will make this example easier to A/B check.

[Puckboy2000]

So (since I am on my iPad and can't download your file), you are hooking up an EQ to Carve directly? Thanks

[jappe]

Hi, no EQ directly to Carve: I use the EQ in the channel strip for the parallel bass drum channel strip (the channel strip thats only connected to Ref In in Carve)

[jappe]

Actually I think an external EQ should most often be used in Ref In to get more precise control of how the user wants ducking to occur. (Note - this EQ should only be applied on what goes into Ref IN - it mustn't go into the mixer since we want to preserve the spectral signature of the Ref In parallel signal that goes to the mixer, so Ref Out cannot be used)

The rationale for EQ:ing Ref In is as follows:
Lets say you have a Ref In signal that contains 10 overtones with falling amplitude for higher frequency.

The higher frequency overtones would be more vulnerable to frequency masking since they have lower amplitude.
Yet Carve would duck these overtones less since they have lower amplitude.
That is quite possibly not what we'd like - those overtones may very well be an important part of the sound which we want to be heard. (for example echo/reverb)

And the fix for it, is to EQ up those high frequencies in the Ref In signal.

If anyone has another opinion about this, or if you think there is something wrong with my statements here, then please let me know. (I'm trying to start a discussion here:-)