DAW: Logic Studio
Difficulty: Intermediate to Advanced
Genre Focus: Dubstep (applicable to all)
Software specifics: Space Designer, Buss Channels
One of the trickiest things to get right when making more minimal tunes is to be able to create depth in the track without cluttering up your mix. This especially applies to the drum elements. It can often feel like a trade off between getting a deep and lush vibe at the expense of the crisp and punchy drums that are pinning your tune together.
We’re going to be using Logic Studio’s Space Designer Reverb to create ambient interest with space and depth in a percussion loop without losing clarity in the mix…
Here’s our starting point – Just a dry 4 bar loop for now…
AUDIO 1
Sounds nice, but perhaps a bit too clinical.
The first thing we are going to attack is that snare hit.
AUDIO 2
We’re going to start by creating a send to Bus 1. We don’t want the reverb to be directly on the snare channel as we want the clean signal to come through. The snare is an integral part of the rhythm and must maintain its snappiness, so by creating a bus, we can blend the clean signal and reverb signal easily.
For the snare we are going to be using Logic’s Space designer. As the emphasis is on creating a subtle ambience, we are going to shorten the reverb to stop it running massively into the next snare hit. We can do this by adjusting the volume envelope, giving us a decay time of 0.93 seconds. This has made it a little quiet so to compensate we have turned up the output on the Space Designer to –11.5dB
As this is on a buss we don’t want any of the dry signal coming through the Space Designer, so the mix level is zero’d. Again the aim is subtlety so we are setting the send to -16.4dB.
AUDIO 3
Sounding good, but what else can we do to subtly go deeper?
Well, taking hits out of the sounds that are carrying the rhythm along (i.e. the breaks or hi-hats) and adding FX is a good way of making changes without having to go through the effort of making another element work with what you already have. Let’s hear the break…
AUDIO 4
Now you may have noticed that on the third bar the snare hits of the break are a touch louder. In order to add a longer reverb on just these hits, it is important to isolate the snares so we’ve moved them on to a new audio channel, preventing them from conflicting with the rest of the break. Again we want to keep the clarity, so have opted for reverb on a send. This time we are using Goldverb and have altered the predelay to 37ms.
A longer predelay can give the impression of distance (as sounds that occur far away from you take time to hit your ears).
AUDIO 5
Nice, but the track is still a little empty. To remedy this we are going to add some percussion to play off the rhythms we have already.
AUDIO 6
Hmm… Sounds rough. These sounds really need to become less a part of the rhythm section and more ambient effects. As the aim of this exercise is to create a sense of space and depth, we will give each sample its own channel and then pan some of them slightly left and right. So that we don’t waste precious processing power, we only really need one reverb unit for the lot. The way to do this is to route all of the channels for the perc sounds to one bus by changing the output on each channel to Bus 3.
On Bus 3 we have the a Space Designer with the initial settings (a nice length of reverb for this technique), sounding like this.
AUDIO 7
So let’s take a listen, and I think you’ll agree that the track has become instantly more interesting and spacious.
AUDIO 8
FINAL TIP:
when applying reverbs to any sounds, be aware of what frequencies are coming through, as the low mids are likely to clutter the mix or appear a bit ‘boomy’. If all else fails stick an EQ in line (either before or after the reverb) and filter out anything you don’t want to hear.
I hope you’ve found this tutorial useful. We’d love to hear from you with any comments on the mix itself, or any further suggestions you might add.
Author: Alex Pinkerton, for 16 Steps Music Production School (Rutile)
