Sub drop help

[Randall Nasworthy]

https://soundcloud.com/randy-nasworthy/reminiscing

I have two subdrops in this song. I know sub drops are kinda played out but I figured out how to do it and couldn't resist putting it in a song. But I can't get decent levels on the sub drop without it cancelling out the guitars. Its really distracting to the overall song.

So my question is what can I do about the cancellation?

Also are the sub drops up too high? Do they overpower the song?

One more question, how is the balance? The drums? Guitar? Bass?

You all probably have more trained ears than I do. I'm just getting the hang of balancing. Plus you'll have an outside perspective. Any advice or critique will be appreciated!

 

[gotet10]

Master your song, then put the mastered WAV in a project and put a basic Limiter on the master bus and put the output at -0.1 and THEN put in your sub drops. You can make them as loud as you want that way.

 

[Studdy]

I'm not sure I'd want to apply another limiter to my finished/mastered mix. I do like the idea of adding them after the track is mixed/mastered though. I mean that I sometimes mix the drops so they are not going through my stereo bus processing, they can really mess with your limiters/comps if they are not sitting just right. sometimes you want the drop to sort of "eat" the track so it over powers almost like a sidechain compression type of sound. just depends what you are going for.

 

[oz_golf]

need to remix whole of the song

 

[gotet10]

I dont mean clamping down on the limiter after you put the subdrops in. It's basically the "bootleg" way to make it sound right. Machine and Putney do this on a lot of their projects.

 

[Studdy]

No gain reduction at all? What is the limiters purpose then? especially if the mix has already been mastered clipping shouldn't be a problem?

 

[gotet10]

It keeps the subdrops from clipping the master that's already peaking at -0.1 db. You can literally make the sub drops as loud as you want to that way.

 

[Jahang]

Ahj posted this video a while ago. Check it out! It's super helpful.

 

[DullElysium]

I remember a good tip fir this one. Use 2 master buses. 1st one contains your mastering chain minus the limiter. then Send everything but the subdrops to the first one. The second one contains just the limiter. Send the 1st master bus AND the subdrop track to this one.

Remember that the subdrops will eat up everything if it's too loud. You shouldn't hear it if your speakers don't have proper low end. If you make the drops to be audible in speakers that don't have bass output, they will be loud as fuck and fuck up the other instruments.. Especially if the sample is a loooong one