i've always wondered one thing since i've started "analysing" older tracks (talking about early 90s and mid90s hard trance and underground/club music in general)
the synths and the patterns were all over the place and each song was kind of unique IMO. what i'm wondering is the following: many times, the bass plays together with the kick. what do i mean by this? well, sometimes some songs have more than a few synths functioning as a bass; sometimes they have a huge acid line going well into bass territory; sometimes they have an alternating/jumping classic pattern (octave down then up; with the octave down playing together with the bass); etc. etc.

now, i do know that unless there is a huge clash below certain frequencies, phase cancellation doesn't really happen, and if it does, it's not audible or doesn't affect the sounds too much. but in some cases, the synth is playing exactly at the same time as the kick.

so i was just wondering, like in the example track here (1:07 the synth bass comes in), why there's no phase issues? you can hear both the kick and the bass pretty well, and the lower octave plays exactly on the same beat as the kick. and i highly doubt they were concerned with phase issues and aligning samples by ms back in the day. is this just a matter of picking a kick that doesn't cancel itself when playing the synth/viceversa? sampling the synth so you always know the phase? etc. the kick seems to be hitting around G and the bass plays G as well.
towards the end, at 5:55, you can hear the bass without kick

i hope i dont have to explain why i havent mentioned sidechaining or volume automation or anything of the sort...
thanks

 

Back in the 90's a lot of studios used a TC Electronic Finalizer.. Is was essentially a mastering compressor. Everything got squashed to buggery, and it's probably why side-chaining eventually got so popular.

That track sounds like it went through a finalizer.

 

I've noticed that in many older tracks, the kick and bass sit much higher in tone compared to today's standards, where there's simply a lot more low end. Back then, it seems like producers weren’t as focused on the technical aspects of frequency separation. If the kick and bass clashed and caused issues like phase cancellation, they would likely adjust things by ear or just swap out sounds until it felt right, rather than using today's more precise techniques like sidechain compression or phase alignment to achieve a more balanced low end.

 

If there was phase cancellation/alignment issues, an option is to flip the polarity.

 

hi mate. yes, i've noticed it too. sometimes the true power and bottom end comes from the 909, or sometimes the bass is much louder and the kick is a soft sweep. and yes i think you're right, that's what i thought as well: "just swap out sounds until it felt right"

isn't this useless in 90% of the cases? flipping the polarity only really works when the sounds are almost completely cancelling each other

 

I think we tend to over-analyse things these days. In the 90's we'd just have everything going through some Mackie or Soundcraft mixer and if the kick needed to come up a bit we'd turn it up. Maybe the reason the kick was too low was a phase issue .. did it matter? Not so much - we'd just turn it up until it sounded right.

Now, I'm not saying we achieved the finest results that way but you can hear it in a lot of music of the time - it's all just jammed together through a mixer, bit of EQ and Compression here and there - done... move onto the next tune because you're buzzing.

 

On this example it is more a question of fundamental frequency.
Synth is one octave higher than the kick, so only the kick first harmonics may clash with synth.

 

it is definitely not the case in this track. did you have a listen? i also wrote it: the synth plays octave lower on beat, octave higher on off beat -- not exactly like that, sorry, but the lower notes are played together with the kick in any case

 

i still have my old vinyl & the mastering on some are atrocious! but i still payed for a copy back then, so it was a case of buy it! But todays standards are more advanced. I like to remaster some of the old vinyl but sometimes you can't polish a turd.

 

There's a couple of reasons for it that i can think of anyways. VCA and gate triggering was far tighter on even older digital gear so that can make up for any lack of phase anomalies. there was no buffer sizes or none of that nonsense to initiate a Note On or trigger like there is with VST SDK and other modern frameworks.

Atari's and the software used to sequence on them for those who used them (most all UK Dance music from the actual rave period as one prominent example)had very unique voice/channel handling which even though it never sounded like it, it treated all the channel triggering as if they was voiced monophonically. it determines priority of the note based on a number of things, so everythings not really playing on top of eachother ever, and on top of that, there is jitter which is taking away any predictability in the triggering which can draw your attention away from the phase "Issues".

On the reproduction side, most of the music of this period was ran through desks which had transformers which have their own way of handling low end signals and making them "marry"so to speak a lot better. not to mention playing back things through samplers and what they do at their encoding and decoding stages, and finally there was DAT, cassette, or R2R's (most likely the two former though)which did their own things to again massage low end, and at least draw your ear away from glaringly obvious phase related stuff.



they are definitely there and nobody was doing anything novel to address them, but there were things out of their control that was making it less of an issue, or disguising it as something else in some cases

 

I slowed the video down to 50%, and I'm honestly not sure, but I wonder if the low octave bass part is more of an illusion from kick design for the part prior to 5:55, and then at 5:55 ish when the kick stops, then the artist had a low octave bass note play in. The part I perceive as a lower octave bass note earlier on is louder when the kick is gone, so either there was some phase cancellation earlier, or that note wasn't really playing before and it's the sound design of the kick sounding like a bass note playing on the kick thump.

Really though, slow the video down to 50% if you haven't yet and just listen for yourself and see if you pick up anything.

 

Last edited: Oct 1, 2024

As OP said, you can hear the bassline around 5:55 and there's definitely a lower octave note that coincides with the kick.

Also, YT's audio slowdown algorithm is horrible, I wouldn't use it for anything musical as it adds more artifacts than it reveals anything.

 

Kick drum used to be a bass drum loooong time ago

 

I'd say your example shows good production hallmarks, but it's not that clear, because the bass' sub oscillator is only very slightly below the kick.
I'd recommend to have a look at Dr. Alban or the early Britney Spears breakthrough songs, produced by Denniz Pop (mentor of Max Martin). You will see a very well designed spectral distribution, where the kick has a steep, pronounced resonant peak somewhere in the range from 45 to 58 (depending on song/genre), but the bass is placed above (say 70-90) and a synthbass-suboscillator (in some cases the fundamental), at the half, which is then @35-45, therefore leaving room for the peak energy for the kick.

Some productions, like Imperio (N. Reichart) filled the whole bass and subbass range with the finely produced kick and only let the bass run above the kick.

You are underestimating the producers! Well, they did. Axel Breitung, the brain behind DJ Bobo's amazing female vocal sound, was famous for comping down to single syllables and building the choir from nothing.

And before, Quincy Jones productions, mixed by Swedien: look what is going on in Billy Jean. Very enlightening...

 

When you have zero talent as a producer, you become a plugin hoarder and a productions analyzer.

 

Backtired let us hear some of your productions.

 

Exactly this. We invested thousands to build a small studio to produce records. Alongside the monetary investment, we invested time learning and perfecting our craft.

Today's producers feel they only need a laptop, a few cracked plug-ins, and YouTube. Is bass getting in the way of the kick? Sidechain it because it's quick and easy and doesn't require any skill. (Despite amplitude modulation creating any number of sidebands that cloud the low end of a mix).

 

I mixed hundreds of projects in the 90s and would have been blown away to have access to what's available today. To answer the question, we just used EQ and got creative with low pass filters if there was a clash, or just pushed the faders in spots if we needed to. I used compression sparingly on instruments, whereas now everything is squashed and then the master mix is comp/limited as well. As dumb as this sounds, we weren't concerned with lower frequencies that much back then. You wanted to hear the bass notes and feel the kick, and that's it. Keep the low end out of the way of the other instruments. I would love to hear what early Yes, Rush, Genesis albums would sound like if they'd been recorded with current tech. Maybe someday AI will be involved in remixing/remastering. The world is changing fast.

 

thanks for all the answers.