Over the last couple of years I've been putting a bit of dirt & crunch into some of my tracks (mainly the chilled yet heavy slow stuff) to go for that raw sound in the mix. Its hard to explain what I mean so I just use those 3 buzzwords but its nothing unique or cutting edge. You hear it in a lot of oldskool tracks in genres like underground Hip-Hop, Techno, Chillout, Jungle (eg 93-95 Dillinja) etc and I love how it sounds over classic drum machines & deep pure sub bass! For example you've probably heard tracks where the drums sound really krunchy especially when an Open-Hihat or Crash overlaps a Kick, or a Kick overlaps a bass note, or the bass just sounds like its too much for the speakers, I love it but I try not to get too dirty & abusive because my music is for chilling to 1st & foremost, even the heavy stuff!

Right now I've got 2 VST's I use for this effect: Fabfilter Saturn & U-He Satin. They're both great but Satin seems to be my "all purpose". I usually group a few of my drum tracks (eg, Kick, Open Hi's, Crash) and put a Satin over it. If I want to get really krunchy I'll try to put the bass in the same group and find a balance without going OTT. Satin can be so subtle that in certain situations you can even put it over the master but I prefer keeping things seperate for more control. Sidechain compression usually sounds nice over a krunchy track too but you can easily go too far.

I've had a lot of fun experimenting with this sound but I know this is only the tip of the iceburg! What do you guys do when you're going for that raw dirty sound in the mix? I'd love to hear some of your suggestions, ideas, tricks etc. I would list a few fave examples of tracks, artists, labels that push a lot of this sound but the threads TL:DR already LOL!

Peace

 

Last edited: Sep 19, 2015

D16 group's Decimort is really really nice for making lofi stuff. You can get that mpc3000 vibe quite easily. I can recommend Waves J37 too, as your have great control over flutter and such.

 

I love using multiple Aux sends from my drums and super crunching them up, using parallel processing with logic's bitcrusher on low bit rates and putting the mix at about 20 - 30 percent. And then using tape machines to make the drums real fat and punchy... Works a treat and means you have the clean sound of the drums with the extra crunch when the kicks and hats go together

Can't really say I would go for routing kicks and open hats together, I prefer to have my hats, snares, kicks and percs all in separate channels and then group them together as 1 channel. After this, use sends and then route the main drum channel and all the sends into another channel. Limiting and processing each main group as well, sounds awesomely fat

 

@iluvhiphop: Thanks man I'll have a look at this Decimort unit amd J37, they sound like what I need!

@V4nger: I like the sound of the method your talking about but can you go into a bit more detail on the steps in the 2nd paragraph? I don't know if I'm understanding it correctly. Do you keep each drum on its own channel then group certain ones together and finally send the grouped channels to an Aux's? I haven't done too much bussing other than standard sends/returns with channels & groups and the way its done in Logic always confused me man but I want to try this out in Ableton. Any way to push that fat krunchy sound, I want to give it a go!

One problem I have with my grouping method (say I have a few drum tracks all sitting nice in the mix, then I group them together with the bassline to get them to "interact" with eachother, krunching eachother up thanks to the Satin/Saturn on the group channel) it renders most of the EQ on the drums (esp. the lowcuts) undone because the Saturation adds all kinds of sub freq's to the drums (which I want to keep fairly free of anything around 50Hz to give room for the bass). I need to find some way of mashing the grouped drums together with the bass without mudding up the drums with sub frequencies. I can't do some low-cutting on the group channel because my B-line is in there too.

I think I explained that terribly man, even I can barely understand it, I'm WELL tired lol!

Thanks!

 

Last edited: Sep 20, 2015

bitcrushers are fun.

 

Sonitex 1260

http://www.toneprojects.com/products/plug-ins/sonitex-stx-1260/

/thread

 

Toneboosters Reelbus

http://www.toneboosters.com/tb-reelbus/

 

Love the SPL Twintube.

 

If you can jBridge, then TbT Tube Saturator is nice and free...http://hem.bredband.net/tbtaudio/archive/newtbtvstplugins.htm

 

Awesome, there's more plugins in old-tbt-vstplugins directory, anything from there?

 

Greasetube has a tube that glows. It gives you a greasy tube sound. You can find it in your link. TL Maximizer and TubeLimit do as advertised. Try them together for that perfect squashed, destroyed, "Moma where are you when I need you most," sound. You will cry, but science says tears are healthy.

 

Ah MAN, thanks for all these suggestions, I wasn't expecting so much to sink my teeth into!