dark screaming drum n bass, please advice for some mastering

Hello,

I love dnb music from panacea, here is a example: https://youtu.be/hEb6P8-xoS8?t=275 .

Now i try to make my own stuff, in a tradition some where in this corner.

Its surprisingly hard to fuck it up and make it scream, so that you still can “use” it in the end.

Maybe some one can tell me some tips for distortion like effects but keeping it crisp and clear.

Here is what i have so far:

http://vm68.crossvault.de/tmp/audio/dark%20dnb%202.mp3

TBH this sounds so much better to me than your panacea link… :wink:

Damn, I can’t listen to your stuff because my browser runs without abobe flash! Any other option to listen to it?

Tips for these “transparent” yet “screaming” basses…split the frequencies of the bass, and process bands individually. Where you split depends on the sound you like to have. You can also overlap, and not use the multiband send but sends and normal steep hp/bp/lp filters for defining the ranges, i.e. what gets passed on and which range of the result of that chain you wish to recombine with the others.

For example you can leave after first saturation stage the bass freqs cleaner, and maybe even add width the the upper range of it, and distort in a second path only the upper freqs (or the whole, and then hp filter hard). In my experience, the bass can be driven medium for more rumble and intrinsic compression, but needs chopping up the generated harmonics. The mids react very hard to drive with making stuff cloudy and shrill, so best to keep only slight saturation. The high freqs can be driven rather hard without mushing up, but need eqing to make them less piercing, and to get thrashy sound like in the yt vid you’ll need filtering/eqing to make the guitar cab like ringing action going on. You can also combine different distortions in each path. And as I’ve said for the mids to scream by a filter or similliar but come on transparent enough, you can keep the basic sound distorted only slightly, but can distort it again harder in another chain, which will add harmonics, and filter out the main mids and only keept those harmonics of it for further processing.

Also this can give options to make the sound more spacey by processing the bands differently, different chorus/phase/flanger effects, or notch filters lfoed in just one band, stuff like this. It’s a bit experimenting on how well the elements will sound together in the main mix. With depth/width action it can be overdone though, these techniques can make a sound big, but also way to artificial, cloudy and biteless if overdone. I’ve once tried to split a bass into 6 bands and chorus/distort every band individually, and it wasn’t fucked up so hard by the rather hard distortions anymore because of the seperation and stripping of harmonics, but sounded crap like some real low quality mp3 :ph34r: