in this lesson we're gonna talk about how to get your 808 to stand out and
make it translatable on systems hi-fi systems like laptops cell phones it may
not have the bass response that your monitors or your car stereos have so
there's a misconception out there that sometimes the reason why you can't hear
certain 808s as much or they're not as noticeable is because they're not as
loud in the mix so naturally people just turn the 808 up really really
loud and think that that's going to be heard on everything the reality and this
science behind it or the the mixing science we'll say is an 808 typically is
hitting you know below 120 Hertz down in this lower range so speakers they can
play that back no problem now these smaller systems most of them
can't play back anything below you know 150 some of them even 200 so it
physically can't replicate the sound of the 808 if you're in that really low end
the only thing that's going to play back is some of this really low mid and then
if you have any high frequency information in this specific 808 sound
of course that's going to be heard so this being the case what we want to do
is we want to separate the low end from any low mid and the high end of right
away track so I'm going to duplicate our 808 channel here and I'm going to drag
it down and then let's call this 808 low and this is going to be 808 high and
it's okay to have the sidechain on both of these that's okay it's gonna route it
there you don't necessarily have to sidechain the high end once we get that
done but let me show you how to do this first so first thing we need to do is
get rid of all the high frequency information
on 808 low so we're gonna go down here and just make sure and take note of
where you make this cut we're gonna start rolling off everything below let's
say 150 and we can just take another one here make sure that we're cutting a lot
of that stuff out okay so now let's just take a listen so you can hear by doing
that we didn't fundamentally change anything about the sound there we're
just taking out some of this stuff that we're gonna be processing on this 808 high
so take a note that we made that cut at 138 we can actually just copy this let's
just copy this over and then we'll paste it to this and what we're gonna do is
we're just gonna do the opposite so we're gonna roll this one off at 138 and
I'm just doing this so I can get a better visual here okay great so now
to 138 so let's hear what is there it's not much
so now we have the 808 low and 808 high separated
and once we've done that we're gonna heavily effect this frequency and
emphasize it so that these lower excuse me these high five systems without lower
frequency capability we're gonna make this more audible so let's go ahead and
let's put a distortion on this we're gonna do let's just use a stock logic
Distortion you could also bit crush it which gives
you an interesting effect but we might do that one on the next beat let's try
distortion and let's just heavily drive this thing
pretty cool right so the last thing that we want to do is I want to widen this so
that our stereo or our headphone users are going to get even more of an
emphasis on this particular low mid frequency for our 808
so let's try and use a widening plugin from Mathew Lane it's called Stereo
Delta you all should check this out it is a cool one
so we basically just made this high end of our 808 3d so if we take that stuff
off
and with
now for the fun stuff let's mix these back in together so I'm gonna bring this
down and then we're gonna make some adjustments here
it's up to you how much you want to drive it it's personal taste
obviously you're hearing a lot of really aggressive distortion and drive on the
808 these days which is fine for this beat I just want to kind of tuck it in
but again it's just going to give us that emphasis we need for the 808 on
hi-fi systems now one thing you do want to take into account when you are
shifting some of the EQs and processing your 808 or any instrument in this way
is to make sure that we don't have any kind of phase issues so the easiest way
to do that is just to switch your mix into mono so you can use any kind of
mono plugin right now I'm just going to switch it on on ozone and let's just
double check and make sure that everything is sounding okay and if you
hear something disappear for instance if you heard the 808 high go away completely
then we've got a little bit of a phase issue but let's play it back I don't
think that's the case
nopes everything is okay but again just general practice when you are spreading
things out and processing things in this way it's always good to check mono
compatibility