I'm having issues with mixing my drums in a song to get that hard "boom bap" feel in my song. I'm using Logic 8 express mainly for hip-hop. I've purchased Logic 101 tutorial and have tried the section where the instructor "beefed" up the kick drum (this doesn't always work for me) Before entering the wonderful world of software I mixed my songs in my hardware (mpc 1000) and arrange in a live recording to one track in garage band or sound studio. As long as my input levels where good my mix kept the hard "boom bap" feel I desired. NOW that I'm using Logic 8 express, I'm tracking out my drums separately. When I mix my song, compress the kick and snare it sounds "decent to good" when playing back the mix in Logic BUT when I bounce my song to mp3 and listen to it in itunes, ipod or my car the drums in my mix tend to be at a lower level, sitting in the back ground instead of a hard hitting main charecter. Any suggestions?

Hi Conduct, You might like to consider checking out the 404: Mixing Electronica: [url]http://www.macprovideo.com/tutorial/prodElectro[/url] and/or 403: Mixing R&B: using?[url]http://www.macprovideo.com/tutorial/logic403[/url] Also, when you bounce your project what settings are you using? If you're going from 24bit to 16bit you could try using a different dither algorithm. Cheers Rounik

Thanks

Hi, I was having problems with getting a good strong kick drum sound to cut through the mix. I was told to use bucket loads of compression, but this just made things muddy. My solution was to: Use three instances of UltraBeat with the same settings. Send the kick for each to it's own AUX channel. I set one up with compression and EQ, One with just EQ and one with no plugins. I bypassed the compressor and limiter on the output channel Turned down all the faders on the other instruments and then adjusted the three kick Aux faders until the combined output peaked just under 0dB. I then brought the other instruments up again and when all was set I turned on the output compressor and Limiter again. I hope this helps.

Hey Darren thanks for the advise! I'm going to try your method this weekend. I have a couple of questions. Question 1 - What was your Compressor & Limiter settings? Question 2 - From your knowledge can Ultrabeat be used on drum line audio files that were imported or recorded into Logic from external hardware(mpc 1000)? I'm just getting my feet wet with Ultrabeat and plan to purchase the tutorial soon. From what I've explored I have to map out my drum hits (snare & kicks) in the "Drag & Drop" program selection, then replay the drum line in Logic in order to utilize Ultrabeat options. If I create a new audio track then import a drumline wav file I created, Ultrabeat doesn't come up as an option when trying to select it with in the channel strip. Thanks again!

Hi I usually use a threshhold of -9, gain of 0 and a ratio of 2:1 to start with and then tweak the settings until I like the sound. But I'm a beginner and maybe not the best person to follow yet. As for using MPC 1000 files in Ultrabeat I wouldn't know. I know you can import wav and aiff samples.