QUICK TIPS

1 Depending upon your monitoring, it can be tough to decipher a kick drum’s key. To solve that, simply throw a saturation plugin on the kick, overdrive it into hell, then audition its bloated, tonal timbre against the melodic parts in your track.

2 Sub bass is non-directional, and most clubs output a mono signal, so keep subs central for maximum low-end power and focus. Widen a high-passed parallel signal to give subs width.

3 Use an analogue-style high-pass filter to remove unwanted sub from a bass part, then overdrive the filter to create warmth and emphasis around the cutoff point.

4 When synthesizing sub bass, start and end clicks at non-zero crossings are annoying. Raising amp envelope attack and release can relieve those pops a bit, but this can remove front-end impact. The best – but most time-consuming – solution is to bounce your sub part to audio, then chop and fade edges to remove clicks.