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3. Mixing a minimal house beat in Cubase
1
Drag 909 kick.wav, 626 clap.wav, 808 clave.wav, 808 open hat.wav, 606 open hat.wav and 808 tom.wav onto separate audio tracks in Cubase, and set up a loop around the bar they’re in. The problem with this material is that the 606 open hi-hat is very long and lazy-sounding, and doesn’t fit with the minimal vibe we want.
3
Now that we’ve tidied up the hats, it’s clear that the 808 tom needs tightening up as well! Add an EnvelopeShaper to its channel and turn its Release down to -20. The tom’s low end is interfering with the kick a little, so add a Studio EQ from the EQ folder and use a low cut to take off 7dB at 100Hz. (Audio: Shaped envelopes)
5
With the original reverb dealt with, we can now add our own. Create an FX Channel track and put REVerance, from the Reverb folder, onto it. Select the Catacombe preset, then activate a send routing to the reverb on the 626 clap channel. The character of the sound is right, but it’s a bit big for our needs.
2
Add an EnvelopeShaper from the Dynamics folder as an insert effect, and turn the Release knob down to -20. The hi-hat is too loud, so turn the Output knob down to -4dB while you’re at it. The 808 open hi-hat needs tightening up, so add an EnvelopeShaper to its track as well – set its Release to -13.0 and Output to -4dB.
4
The handclap sample we’ve used has a little bit of a reverb tail on it, which we can get rid of using a gate. Add Cubase’s Gate effect from the Dynamics folder and set the Threshold at -35dB. This completely cuts out the reverb tail while leaving the body of the sound intact.
6
Turn REVerance’s Size parameter down to 30. The reverb also has a heavy pre-delay on it; get rid of this by turning the Pre-delay down to 10. This reverb can help us make the rest of the beat sound less dry, so let’s use it on some of the other tracks. Apply it to the tom and both hi-hat channels also. (Audio: Reverb)
7
Our beat now has a more minimal feel, but it’s pretty quiet. Let’s boost its volume and enhance its character with some buss processing. Add a Group Channel track, route all the audio tracks to it, and put a VintageCompressor from the Dynamics folder on it as an insert effect.
9
Thankfully, we can remedy this using the EnvelopeShaper. Add it to the 909 kick track and turn the Release up to 4.0. We can also make the transient a little bit more punchy by turning the Attack parameter up to 2.2. Put a SoftClipper from the Distortion folder after the EnvelopeShaper.
11
Add Pitch Correct from the Pitch Shift folder at the very start of the kick’s insert chain, and turn the Transpose parameter in the Correction section down to -2.0 semitones. Turn Formant Preservation off to avoid any extra unnecessary processing. This puts the kick at the right pitch without messing up its transients or low end too much. (Audio: Tuned kick)
8
Turn the Input knob up to 8 and the Release time down so that it’s at about 8 o’clock. This gives the beat a more upfront feel, but without driving it too hard and pushing it into techno territory. At this stage, though, it becomes clear that the kick drum is a little lacking – it’s very short and the low end is suffering as a result.
10
Set the SoftClipper’s input to 4.7dB. This sacrifices some of the kick’s dynamic range for loudness, but the kick was very dynamic, so this is a worthwhile tradeoff. Let’s try lowering the pitch of the kick to get a bigger sound. If we were working on this track from scratch we could simply adjust the pitch of the sample, synth or drum machine instrument that it’s played from, but as we’re using bounced tracks, we’ll have to fix it in the mix.
12
Duplicate the bar-long beat seven times to create an eight-bar section, then add RoomWorks from the Reverb folder as an insert on the 808 clave track. Set the Reverb Time to 3.12s and automate the Mix parameter to morph the clave from a wet background sound to a dry foreground one. (Audio: Reverb automation)