Korg Kronos Sequencer - Mixing Bass etc.

[blazerunner]

Hello fellow Kronosers!

I had a new topic this week. It's about mixing bass on the Kronos.
The Kronos gives us a lot of options for mixing but depending on what you're doing sometimes you end up sacrificing effect slots.

I have songs I've completed where I've finished my basses on their separate track by using compressors and limiters to tame them.

I have songs where I've done nothing to the bass on the track itself but instead mixed the whole song in Total Effects with adding the compressor there and it tamed the bass very well with some minor sacrifice to the higher EQ levels but overall a much cleaner result.

I've always felt that the mixing and mastering features on the Kronos should not be married to the "effects chain" but instead completely separate to it like the EQ's where you can mix or master each track individually without using effects slots.

Reason being in a studio you are going to compress/limit tracks etc. but not all tracks will require the same settings. So you wouldn't compress an entire song with the same setting parameters unless required. I just believe you can get away with it on the Kronos because well...it's a Kronos and most tracks are going to be normalized as it is so compressing the entire song won't give you the same crazy results you'd get in a studio running separate instruments through a mixer.

I truly believe that was Korg's intention and why compression is treated like an "option" rather than a standard. The Sequencer seems to revolve around Midi and not the idea of recording Audio (as I find a lot of tools that would be helpful on the audio side are left off the table).

When I record in my Kronos the biggest issue I run into are recording basses. If it's an 808 thud, Moog bass, Sequential, guitar bass etc. the Kronos doesn't like it. You have to really play around finding the "sweet spot" when you record it to where it sounds like a bass but isn't distorted and you always have to put on "Compression" to bring it back to life.

I've experimented with this for a some time. Tried running external compressors to tame the signal before it hit the Kronos but still the same results. The Kronos doesn't like recording bass into its audio without the Kronos compressing it itself.

My best results where when I captured the bass as close to the Midi basses that the Kronos has. So that it's at a similar volume level and receives similar responses from adjusting the EQ's. Nothing ever goes to the point of distortion (just like the midi sounds) and then I can turn up the thud by adjusting the low end EQ and then finishing it off by bringing in compression and you get that nice tame deep bass that's well defined.

I don't know what experiments you guys have done or settings you used but I'd like to hear about them and learn more. recording bass seems like an art when you're not using a VST or a DAW to do it with/on.

Like I mentioned some years ago on the forum my Kronos is the center of my small studio. EVERYTHING runs through it and EVERYTHING gets recorded on it so mixing on it is life or death. I will never criticize the Kronos's abilities to mix,master and finalize. I've learned the hardway over time that it is plenty powerful and capable of provided professional sound results. If I can't get something to sound right coming out the Kronos... I know I made a mistake not the Keyboard.

[pete.m]

Interesting topic, and I agree with your thought that the mixing and mastering stuff might ideally be separate to the effects chain. That would be a nice upgrade...

I don't agree that the Kronos doesn't always handle bass well, though. I think it's probably as good as anything else but that recording bass is problematic with any set-up, because it so easily clogs up the picture. Go back to pre hip-hop and rave times - before the obsession with heavy bass started - and you'll hear that the records back then generally had far less bass and would probably have been simpler to mix.
The one time you would get really heavy bass on a recording - in reggae and dub - it worked because the musicians and producers gave it the space it needed. Listen to a good dub record, and there's acres of space in it. Drum and Bass stuck with that principle - particularly in its early days, you'd hear that there was very little going on in the middle of the sound field, just a lot of high end and some mighty trouser-flapping bass.

I try to keep my bass in check by using compression and cutting bits of the lower end of the bass, and also by EQ-ing out unnecessary lower frequencies on the other instruments. I also put the bass on a different out into the mixing desk, rather than keep it on the main L/R output.

These sorts of things do help, but yes - bass is a tough one to really nail. Like you, I'm interested to hear how other users choose to deal with it. Thanks for bringing it up.