Unwanted flanging

[obvakhi]

You know how sometimes you get that flange effect when you stack more than one of the same instruments together? It is more noticeable on kick drums.

Is there anyway to get rid of that? I heard somewhere that changing the phase should correct this... but I have no idea how or where to do it for audio tracks

[ski]

When you pile up multiple sounds (especially MIDI-based sounds) of the same kind, and especially percussion instruments (and especially especially kicks) you're going to get that sound.

 

Flipping the phase is not usually a remedy for that. That will probably do nothing but thin out the sound. You have several approaches available to you:

 

1) careful trimming of the start times of the samples (or the audio regions) to tighten up the attacks

 

2) changing the pitch of one or more of the kicks (depends on how many you have layered). But there should always be one kick that's your "main kick", and you'd adjust the pitch of the other sounds to work with the main kick. If you don't set at least one kick to be the main kick you'll be chasing your tail all over the place.

 

3) make sure that you never have two of the same kick from the same instrument playing at the same time. That's almost a surefire way to get that flanging sound.

 

There are other things you can try, but I'd start with those and see how it goes.

 

-=sKi=-

[obvakhi]

The thing is, I'm doing a remix but unfortunately do not have each individual audio tracks, so I have to make do with the entire song.

 

Well here's what I have set up for the kicks.

1. Kick drum A (Bottom end)

2. Kick drum B (Mid-Hi end)

3. Original song C (High-pass)

4. Original song C (Low-pass)

 

The flange effect is coming from the kick drums in 3 & 4, which is hard to edit because any changes will affect all the other instruments.

Any suggestions for that?

[Jope]

(...)

3. Original song C (High-pass)

4. Original song C (Low-pass)

 

The flange effect is coming from the kick drums in 3 & 4, which is hard to edit because any changes will affect all the other instruments.

Any suggestions for that?

 

So you feed the same track into one lowpass and one highpass filter in parallel? If you bypass the filters, does the phasing effect disappear? Usual IIR filters introduce phase shifting depending on frequency. Maybe you can use Linear Phase EQ instead of the filters. Or you fiddle about with sample delay on one path to shift the phasing into a range where it is less annoying.

[obvakhi]

So you feed the same track into one lowpass and one highpass filter in parallel? If you bypass the filters, does the phasing effect disappear? Usual IIR filters introduce phase shifting depending on frequency. Maybe you can use Linear Phase EQ instead of the filters. Or you fiddle about with sample delay on one path to shift the phasing into a range where it is less annoying.

 

Two different parts of the song are playing in 3 & 4 but the kick drums are still the same... so that's why I'm getting the flanging.

I'm just using a low-cut/high-cut on the regular channel EQ. Bypassing them will just double the amplitude and sound awful.

 

I'll try some of these suggestions tomorrow, but please let me know if there's anything more I could try.

 

-

[ski]

Apologies in advance if I'm not understanding this, but would it be possible for you to replace the kick with a new one that's just one sample? Or is the sound you're approaching so right-on-the-money that you want to exhaust all possibilities first?

[Jope]

(...) Two different parts of the song are playing in 3 & 4 but the kick drums are still the same... so that's why I'm getting the flanging.

 

So there's about nothing you could do about it because there's no fixed phase correlation between the kicks on the two parts (because they are most likely not played sample accurate).

One last suggestion: Try ducking one of these two tracks by the other one (send one to a bus, insert a compressor into the other track's channle strip, set the compressor's input to "Side Chain" and use the bus for sidechaining). You could use a lowpass filter in the compressor's sindechain (in the extended parameters) to make sure that mainly the kick will be used for ducking. But I guess it will be much effort to no avail.