013: PRETTY SWEET — How to thrive as a duo, making your drums pop, and more.

013: PRETTY SWEET — How to thrive as a duo, making your drums pop, and more.

For this week's episode I sat down with Pretty Sweet, a production duo powerhouse based out of LA and Salt Lake City. The two met at a Troi Boi show years ago and have since combined their plethora of music experience to create a unique, heavy hitting, energy packed signature sound. These dudes shared tons of knowledge and insight throughout this episode, so make sure you listen to this one end to end!

LISTEN TO BASS CAMP EPISODE 013 WITH PRETTY SWEET

SUPPORT Pretty Sweet: Soundcloud | Spotify | Instagram | Twitter

EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS:

Their experience at ICON Collective @ 12:00:

  • You get out of it exactly what you put into it
  • Insight industry heavy hitters (Disciple Records Mastering Engineer, Steve Duda, many more)
  • Finding your flow state

Hip Hop Influences @ 25:30:

  • Alcoholics
  • Atmosphere
  • LP (from Run the Jewels)
  • Kendrick Lamar
  • J Cole
  • Drake
  • Token
  • Da Baby

Transitioning from FL Studio to Ableton Live @ 31:00

Benefits of working as a Duo @ 35:20

Surviving as a Duo @ 40:30

Drum tips @ 43:50:

  • Hold back your closed hats when the snare hits
  • Don't overdo your drums processing, most samples you use are already heavily processed
  • Slight coloring saturation on the drum bus can bring the sounds together and make them pop
  • Don't over layer, find the right samples and present them well
  • Use reverb to push sounds "deeper" or "closer" in your overall mix

Bass Processing @ 49:50:

  • Make a "foundation" sound (by using a preset or by making a simple patch) to make what they call a "2008 type of sound".
  • Bounce this sound to audio, and then stretch, manipulate, resample
  • Add some creative post processing from there and try to arrive at a result that is unique that not too crushed (white noise heavy)
  • Use LFOs with different rates to create unique grooves to spark ideas
  • Pay attention to where there aren't things. The songs that slap the hardest are usually the simplest

Pretty Sweet's Favorite Plugins @ 56:08:

Bouncing back from failure @ 1:02:20

 

FULL EPISODE:

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