I’ve spent at least 20 hours on this knowing that only experience will help somebody to master music correctly. And now I’m tired and would love to hear how the experts do it.

Essentially, I have an experimental dance floor song, but so far I have only been able to make the bassline and drums sound great in headphones and on a CD player – but not a warehouse rave or anything with substantial bass.

What it comes down to is the samples I used for the bass drum kick were not good enough, however I *believe* should be able to save this song. I’ve tried:

1. Compressor on the bassline with sidechain from the drum. This creates a wobbly sound and the bassline that my friends like goes out. Of course trying different settings adjusts it, but once dithered to 16-bit it seems to get really noticeable no matter what settings (POW/MBIT/etc)
2. Sub-bass plugin to re-inforce the kick drum with and without adlimit with and without a 12-48db highpass using the linear phase EQ starting at 40hz. I know this seems to defeat the purpose of the sub-bass plugin, but frequencies below 10hz will get cut off in export and that sonic energy is mostly rumble from my experience trying cuts of the track at raves. This sounds BETTER in the studio, but not putting in the highpass creates a very noisy final mix, because of the energy contained within those lower bass frequencies.
3. Using Ozone 4′s multiband dynamics at various stages to make the low end punchier. Sounds great in headphones and my studio monitors, but when using my 12″ Mackie SRM 450 as a stand in subwoofer and comparing it against a vinyl record on a standard, non-archival press demonstrates that it is still too muddy. Mixing the song is very difficult because there is little definition in the bass drum. Oh how I wish I wrote the drums with midi instead of samples.
4. Putting both the bassline and main drums into a single bus, lowering every level to -6db, putting a highpass on ‘everything else except the bass’ adding guitar amp distortion to the bassline to give it more definition in the high end and dropping the levels for the low end eq while simultaneously using Ozone on the drums with a limiter in hopes to keep the drums consistent while not killing off the bass, and being able to have headroom to maneuver the rest of the tracks’s levels so in the final stage the loudness doesn’t become a war against the limiter. This is what I’m on now.

There is probably a simpler way, and I’m over-thinking it. I’ve always had a problem with the bass drum not being floor pounding at all when played on a large system. How do you master a track destined to play on speakers big enough to crush you? It seems as though leaving the track as simple as possible and just putting a limiter works better than trying to maximize it[but I'm not saying about the disaster that are the re-releases of The Downward Spiral and the horridness of over-limiting]

From writing this, it seems like if only when the bass drum is limited and everything else is lowered in volume to the point where the output volume only reaches the limiter’s limit would allow for breathing room and mostly solve the problem, but then the small details in the song go unheard.

How sad it is that M-Audio has a seemingly happy base of users who enjoy their products, and yet they drag their feet on the drivers yet again. Perhaps they did not have a developer seed of Snow Leopard to work with, but there was plenty of indication that they would need to devote resources to make their drivers compatible. I was fortunate enough to use Tiger drivers with Leopard successfully, however I don’t wish to hack together a ‘working’ solution from the old 32-bit system panel.

I am more irked than I normally would be due to the hacked together setup I have going just to connect to my speakers. Without proper shielding, my cell phone ringing causes a buzzing and interrupts my work!

I’ve been considering what equipment I would want to re-create my studio with in a few months. The audio interface is where I’m stuck in this thought process. On one side, I do not need more than 2 or 4 phantom powered inputs, and on the other side I would enjoy an outboard mixing console to integrate with other units while still retaining a digital connection with my Mac Pro. There are plenty of options to choose from, and a great deal of investment to utilize effectively.