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Message: [QUOTE="Bombastus, post: 90880, member: 2178"] Krum-B lets you move the crossover anywhere from 60 to 400 Hz, and it opens at 150 Hz, which is a number almost nobody questions. That default is a reasonable guess for a mix, not a decision about your 808. Most advice on multiband compression says roughly the same thing, which is to avoid slicing a primary instrument in half and to trust your ears. Fine as far as it goes. The split is doing something specific and countable on a bass part. Everything below it gets treated as the sub layer, and everything above it gets the character processing, including any saturation the plugin offers. So [B]the point where you split the low end[/B] decides which harmonics get dirty and which stay clean. [HEADING=2]The 150 Hz default hides most of your harmonics[/HEADING] An 808 tuned to E1 has its fundamental at 41.20 Hz. Its second harmonic lands at 82.4 Hz, its third at 123.6, and its fourth at 164.8. Set the crossover to 150 and count what happens. The low band swallows the fundamental plus the next two harmonics. The high band is left with the fourth harmonic and everything above it, which on a mostly sinusoidal 808 is very little signal. Then you turn up the grit and wonder why nothing changed. Nothing changed because there was almost nothing above the split to work on. Retune the same 808 to C2 at 65.41 Hz and the picture moves. Second harmonic 130.8, third harmonic 196.2. The third now crosses into the high band, and your saturation suddenly has something to bite on. Same plugin, same setting, different result, purely because the note changed. Producers who tune 808s down to C1 at 32.70 Hz have even less room to work with. Drop the crossover to its 60 Hz floor and the low band holds the fundamental and nothing else, which is sometimes exactly what the part needs and sometimes leaves you with no weight left to control. That is why you check the tuning before you touch the crossover. You can run the numbers yourself, or you can watch it happen on [B][URL='https://goldmidi.com/community/threads/rockheyday-introduced-the-krum-b-bass-compressor.76233/']a compressor that draws the split across its own analyzer[/URL][/B], where the guide line sits directly over the harmonic stack. [HEADING=2]Crossover filters change the sound before the compressor does[/HEADING] Splitting bands is not free. Linkwitz-Riley crossovers, the standard choice for this job, sum back to a flat amplitude response, but the summed output behaves as an all-pass network, so phase rotates smoothly through the crossover region even while the level stays put. A fourth-order Linkwitz-Riley output sits 180 degrees away from the input at the crossover point. An eighth-order design rotates all the way around to 360. Group delay stops being constant above second order as well. Step-response overshoot runs around 15 percent on a fourth-order design and roughly 30 percent on an eighth-order one. On an 808 that overshoot matters more than the number suggests. The click at the front of the note is often the exact thing you are trying to shape, and the filter has already altered it before the detector sees a single sample. The practical response is simple. Move the split away from the densest part of the note where you can, and bypass with the levels matched before you decide the compression helped. [HEADING=2]Bass guitar wants a different split than a tuned 808[/HEADING] Low E on a bass guitar is also 41.20 Hz, but the instrument keeps producing usable energy far above that. String noise, body resonance, and pick attack put real content well past 2 kHz. So a 150 Hz split works nicely on a played bass. Almost all of the instrument's character sits in the high band, ready for saturation, while the low band handles the weight on its own. An 808 gives you nowhere near that spread. It is close to a sine wave with a short transient on the front, so most of its energy sits under 150 Hz whatever note you program. Push the split down toward 60 or 90 Hz on those parts. That hands the second and third harmonics to the high band, where saturation can build the upper content that phone speakers and laptop drivers actually reproduce. The failure runs the other way too. Set the crossover near the top of its range at 400 Hz and an 808 lands almost entirely in the low band, the high band goes quiet, and you are left with an ordinary full-band compressor and a saturation control that does nothing at all. [/QUOTE]

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