My mixes suck. I need serious help.

[CRDM]

What rktic said above has been the same experience for me. Trying to focus on less and get the basics right, and with doing less has made the whole music making process better. It also helps me realise ideas in a better way because if somethings not where I want it to be sound wise at the beginning but it's got some potential, I am getting more confident in knowing I can get it there later on and just focus on getting things working naturally and experimenting with ideas.

For that rougher around the edge sound, the most important part imo will be the sound choice. If your fighting sounds that weren't good choices it's going to make things tougher. There's not really one answer to getting that sound, again it's cumulative, you'll have to develop your own and every mix will be different. That DJ plant Texture track has what sounds like a break sampled, some 808 samples in it. It's definitely got the rough around the edges sound and some noise and textures in there that all contribute to the aesthetic.

There's lots of ways of creating a not so clean asthetic but it's all just a matter of balance in context of the song and choosing the right sounds. By the sounds of it you know some processes that can help gain that kind of aesthetic and less clean sounding mixes, distortion, saturation, downsampling, and Resampling through things for example. Still if you use too much of this stuff the mix can fall to shit, as with anything in mixing.

So going back to keeping it simple. Really work on getting the basics right and know that by practising each part of the process and your tools your tracks will start to sound more and more in vein of the tracks your showing. That has been my experience at least, in the last year I've spent a lot of time practising getting balance and space in my mixes and I'm finding getting an aesthetic that I'm happier with is becoming simpler as it's like a sweetener rather than a fixer. All a working progress though and there's always ways to improve!

It might be worth posting a few mixes of yours that your talking about, could listen through and hear what your talking about.

[Lost to the Void]

even a dirty sound requires "clean" mixing, more so in fact.

If adding saturation is causing mix issues, then you should make sure that EQ is at the end of your mixing chain on each channel, otherwise you are bypassing some of the EQ with the saturation.

[Plyphon]

Thanks CDRM,

I think the 'basic's right' is where I'm at. I've been trying to use buss processing (saturation) to try and make all my shit sound together and similar, but this is ruining the mix. I need to focus more on getting the sounds sounding right in their individual channels and just use buss processing really subtly rather than as an obvious distortion effect. Thats my challenge tonight anyway.

Resampling is always fun, twice through TAL Sampler and shit sounds gritty. Might have to start doing that on everything maybe.

Great advice thanks. I'm going to stop composing until I nail this technical bit as it's really a bummer when your shit doesn't sound anywhere in the ballpark of how you want it to feel.

Here is a track, can't embed as it's a private link. It's also a work in progress, no judgsies!

https://soundcloud.com/futrohouz/octobe ... -4/s-JhZWR

[CRDM]

Thanks CDRM,

I think the 'basic's right' is where I'm at. I've been trying to use buss processing (saturation) to try and make all my shit sound together and similar, but this is ruining the mix. I need to focus more on getting the sounds sounding right in their individual channels and just use buss processing really subtly rather than as an obvious distortion effect. Thats my challenge tonight anyway.

Resampling is always fun, twice through TAL Sampler and shit sounds gritty. Might have to start doing that on everything maybe.

Great advice thanks. I'm going to stop composing until I nail this technical bit as it's really a bummer when your shit doesn't sound anywhere in the ballpark of how you want it to feel.

Here is a track, can't embed as it's a private link. It's also a work in progress, no judgsies!

https://soundcloud.com/futrohouz/octobe ... -4/s-JhZWR

Don't have to stop composing, you can practise while your making stuff, it's a gradual improvement and all good practise. What I've found really helpful is like I said before, having a week or so when you just focus on one area like eq for example. That way you can make real advances in those areas and it will help towards the aesthetic your talking about. If your saturating the busses and it's not happening for you just stop it for a while.

If everything's balanced and your eq strokes are making the mix sound balanced and in a nice space, when you saturate that your enhancing the good that's there, then you may need to cut a bit that's been added, all about balance. If your saturating your busses but your not happy with what's there before it's less likely going to be an enhancement and could bring out bad parts of each sound. By having the right sounds to begin with, all processes will become simpler because your not fighting a poor sound.

TAL sampler is great, running everything through it twice is definitely going to degrade things and can be fun but I wouldn't get attached to this or that idea will get my tracks there. It's a sum of all the parts.

The track you posted I think could be improved just with eq and balancing the levels. The hat seems loud and a bit harsh and might just be a case of lowering the volume. This makes other elements seem a bit quiet. It also sounds quite compressed and the mid range feels scooped. The whole track could sound warmed up with some more mid range presence and the tops being reined in.

I've spent this whole year focusing on this and I've heard my tracks improve, not quickly though. If you follow the suggestions here and work at improving your understanding of balance and space within in a track things will certainly improve over time.

[rktic]

Thanks CDRM,

I think the 'basic's right' is where I'm at. I've been trying to use buss processing (saturation) to try and make all my shit sound together and similar, but this is ruining the mix.

I'm using that on parallel busses for low, mid and high stuff individually. More granular control over the transients with an additional EQ and compressor. So I'm keeping the punch of the subtly compressed "dry" busses and add mostly "body" (fast attack, fast release) from the saturated ones.

[jacksonick]

http://glowcast.co.uk/blog/2015/04/musi ... mpression/

someone has got to have posted that already, sorry. Good read though.

[Southpaw]

Thanks CDRM,

I think the 'basic's right' is where I'm at. I've been trying to use buss processing (saturation) to try and make all my shit sound together and similar, but this is ruining the mix.

I'm using that on parallel busses for low, mid and high stuff individually. More granular control over the transients with an additional EQ and compressor. So I'm keeping the punch of the subtly compressed "dry" busses and add mostly "body" (fast attack, fast release) from the saturated ones.

That sounds interesting, can you elaborate? Do you mean that in terms of a sort of multiband saturation or do you mean that you're bussing low/mid & high elements rather than say a whole drum mix.

[Mattias]

The main biggest "mixing issue" must be that people toss stuff together and force it work with processing instead of selecting their sounds and elements of the track carefully from start, tune it together, balance the levels nicely and have 90% of the work done right away.

[RWise]

The main biggest "mixing issue" must be that people toss stuff together and force it work with processing instead of selecting their sounds and elements of the track carefully from start, tune it together, balance the levels nicely and have 90% of the work done right away.

^^^this^^this^^this..


I think sometimes people can forget that techno is genre revolved around sound design. Work on your sounds and then work on them some more. Like Mattias said, you'd be amazed how little corrective processing you need to do when the sounds are right in the first place. E.g you might think your kick and bass need a ton of eqing to fit together when it probably means you need to change the kick drum or tune it to harmonically fit better with the bass.

If you find yourself having to process a sound to death to try and make it fit in the mix, chances are the sound is wrong. So try another sound and you can start to bypass the millions of eqs you have on the channel strip..

[Southpaw]

The main biggest "mixing issue" must be that people toss stuff together and force it work with processing instead of selecting their sounds and elements of the track carefully from start, tune it together, balance the levels nicely and have 90% of the work done right away.

This is what I was trying to get at earlier on in the thread. Lots of basic stuff can be sorted out with the right source sounds in the right place and knowing what frequencies you're imparting, using clever separation of those frequencies via note placement or inversions of chords/stabs etc. It goes such a long way when everything is 'singing together'.

I can never really get that super duper last 10 to 15% on my set up due to being in a less than ideal acoustic environment but it's mostly the low end and usually I just play it safe as far as that goes. But I do everything that's been mentioned in the thread and I generally feel ok about my mixes. When I first got into music, one of my main mix issue was simply adding too much stuff. It's still easily done even now.

[Southpaw]

Maybe. It's possible!

For what it's worth, I'm after a mix that feels like these tracks:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QafWm-AskKY

or

https://soundcloud.com/10-pills-mate/dj ... llsmate003

So a bit rougher round the edges, but not full on lofi. Just not "clean" tech house basically. The 4th track on that DJ Plant Texture EP is particularly appealing to me.

I listened to the Speed Boat Youtube clip. Deep House in the modern 90's vein, edging on lo-fi but leaning more towards getting an 'aged' sampler feel. Are you not just on about acquiring a certain aesthetic quality rather than talking mix issues?

That type of sound used to happen quite naturally when most of your source sounds were sampled into/and returned from old Akai stuff like the S1000/S1100, drums have like a papery film on them and a bit of gain on something like an old Mackie and just low/mid/hi eq is all you had if you were a bit skint.

You don't need to go out and start buying old samplers for colouration, it's addictive, there's lots of stuff you can do if that's what you're looking for. I guess that's a different subject because at the end of the day, it's still gotta be well balanced and mixed right?

I might be wrong but maybe you're using 'shiny new' sounds and then trying to force them to take on a different sonic identity and along the way, you are making your own mix issues by trying to force those sounds into the aesthetic quality and the type of vibe you want?

There's lots of ways to get a more lo-fi 'under-produced' sound, you don't have to smash stuff through saturation. A bit of noise, avioding new, polished drum samples ( some of the old sample cd's might not go amiss ) A lot of it is hi cut, some tracks I have in this vein don't have much above like 12k, even 10k at times, maybe even less on certain mix elements. Some steep cut off points and it sounds like they have eq'd into that to grab a bit of bite at the cut off point.

You can get similar 909 kick sounds through Soundtoys Decapitator. TAL Sampler is very good for dumping parts into and experimenting with. Sonitex STX-1260 is a nice plugin for textural lo-fi stuff, very versatile.

[Plyphon]

I might be wrong but maybe you're using 'shiny new' sounds and then trying to force them to take on a different sonic identity and along the way, you are making your own mix issues by trying to force those sounds into the aesthetic quality and the type of vibe you want?

Yeah, this sounds like massively my problem tbh. This thread has been eye opening on a few levels, I had another play tonight and the mix feels like its coming together easier but because I'm still doing the above I've still got the same issues I had.

I think I need to go even further back, back to my sound source selection... Time to dig out some vinylistics sample CDs...

Maybe I'm barking up the complete wrong tree with saturation and distortion. I don't have Decapitator but I do have D16 Decimort which I think does a similar job.

[rktic]

That sounds interesting, can you elaborate? Do you mean that in terms of a sort of multiband saturation or do you mean that you're bussing low/mid & high elements rather than say a whole drum mix.

Sure!

I've got my drum bus and all other tracks, maybe bussed, maybe individually. Depends on my decision wether they "belong together" or not. No science here, gut decision. Well, not 100% - sometimes there are midrange tracks that communicate together, sometimes there aren't.

Everything is already balanced, transients, dynamics and space is already there.

My idea with the parallel busses is adding energy and loudness without affecting the original punch. If I'd throw the entire mix into one singular bus pumping and all sorts of artefacts are likely to be introduced. Instead, I'm running the low end material like kick, low percussion, bassline through one bus. Same with the mid and high end material. Working that way allows me to bypass kick-based pumping and add only the amount of loudness I need in the particular frequency area.

Now, I don't have any rules about how to distort those busses individually. Except, quite a lot. Then I'm pushing up the busses until the effect becomes apparent and problems occur. There might be phase issues. Some transients interfering with the punch of the unprocssed material. I'll try to minimize these effects with EQs, compression or something like Cableguys volumeshaper. Then I bring the entire bus down to nil again and keep raising the fader until the additional loudness becomes apparent.

For the mids I might also give the 4khz a positive kick on the sidebands to increase the stereo depth.

What this gives me is much more control over the overall loudness and energy that's going on without fucking up the balance.

Been using that eg here:

That particular track didn't need much mastering, just a bit of glueing. I achieved the loudness beforehand already.

[Lost to the Void]

The main biggest "mixing issue" must be that people toss stuff together and force it work with processing instead of selecting their sounds and elements of the track carefully from start, tune it together, balance the levels nicely and have 90% of the work done right away.

This is what I was trying to get at earlier on in the thread. Lots of basic stuff can be sorted out with the right source sounds in the right place and knowing what frequencies you're imparting, using clever separation of those frequencies via note placement or inversions of chords/stabs etc. It goes such a long way when everything is 'singing together'.

I literally made that point in the second post in this thread and it has now been repeated about 3-4 times.

Some serious mansplaining going on here.

[Southpaw]

That sounds interesting, can you elaborate? Do you mean that in terms of a sort of multiband saturation or do you mean that you're bussing low/mid & high elements rather than say a whole drum mix.

Sure!

I've got my drum bus and all other tracks, maybe bussed, maybe individually. Depends on my decision wether they "belong together" or not. No science here, gut decision. Well, not 100% - sometimes there are midrange tracks that communicate together, sometimes there aren't.

Everything is already balanced, transients, dynamics and space is already there.

My idea with the parallel busses is adding energy and loudness without affecting the original punch. If I'd throw the entire mix into one singular bus pumping and all sorts of artefacts are likely to be introduced. Instead, I'm running the low end material like kick, low percussion, bassline through one bus. Same with the mid and high end material. Working that way allows me to bypass kick-based pumping and add only the amount of loudness I need in the particular frequency area.

Now, I don't have any rules about how to distort those busses individually. Except, quite a lot. Then I'm pushing up the busses until the effect becomes apparent and problems occur. There might be phase issues. Some transients interfering with the punch of the unprocssed material. I'll try to minimize these effects with EQs, compression or something like Cableguys volumeshaper. Then I bring the entire bus down to nil again and keep raising the fader until the additional loudness becomes apparent.

For the mids I might also give the 4khz a positive kick on the sidebands to increase the stereo depth.

What this gives me is much more control over the overall loudness and energy that's going on without fucking up the balance.

Been using that eg here:

That particular track didn't need much mastering, just a bit of glueing. I achieved the loudness beforehand already.

Whoa, cool track, there's a lot of things about that I like. Sounds great through my headphones.

Sounds really interesting, just trying to get my head around it but I've had a smoke so that's not gonna happen tonight I've got a bit of tunnel vision recently, I thought I had somethings covered in a clever way but I'm contemplating new routings now. Thanks for that, will get back when I'm more alert.

[rktic]

I literally made that point in the second post in this thread and it has now been repeated about 3-4 times.

Maybe you didn't make it sound complicated enough

The super important basic shizzle! Way too overlooked.

[Southpaw]

The main biggest "mixing issue" must be that people toss stuff together and force it work with processing instead of selecting their sounds and elements of the track carefully from start, tune it together, balance the levels nicely and have 90% of the work done right away.

This is what I was trying to get at earlier on in the thread. Lots of basic stuff can be sorted out with the right source sounds in the right place and knowing what frequencies you're imparting, using clever separation of those frequencies via note placement or inversions of chords/stabs etc. It goes such a long way when everything is 'singing together'.

I literally made that point in the second post in this thread and it has now been repeated about 3-4 times.

Some serious mansplaining going on here.

I doubt anybody reads the entire thread from front to back once they have already entered it, only the recent posts. So there's a tendencey to forget what has already been covered even if you do intend to come in from a different angle. By your definition, all threads should be closed as soon as one person covers the entirety of the topic which kinda defeats the freedom of forum discussion no?

[rktic]

I doubt anybody reads the entire thread from front to back once they have already entered it, only the recent posts.

Add that to the list of things I hate.

[Southpaw]

I doubt anybody reads the entire thread from front to back once they have already entered it, only the recent posts.

Add that to the list of things I hate.

Why?

The main biggest "mixing issue" must be that people toss stuff together and force it work with processing instead of selecting their sounds and elements of the track carefully from start, tune it together, balance the levels nicely and have 90% of the work done right away.

This is what I was trying to get at earlier on in the thread. Lots of basic stuff can be sorted out with the right source sounds in the right place and knowing what frequencies you're imparting, using clever separation of those frequencies via note placement or inversions of chords/stabs etc. It goes such a long way when everything is 'singing together'.

I literally made that point in the second post in this thread and it has now been repeated about 3-4 times.

Some serious mansplaining going on here.

You were talking about live bands, classical music & conventional music. I was on about compositional strategy to avoid potential mix issues, inversions, note/frequency placement and whether certain notes - like root notes were necessary. I'm not quite sure why you are coming across like a prick but hey ho !

[rktic]

I doubt anybody reads the entire thread from front to back once they have already entered it, only the recent posts.

Add that to the list of things I hate.

Why?

Cause every thoughtful answer needs efforts. And stepping over them is kinda missing the point of asking in the first place?