Hoping to get a bit of feedback on some tracks I’ve put together recently and some advice on which direction to head in. I’ve started to get the hang of the 70/140bpm and 100-110bpm stuff but I’m finding it a bit harder to construct the dnb tunes.
I’ve got my head wrapped around the song structure of 87 but i just cant seem to get the songs to not sound a little bit abrasive to the ears, any sort of criticism or pointers is welcome.
This post is very long to read and there is a lot of music in it. Personally I won’t be reading or clicking, sorry, but there’s just too much for me, you’re a stranger as a person and I don’t know that I want to dive into your life so heavily atm. Maybe consider cutting it down into a few shorter posts?
Haha yeah I kind of went a bit overboard with the backstory and was actually in the process of rewriting it as you commented, thanks for taking the time to make the recommendation
Also its probably worth mentioning that i’ve only just started to delve into the mastering aspect of things and all of the tracks I’ve made so far are still pretty raw so any advice on the best way to wrap my head around that would be welcome.
As far as mastering goes the first step is the mix, so try not to run before you walk if that’s the case. Took me years to learn and I’ve got a long way to go, but some people get it faster than others, so don’t feel discouraged by what I said.
I’ll give you a run down of my methods, other people have their own. Best thing is to read up and mix/match the ideas that seem good and work best for you. There’s a good number of threads covering the subject in the production subforum and there will probably be more people coming to this thread willing to give advice.
Here’s a good place to start your independent reading:
Ideally you want your raw track to peak somewhere between -6 and -3 dB, that way you have headroom for mastering. Bounce it to wav and open it in a new project/session/whatever term your DAW goes by. Then you want to split it into low (0 to 200hz), mid (roughly 200hz to 6khz), and hi (wherever the middle ends to 20khz) on three separate tracks. The bands are pretty flexible depending on the tune and how you want to work on it though. I usually use a preset and link the band endpoints to a macro of some sort for easy control.
From here I go into compression for each band. I like to keep the kicks louder than the sub so that they cut through nicely, but you should sort that out in mixing first, then use compression to reduce the difference if need be. For the other bands I ussually compress about half way up the loudest sound (it helps to use some kind of compressor/limiter with dynamic range display).
After that I get into the stereo separation settings, I was told by a few people that panning on subs and kicks is known to make systems behave undesirably, so I avoid it unless I’m going for something specific. The low band is fully mono, and then I tweak the mids and his to how I want them to sound and sometimes add things like delay and reverb to them.
I usually high pass at about 30Hz with a lump from the Q, just to keep things in decent range but still vibing. Below 20hz is inaudible to most humans so going lower usually just means that you’re taking up head room. That said, the 0 to 20 hz band is still felt on the body as vibration, so keep it if you want.