Hi everyone!
I recently finished this song, and I’m pretty upset with the mixdown. (I had to upload something onto my soundcloud. I have been pretty inactive for a while.) Either way, here’s the clip so you understand exactly what I am talking about: https://soundcloud.com/popperr/popper-metastasis Any tips that people have on getting a cleaner mix in your tracks? Specifically on widening the stereo without drowning the song in reverb.
Can’t listen to the track ATM but I struggled with that a lot. A clean mix starts at sound designing and sample selection. You have to make sounds that fit into the mix instead of trying to correct crap ones. EQing everything in the mix so that parts get their own space is really important too. Make your patches strong and you won’t have to do weird things to try to get them to come through. Layer patches to fill out more frequencies.
In terms of FX…order matters. Something like reverb and dely sounds a lot more natural when it is last in the chain. If you put it in early and do all sorts of compression…its going to get an unnatural sustain to it and wash out your main sound. Using the same reverb setting for everything helps a lot too. Reverb defines the room that your sound is in so if you put it in 5 different verb settings through the mix, you blur the space.
Stereo mixing happens at the patch level too. Use unison and a wide pan to get stereo width. Add depth by using delays and reverb. Something like Ozone’s Imager shouldn’t be used to get stereo width, it really just enhances it and makes things a bit crisper.
I struggled with that a lot at first as well. Are you automating wavetable positions synths/growls? What I usually do is automate an actual stereo pan for example for the main growl on a track of mine I have a pan that’s set to go from Full L channel to Right in a 2 bar sweep(using Serum). Another way is if you’re running synth in unison to slightly detune then phase them. What kind of plugin are you using for the main synths?
Example https://soundcloud.com/aorick/gas-pedal-aorick-remix
you talk about about stereo widening but should warn you in a club everything’s in mono and you play with the stereo field too much You’ll get all sorts of unwanted effects namely phase cancellation which will ruin all the hard work you put into your mix 
Much better to try and use reverb sparingly anyway as it adds to the impact of it when it is there. Also, always always always put reverb on an auxiliary/send track, not on the fx rack of the channel
Filters.
No rules.
Why?
Honestly didn’t really consider that =/
true, shouldn’t have said always
makes it easier to control the reverb because you can control both the tail AND volume - makes it easier to craft into the mix, tuck it underneath etc.
You can control the tail and volume on an insert, unless you wanted to control the volume on the whole reverb sound together, rather then fiddling with a bunch of tracks. You could affect the reverb as a whole with a send though, eg compression, EQ, saturation, chorus or anything.
I think the main advantage is that you can put things in the same space. There’s a trick where you set up two sends; early reflections and late reflections and control the z-dimension depth of the sounds.
Another advantage is CPU, but I think that is becoming less relevant today.
Also setting up a send with reverb allows you do some more complex things, like saturating the verb, sidechaining the reverb etc. Doing that on every channel strip becomes a headache very quickly and you’ll be effecting the source sound as well.
With alot of sounds going on subtractive eq is important sometimes to make space, for other sound to have room.
my track is sounding good on my DAW but i export it and played it on media players n virtual…can anyone explain to me why? or do i have to hear it through a car system?
*i played it on media players n virtual but it sounds different from in the DAW…
u probably clipping the master in the daw and on export its clipped and without that +0db stuff that you hear in the daw
i am using a G clip on the master should i take it off?
you know…you can always just try things for yourself and see…
…and that’s, uh, chaos theory.
T-Rex = reverb on FX chain