Here’s another one I put a lot of work into when it comes to sound design. I prefer not to use pre-made synths, so all the ones here were designed from scratch. This one is a bit earlier in my experience so the sounds may not be quite as full as I hoped for. As far as the compositions goes it was a really fun one. I played around with some different timing. The verse and the chorus use the same melody, but a different number of measures before repeating, so it made for some fun changes. While the chorus uses and even number of measures before repeating, the verse uses an odd number. And like my stuff usually goes, it builds up to a big finale at the end. I hope you enjoy, and let me know what you thought of the track and if you have any comments or feedback.
Your composition is spot on for the style you are aiming to achieve. In terms of general mixdown stuff, there’s a lot of low frequency mud coming through on a lot of your instruments and such, especially in stereo. It’s not a hard rule, but for the most part, you’ll want to remove anything stereo below 120-150hz in your track. Your kick drum lacks presence, part because it’s fighting for space in the low end, part because it’s a weaker sample, and part because it’s just a bit too quiet in your mix (I would estimate around 2-3db). When you design your own synths, do you layer your synths with sub basses or make all aspects of the sound in the same patch? Also do you use send effects for reverbs and delays? A bit of the mud in the mix is likely coming from too much reverb in undesired frequency ranges. Like I said before, your synth composition is great. In terms of actual design, push modulation a bit more. Try modulating multiple parameters at different rates, or 2 at the same rate with a third at a different rate etc. etc. It will give your lowmid sounds a lot more dimension.
Thanks for the feedback! I often have trouble getting the kick to cut through enough. Its hitting at 0db, so any higher and it peaks. At one point I actually went and lowered all the other instruments a bit to make more room for the kick. But it still doesn’t cut through as much as i’d like, and its the strongest one i’ve been able to composite from various samples. I isolated 3 different kicks for preferred low/low-mid/high click frequencies and layered them to make that kick. As far as my synths go, most of them are designed with a 4 OSC synthesizer. And no they don’t usually have sub on them. I keep the sub bass on it’s own track to avoid muddiness and have more control. I also have reverbs individually tweaked for each synth, so using a send for the reverb isn’t appealing to me. or maybe i dont understand sends that well. I usually like to automate it within the synth preset i built.
Using send effects for reverbs and delays will allow you to filter out unwanted frequencies in the lows without having to apply filters to the source signal, it will also allow you to send multiple things to the same reverb if you want to. Most people in this style like to highpass their reverb sends to about 250hz and sometimes lowpass to about 15khz. In terms of mixing, it’s best not to have any of your sounds hitting at 0db peak. Turn down everything in your song like 5db and just mix from there. That way if you need to bring something out you have the headroom to turn it up slightly. After you’ve turned everything down to a healthy place, use RMS meters and multimeters and compare your song A/B with commercial grade songs of similar styles to see how you can adjust the mix to make it sound cleaner. Proper RMS referencing will help you quite a bit from this point. There’s a lot of signal bleeding through from everything into your sub frequency. Generally speaking, you only ever want 1 or 2 elements happening below 160hz at any given time in your piece.
Thanks a lot! That’s some really useful info. Do you have any other tracks on here? I’d be more than happy to give some more feedback. I also posted a more recent one of mine a few days ago called “Eye of the Storm” if you’d be down for another listen
you can find the majority of my work on my soundcloud here
I will have a listen to your other song as well.