Mixdown Workflow for Dance Floor Tunes

Tutorial | Feb 21, 2022

In this video, I discuss my workflow process when it comes to mixing down dance floor tunes. I stress the importance of starting with the creation process and how that influences the mixing process. I demonstrate how to use a transient shaper, a limiter, and a clip to reduce dynamics and create a punchy sound. I also discuss the importance of frequency balance and how it is influenced by the length of the samples and the BPM. Finally, I discuss how to create a hierarchy in the mix by making the kick drum the loudest part and then gradually reducing the volume of the snare and high hat.

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Questions & Answers #

Maybe you dont watch the video, here are some important takeaways:

How do I create a mixdown hierarchy? #

A mixdown hierarchy is the order of importance of different elements within a track. When creating a mixdown hierarchy, the most important element should be the kick drum, as it is the anchor sound for most dance floor tunes. Then, the snare and hi-hat should be slightly quieter. After this, other instruments, such as bass and pads, should be included and placed in order of importance. Finally, background sounds and effects should be added to give the track its overall texture.

What is the difference between the transient and the tail of a sound? #

The transient is the initial attack of a sound, often heard as a click or sharp attack, while the tail is the decay of the sound, often heard as a smooth or sustained sound. The transient is usually much shorter than the tail, and is often the part heard most prominently when a sound is played. The tail of a sound often contains more low-end and mid-range frequencies than the transient.

How can I make sure my drums have the right frequency balance? #

The frequency balance of drums can be achieved by adjusting the loudness of the

Transcription #

This is what im talking about in this video. The text is transcribed by AI, so it might not be perfect. If you find any mistakes, please let me know.
You can also click on the timestamps to jump to the right part of the video, which should be helpful.

[00:00.000] Hey guys, welcome back to another video today. It's all about mixdown and it's also not specific about bitvic studios
[00:07.140] We can reproduce this in any dark probably and it's about my workflow of how I mix down my dance floor tunes
[00:16.920] This is pretty important because for every genre there is probably a kind of a different workflow of how you mix down a track
[00:24.480] on what you put your emphasis what you put in the front how you start your mixdown hierarchy or your anchor sound
[00:34.600] for drum bass for me it's probably the kick drum for a lot of other dance floor tunes too
[00:41.760] so it all depends on what kind of genre you do but generally there are some tips in there here and there
[00:51.520] that are important for a lot of mixdown situations I think and how I found my solution for them basically
[00:59.280] It's also not heavy on the VST part or plug in plug in part because I'm a simple man
[01:06.360] I like simple solutions for all kinds of stuff so I hope it's straight forward and easy to understand for everyone
[01:14.080] for you if you have questions then you can ask me anytime in the comments below of course
[01:18.920] and if you have some some critique on this because you know everyone does its thing differently then of course I'm open for that too
[01:29.480] so it's a pretty long video so stick with me if you make it through the video I promise you
[01:36.520] there's a lot of small hints and tips and tricks in there you can use in your daily workflow for mixing down audio
[01:43.680] it's obviously not everything because it's a deep topic you can dive into every section of the video even more if you want to
[01:53.280] but I want to keep it more like an you know on the surface on on a rough guide how we can see and how you approach mixdowns
[02:03.800] easily okay so let's start the video okay we start this whole tutorial from the scratch this means I have no track ready
[02:14.400] because most of the times the mixing process starts with my tracks already in the creation process
[02:22.000] and this is the important part I think about mixing and mastering and making songs that you know that everything influences everything
[02:32.600] so there are no separate processes or things that completely are working apart from each other so mixing is basically influences how the song sounds
[02:46.400] how the song sounds influences how loud you get your track and so on until down to the to the single sounds what kind of kick drum you choose
[02:58.200] what kind of snare drum you choose everything influences everything in some kind of way and so for me mixing and mastering always starts with the creation process
[03:11.000] and doesn't stop the mastering so for instance let's call here XO which gets us some samples or is a drum simpler and I really like to use this
[03:23.200] you already know this probably so we need some kick drums or at least one kick drum here something like this
[03:33.800] something like this as a snare and a hi-hat and when we do here a simple pattern maybe drum bass for instance
[03:59.200] super simple let's go to one on 70 ppm here maybe I choose a different snare
[04:14.600] like this okay so when we put here some kind of analyzer on it and maybe it's taken oscilloscope to
[04:29.600] and let us run you can see just this drum loop fills up the whole frequency spectrum right so how low the snare is how low the hi-hats are
[04:45.600] and the kick drum is defines what kind of overall frequency balance you have in your mixdown because probably with drum and bass
[04:55.000] the drums are the main part of your song which sticks out a lot and when you start with drums first then how you mix the drums defines how well your whole song or whole track sounds or is balanced in the end
[05:19.000] and it also defines how loud you can push your mix in terms of for instance the recent years of drum bass are featuring heavily super short transients or super short drum sounds
[05:36.000] for instance this year is way too long right so this is much better this is more like like a recent drum bass tune where you have super short drum sounds
[05:57.000] and you only barely hear the transients or you can only hear the transients of the of the sounds itself and this is because in the end we want to drive this all the way into a limiter into a clipper
[06:12.000] and we have maybe a bass sound or a mid-range bass sound that fills up the rest of the song and we don't have too much room for the tails of the
[06:23.000] heads and the snare and the kick and so on but you can fake this or you can fake that these sounds are much longer with white noise on top or something like this or reverb and so on
[06:37.000] when you remember what the first told you that everything influences everything the long how long these samples are how long decay times are of these samples define how much you can push this into a limiter clip or later on
[06:53.000] also this changes from genre to genre if you have a melodic house track or dubstep tune or slower song hip hop song and so on you basically have different speeds here of BPMs
[07:09.000] for instance for drum bass we have 170 so the drums are much closer together right all these hits are closer together
[07:17.000] and when you make a hip hop song for instance 80 BPM or 85 there's much much more room between these hits right so we can have longer tails
[07:31.000] much better because you want to fill the space in between those hits in some kind of way so you have much more room to play with
[07:41.000] so the BPM basically defines how long you can make these tail sounds it also defines how allowed or how much you can push the drums into the clip or in the end
[07:55.000] and it defines also how loud your song will be how easy it is to mix down the song and so on
[08:01.000] so there is a lot of things that influence each other all the time it's not separate right let's bring it back to this
[08:15.000] and now we can see here the frequency balance also if I do here along our tail and because in the tail we have much more bass than in the transient
[08:27.000] the transient is probably just a click around 120 150 hertz or something like this and then the bass part comes afterwards in the tail
[08:37.000] so when you cut the tail short it also becomes much brighter drum loop itself so this is also something if you cut down your tails you make the sound brighter
[08:47.000] sometimes most of the times it depends on the sound the sound depends on what kind of samples you choose so everything influence everything
[08:57.000] this is very important to know there's little to no occasion in audio processing where you don't trade anything for something else
[09:07.000] so if you remove dynamics you get a lot of mix down but you also get less dynamics if you yeah so everything influence everything
[09:19.000] it's it's very important to to get this that you always trade something for something else
[09:27.000] most of the times you just lose quality or you lose dynamics or in reduced transparency or yeah any of that stuff
[09:37.000] and you have to keep the balance between one extreme and the other extreme
[09:45.000] okay so now that we have we know this we probably have to push here the low end a bit for the kick drum to come out
[09:57.000] maybe you can also hear a cute kick drum itself but it's not really possible here and this
[10:03.000] this drum sample it's it's just an example right so and what I do most of the times is instead of using here a bigger
[10:15.000] bass drum I just use a separate bass drum to layer only bass in let's do here quick now that I have here
[10:35.000] separate layer I can basically decide how much low end I want because this is only the low end
[10:47.000] and then I know I can remove here the low end from this kick drum
[10:59.000] I only want to have the top end of this kick drum to get a bit more yeah maybe I choose here a
[11:09.000] real drum kick with a lot of room in it so I can yeah take the room and just use a synthetic
[11:19.000] drum beneath it to get the bass
[11:35.000] and this one gets much shorter
[11:45.000] okay so now we can put this here into into group and I call this drums
[11:51.000] this is also something that's super nice in Bitwig you can probably just take groups and other doors
[11:59.000] that you combine these little things and compress them or distort them together and then they are
[12:07.000] kind of glued together you don't need to use a compressor at all for this sometimes it's just nice to
[12:15.000] or to process the sounds together and so they have the same texture on top and then they kind of
[12:21.720] blend well together right and so now we are here the kick which is synthetic and just
[12:29.320] was the bass kick throughout bass kick and then we have hit the texture layer on top
[12:42.520] and then we can put on this here maybe a transient shaper
[12:47.000] transient control and just increase the sustain which brings out the tails of each of these sounds
[12:53.560] and we use a hard clip here
[13:13.560] so now we are picking here at 0 dB and what I basically do with the clip here is I'm reducing
[13:21.560] the dynamics because I know the snare and the kick are basically super short and also the kick
[13:29.800] itself here is super short and I clip the transients to get rid of all the yeah of all the unnecessary
[13:41.080] peaks you can see here the kick and the snare are basically scratching the surface of 0 dB
[13:48.600] here when we remove the clip on and see we have a lot of peaks here for the kick and the snare
[13:57.480] right it's not very consistent and this is also okay it depends on your music style you want to
[14:04.920] produce but for drum bass it's it's kind of you need to you know you know you need to go to the
[14:13.480] extreme sometimes to get this straight here if you clip too much you can hear that the bass
[14:21.640] of the kick drum comes or gets too much overtones
[14:32.760] it loses basically the punch
[14:34.360] so you need to be aware of that the too much clipping on the kick drum is in my opinion bad I
[14:45.800] usually tend to use a limiter on the kick drum itself but sometimes the clip is just just
[14:54.040] the K on the drum loop itself so what we are doing basically is using the transient control here to
[15:01.000] do the sounds a bit together here to bring out the sustain so everything in between basically
[15:08.840] the tails everything that happens after the transients here is going up and then we have
[15:17.880] basically a frequency balance here which I don't do with the EQ you can do this with the EQ
[15:23.720] what I do it basically here in the mix I decide how loud I want to have the snare and the kick
[15:28.840] and the hi-hat I define basically my frequency balance for the low end the mid mid here and the
[15:34.520] high end but you can also go into this into this with the EQ
[15:45.320] so you can do this this way or what I usually also do is using also an 8
[15:52.520] and you can use the match EQ here I can't spink noise so you just analyze your kick
[15:58.760] drum here or your drum loop and you can hit stop then you want to say here I want to compare it to
[16:11.000] pink noise activate this and then you can dial in here basically the frequency balance I think
[16:18.600] most of the times turn percent are completely fine also when you do this multiple times or multiple
[16:25.720] groups then at the end you get a pretty bright mix so a quick recap it's very important what kind
[16:35.720] of sounds you choose for the mix down in the end it's also important how long these sounds are
[16:42.520] and the frequency balance of your drum set you can also balance of course kick drum and snare but
[16:50.440] most of the times it's just enough if you balance the kick drum or the loudness of the kick drum
[16:54.600] loudness of the snare and the high head and that defines basically your overall general
[17:02.520] frequency balance because the kick drum decides how low the low end is the snare drum decides
[17:09.160] how much there is in the mid and the high head defines what's happening in the top end right so
[17:16.040] you have control of all these three sections in your mix down and because most of the times in
[17:23.160] dance music drums are the loudest part in your in your song this defines everything so it's very
[17:32.200] important to get this right in my opinion it's probably not important for ambient because you don't
[17:39.160] have drums there but it depends from genre to genre right you have to have to take some kind of
[17:46.360] anchor sounds for you to kind of build some hierarchy right do you have the drums at
[17:54.760] top and that they define everything and everything else depends on the mix sound of the drums
[18:03.400] I think in earlier mixing mixing causes you learn that you have to use the kick drum for that so
[18:12.680] the kick drum is the loudest part it's very basically peaking at 0 dB and everything else is
[18:19.240] basically below that or you have to decide what kind of hierarchy you define then from the kick
[18:27.320] drum else but you start with the kick drum and then you go down all the instruments or the tracks
[18:34.840] from the kick drum onto all the other sounds and for me it's basically most of the times the same
[18:41.960] so I use the kick drum as the loudest part and I want the snare to have a bit more quieter
[18:49.560] than the kick drum and the higher it's even more quieter right and then there's the bass sound
[18:56.040] below the kick drum is also a bit quieter than the kick so the kick is the loudest part this is my
[19:02.440] anchor of the mix down and this is sometimes also important to have this in mind because I see that
[19:09.880] some people struggle with jumping back and forth between different sounds you know you make the
[19:16.520] kick drum louder then all everything else becomes quieter so they raise the snares and raise the
[19:21.960] high heads maybe make a pad sound then this is too loud so this is pretty troublesome so the best
[19:31.160] way of doing this is basically to build from from the start so to start with the kick drum and say
[19:37.240] this is my loudest part then comes the snare then comes the high heads and then comes the bass
[19:43.560] so build kind of a hierarchy and step down from the top to the bottom and mix everything well
[19:50.200] together so this is the anchor point so we define basically here our spectrum frequency spectrum
[19:58.200] balance with the kick snare and the high heads we mix everything into a group together with the
[20:03.800] transient control for some kind of gluing then we have the ozone 8 to balance everything again a bit
[20:12.840] to have some kind of pink noise curve ish it doesn't need to be exactly pink noise it's just a guide
[20:20.520] basically to get you in the same ballpark basically to don't drift too much apart from the
[20:27.640] when I'm from a nice frequency balance and then I use a hard clip here to cut everything out I don't
[20:35.160] need I don't want and the hard clip also sounds pretty nice on drums on percussion sounds it
[20:41.800] gets you this nice clicky punchy feel it brings out the transients even more and this is everything
[20:49.320] of course style and genre dependent like I said all the time it's it's not you know if you
[20:59.080] won't make melodic hours then you probably don't use a hard clip at all use maybe a compressor
[21:03.960] for that or a limiter get a more softer sound right so it depends okay so now that we have your
[21:12.680] nice frequency balance for the drums which is in my opinion okay so far
[21:24.200] we can move on to other tracks maybe we we create some kind of bass sound maybe do this a
[21:29.560] bit longer we do some kind of bass sound and the bass is also important part because
[21:36.680] a place probably all the time or the most of the times and in your track and it takes up basically
[21:45.400] low and below the kick drum and that's why you always go for yeah deeper notes here
[21:56.120] maybe you have boring pattern something like this
[22:09.480] and the bass has different problematic parts of course maybe put in your limiter
[22:17.960] I put it here into the FX group let's bring it up to zero dB also yeah so it's basically
[22:29.160] peeking at zero dB exactly like the drums but it sounds much louder and the reason for that is
[22:37.480] because the sound itself is longer it has a longer tail the snare and the kick are basically
[22:43.880] super short so it sounds like it's quieter but it's not technically it's exactly the same
[22:51.640] no not loudness how it's called it's the same peak peak volume
[22:59.560] if you put this here in a group and we call this or I call the smallest lines drum bass group
[23:04.280] and I put here and also nothing else to this go perspective analyze on that and see here the bass
[23:14.920] is playing all the time right it's then the kicks are peeking here so it's way too loud so most of
[23:23.800] the times for me the best in drum bass loudness for bass is minus 3 dB or minus 4 dB and now I have
[23:36.040] exactly peeking minus 4 dB because I use the peak limiter here to get this up to zero so the output
[23:44.280] of phase 4 is exactly zero dB right when I put in here minus 4 dB the output of this phase 4 now
[23:52.680] is exactly minus 4 dB your minus 4 dB so this is really okay for me and I think I have to bring
[24:05.640] up the drums a bit more yeah yeah look this here a bit so the first problematic part is that
[24:23.640] the kick drum is in the same frequency range as the bass is the first problem and you probably
[24:32.600] saw a lot of tutorials explaining that how you can circumvent this with the side-chaining so
[24:40.040] I take here the kick drum and every time the kick drum plays I pull down the volume tool here
[24:47.720] and it's pretty much a standard procedure to do this in all kinds of genres you have this
[25:05.320] also in house and techno a lot probably just to get the frequencies of the bass out of the way
[25:11.160] when the kick drum comes in and you know wants to hit the dance floor so this is one way of doing it
[25:17.800] of course you can also put in here an EQ and maybe bring in a second reference here which is
[25:27.800] probably the drums drums master post you can see here the kick drum
[25:34.280] it's playing here some kind of in the same range not really I mean it's more like about 100
[25:43.880] 100 hertz here because I know that already that's why I tuned the kick drum how I tuned the
[25:51.160] kick drum so this is also important part when you do this all the time producing like this you
[25:57.960] tuned kick drums in a certain way because you know you will add the bass sound in a certain frequency
[26:04.520] range so you already get this out of the way but here we can basically go in and we have here this
[26:13.160] frequency balance still in place but after that you can use here maybe an EQ and remove some of the
[26:19.880] low end of the drums this is too much probably but maybe remove here the low end energy of the kick drum
[26:33.640] below wanted to try it's because everything that we need is above 100 hertz is to click on the
[26:39.000] knock and this is also dependent on the style on the genre you do because in house and techno
[26:46.120] you probably want a really deep rumbly kick drum in drum bass you don't want that in hip hop you maybe
[26:55.000] want also a kick a pretty nice kick drum in trap I don't know maybe in trap it's it's dependent on
[27:02.360] the style but also there you want basically from the kick drum all need to snap this attack which
[27:08.280] is which happens probably around above 100 hertz and the bass is used by the bass sound itself
[27:17.960] right you take basically the snap of the kick as an accentuation and then the bass itself
[27:25.800] goes the rest of the of the set so it sounds like the kick and the bass is the same but it's not
[27:48.440] also you don't need to be that precise with cutting frequencies overlapping of frequencies
[27:55.720] is generally also good because they glue the sounds together you want to have in a song in the
[28:03.160] end sounds that working together and you get sounds working together in the that you basically
[28:14.040] overlap the frequencies also so I see a lot of people that are not a lot of people but sometimes
[28:21.000] I see tutorials where people basically cut out everything super precisely and in my opinion
[28:27.720] this is not good it sounds too clean and it makes more problems than that you want to have
[28:35.000] but in the end you want to you glue everything together right so people basically start to
[28:40.200] EQ low cuts or do a lot of low cuts here in their high cuts make everything super clean and yeah cut out
[28:50.360] everything and then in the end they put everything into a group and then they try to glue everything
[28:55.320] together with overdrive and saturation and compressors and so on so they do basically the opposite
[29:02.360] thing in different parts so overlapping is generally not bad it's it's good you want to have sounds
[29:11.000] that work together and overlap okay so if you have overlapping frequencies it's okay
[29:18.120] and but you can hear here when I cut this a bit at this point here it's it starts sounds sound more
[29:26.840] you know cleaner but I don't want to have too clean right so it sounds like
[29:39.160] so it sounds like a bass and there's a drum loop on top that's not what I want you want to have
[29:44.760] a drum loop that works together with the bass so you need overlapping frequencies I mean it's
[29:53.400] still clean but there are still some overlaps which is good the next problem is the bass itself it's
[30:05.400] just a sine wave in this I know here it's a saw but if you have to shape it zero it's a sine wave
[30:11.960] super rounded super clean there are no overtones at all it's just one frequency basically at zero
[30:25.880] so in drum bass usually then take overdrive or saturation to bring in harmonics
[30:32.280] you can clip this here also
[30:45.080] which is more like a rounded square here maybe bring in a different operator here with the
[30:52.520] different frequency you tune it a bit maybe we bring in some LFOs
[31:06.440] no three trigger
[31:22.360] so again it's all about finding the balance between too much distortion and too less but now we
[31:36.840] get overtones which means you can see here instead of just one frequency here which is a sine wave
[31:42.840] you get all these harmonics here overtones which fill out the rest of the spectrum
[31:47.960] so the benefit of this is that when you hear it on a speaker on a laptop speaker on a headphones
[31:57.480] and so on where you don't have all these lower frequencies here you can still hear that there
[32:03.720] is a bass sound somewhere beneath that and the brain basically fills in the part that you don't
[32:09.240] hear because you hear all the overtone harmonics instead of having maybe this here right you can't
[32:20.520] hear can't hear this so this is the benefit of the mid-range sounds and you don't need to overdo
[32:32.040] this like I do here in drum bass we have these big fat mid-range bass sounds in other genres you
[32:41.560] can do this too slightly so just adding a bit of saturation to bring in out some overtone harmonics
[32:50.920] right like this just a touch not too much but in drum bass we obviously have these
[32:57.320] big fat overtones sometimes you can see here also and the mid frequencies are much louder than
[33:11.240] the bass itself but not not that bad you can also bring in here if you want to fill up the harmonics
[33:23.640] over here that just is a bit empty if you want to have a drum bass tune where you only have drums
[33:31.080] and bass you can fill out the spectrum even more you plan to add some bad sounds or melody sounds
[33:38.040] then you probably want to remove here some of the frequencies and this is also again something
[33:43.640] everything influences everything it depends on what kind of song or tune you make
[33:49.960] if you want to have more like a dubby tune then you probably don't need overtone harmonics at all
[33:56.280] because there are so much stuff going on chords steps delays and so on that fill out everything
[34:03.960] in your song in this area here so you don't need to do that many overdrive things here to the bass
[34:10.200] so basically this influences also the mix down then in the end and yes I think about this all
[34:21.960] the time when I'm doing music so I think like oh I have I have nothing going on here what can I
[34:28.520] put down right so maybe you're a water after bass and take the mid-range sounds for that maybe I
[34:34.200] put the bad sounds in bad sound in there or maybe a melody or some percussion loop or something
[34:41.160] like this so I always think in frequency balance on time and think what can I put at this position
[34:47.800] at this position I cut here the drums early because I know I want to add the bass later on
[34:55.480] so I think about this all the time and when you think about this all the time then it gets better
[35:02.680] in the end with the mix down because you already thought about everything
[35:08.200] but it takes time to yeah get used to it okay so now we have a bass here
[35:17.400] we see the limiters rocking too much I just want to hit here the zero db line
[35:33.560] so now you can see we have here a bass sound at the start here but here nothing happens right
[35:40.200] so you can this is again it's also balanced thing what happens here you can add the second base
[35:47.000] for that usually I do something like this where I take the first base duplicate this here and
[35:52.680] just move this over here and do a different track so take maybe a iteration
[36:02.440] so you have like a riff it sounds like this
[36:05.880] maybe you can also change the rhythm of this
[36:21.960] so this is the easiest thing to do you can also think about using a reverb for instance
[36:30.440] and a bit we can split the frequencies here in a low band and a high band and put maybe just
[36:36.440] a reverb on the top so everything about three and the thirds then has a reverb on it
[36:49.080] and then the reverb tail fills in this part a bit right so you can do these
[36:55.240] the slube a bit together so it's not like here's something happens here's completely empty
[37:00.200] right it's maybe too too approved
[37:08.360] it's maybe also a good part here to add some chords to play
[37:13.320] and we add here some we're on E here
[37:30.840] kind of chord here
[37:31.960] we lay on it
[38:02.840] so it all depends on what kind of style you want to do what kind of sound you want to achieve
[38:22.840] how loud you want to have everything you have to decide at every corner and every decision you
[38:29.800] do is a trade off for something else and when you realize that then you can make your life easier by
[38:39.960] thinking about everything 20 times or just make a decision and call it a day that's what I usually
[38:45.880] do all the time I just do it and then have something and if I don't like it then I discard it and
[38:54.520] make something new instead of you know changing everything 20 times which leads to nothing
[39:02.360] only frustration maybe put you a second base that's I think better maybe slow moving base here
[39:32.360] maybe you can also put in here some kind of
[40:00.680] let's see it's spent
[40:05.400] that's
[40:24.760] That's maybe too much.
[40:46.680] That's also something I like to do is having the LFO in the free mode.
[40:51.880] I don't use these grid based or synchronized modes here for bass lines.
[41:01.240] I really like to dial in this here completely freely because you can't feel the groove
[41:06.920] and dial in maybe more sloppy modulation to the bass.
[41:11.240] I have the node retry gone, so every time the node retry goes here,
[41:14.600] I start in the same position at LFO, but then I have here everything completely freely
[41:20.360] dialed in a bit of phase offset here and yeah, I really like to do this actually.
[41:30.760] Maybe you can use your step mode so every sound has a bit of a different
[41:40.920] different sound to it.
[42:11.320] Okay, so now that we have this here, we have two bass sounds we call the space
[42:19.560] and I probably can also here use the, don't need that, and this will device, ducking device,
[42:27.000] I do this here on the group right on the bass group because we need the ducking on this
[42:31.560] bass and this bass. So all these two basses are basically exactly minus
[42:46.040] minus 40b loud and drums are the loudest part problem from the drums the loudest part is the kick drum.
[42:53.640] Oh, I need to balance this here a bit, a kilometer.
[43:03.480] All right, I want just one to have the kick drum peak here at the ROTB, that's all I want.
[43:14.200] Okay, maybe it's time for a small change because it gets boring all the time.
[43:28.600] So we add here some some shakers, put this into the drum group here and I use some maybe
[43:38.760] tambourine samples, let's see, it should be enough.
[43:52.920] And I also use here a clip for that and make this clip pretty short and I go here,
[44:09.320] dial this in, write something like this and I dial in here velocity a bit lower here,
[44:21.400] this one is the offset tambourine with the loudest one and we do all these things pretty short
[44:42.840] here because of the kick and the snares short so this should be short too. Make you use your hard
[44:52.280] clip again because we don't peak here it will be right, put it down here.
[44:59.720] Then we can bring this down, we can see now we have here basically a nice peak line.
[45:30.360] And also it would be nice here to bring in the groove, so a bit of shuffle,
[45:33.880] the fiftieth percent.
[46:03.880] So we have here the nashaker for this part.
[46:21.880] We can do also here some kind of writes.
[46:50.600] I probably have to high cut this here a lot because I only need here the highest
[46:55.680] high part.
[47:15.680] Maybe you pitch this a bit here.
[47:44.200] So we can also think about putting a layer here on the snare with the clap sound so
[48:09.200] just to high top layer so we have the snare in the mid part here and on top we have the
[48:22.900] clap.
[48:52.820] You now do get some quality to the simple snare sound.
[49:08.100] So again here we divide basically the snare into two parts in the clap part and the
[49:14.580] mid main snare part so we mix this together to make through layering the sound a bit
[49:22.780] more interesting.
[49:42.900] So maybe we can export here this whole thing a rocket medium beat as medium that's what
[49:51.100] I need so we can stop you the playback in here maybe remove the clap part in the first
[50:09.100] part here and switch to this part we get the clap and maybe do a different clap in the
[50:26.940] first part we'll see a clap.
[50:41.460] We can change the sound in minimal small amounts but it sounds like you know more interesting
[50:48.780] and there's more to it than it is back to mix down so we have bass at minus zero we
[51:00.500] have a side chain here so the bass goes away when the kick drum comes in but we have now
[51:06.580] here this drum bass thing right and I usually do this when I have more in a drum bass
[51:15.340] song than just bass and drums so for instance a pad sound right we have a if you're maybe
[51:22.340] a policeman that plays some kind of pad sound so I just do this here maybe sounds it sounds
[51:28.860] maybe not good but just for an example go to E or we're up on it.
[51:57.380] Randomize, lock the floor and maybe pitch shifter here.
[52:24.140] So I put this here in a group and call this just music and this helps me to further process
[52:45.460] the song a bit better in terms of mix down because now I have sub mixers and drum bass
[52:51.420] here is the main dance drum bass part and this one gets treated roughly with distortion
[52:57.900] and limit us hot clipping and so on and this one here I want to keep as dynamic as possible
[53:05.860] because there's melody in it there's a pad sound in with slow modulation and maybe
[53:11.020] if there's a piano part in there I'm not sure about that yet but maybe I just put it in
[53:22.500] here.
[53:23.500] Let's take some piano sample and a piano also is pretty hefty in terms of frequencies and
[53:31.780] if you cut the piano too much it sounds pretty shit that's let's call it a day over
[53:57.980] the melody so I can use a pick limiter here and I don't limit even though I've
[54:27.900] a peak limiter on that and I put peak limiter on everything it's not for me to limit a lot
[54:33.500] it's just to bring up the volume and see what's going on here in this graph so I don't
[54:41.220] want to limit at all most of the times and go here to the pad sound so we need to remove
[55:07.740] your bit of the piano part right so I use your music contact and see the pad and the
[55:14.360] piano is basically in the same range just not that but you know it's not good if you want
[55:39.600] to push this to the limit with the limiter but we don't want to do that actually here.
[55:45.000] You have the piano part here and the pad part and we can cut this out here because this
[55:51.800] is bass and kick from the from drum bass part and we maybe put here a frequency balance
[56:00.280] on it so I use the also on 8 I put this actually in front here just analyze it a bit stop
[56:10.000] pink noise matching and you can see it wants to push the higher frequencies and then we
[56:18.200] put your peak limiter on that.
[56:47.760] So in the second part here I go on octafire
[57:14.880] maybe too loud so this is basically create a mixing part here where I decide if I want
[57:35.680] to have pads louder or quieter and it's not really important for the technical part
[57:46.280] it's more like a creative part so how I want my song to sound what's important for
[57:53.040] my song do I want to have the pads more on the foreground or on the background.
[58:22.840] Maybe I do more distortion on this one.
[58:40.680] Okay so
[58:58.240] So to drum bass part here we can treat roughly like I said, you can go here in full distortion
[59:21.820] mode basically.
[59:23.820] And I usually tend to balance again, where I've basically mixed the bass and drums
[59:32.340] together, the drums are mixed here with the Ozone 8.
[59:37.460] The bass itself doesn't have too much overtones, we don't need to balance that too much.
[59:42.500 --> 01:00:03.260] But drum bass part here we can balance, so just capture here.
[01:00:03.260 --> 01:00:11.380] So and then here again, most of the things that are peeking above here 0 dB, 3.5 up probably
[01:00:11.380 --> 01:00:15.860] each drum, so I can hardclip this again here.
[01:00:15.860 --> 01:00:22.660] Just put hardclip on it with no input gain, so we have 0 dB.
[01:00:22.660 --> 01:00:46.140] It depends on what kind of sound you are achieving, want to achieve.
[01:00:46.140 --> 01:00:50.180] So we balanced and then we removed dynamics again here.
[01:00:50.180 --> 01:00:58.060] And then we put drum bass group and the music group together, and this is our all group.
[01:00:58.060 --> 01:01:06.220] And here I usually tend to do the same, so like balancing and cutting.
[01:01:06.220 --> 01:01:11.820] And this is the master group basically, but this master group changes from time to time
[01:01:11.820 --> 01:01:21.460] for me, also from song to song sometimes, at the moment I use a lot, a newfangled elevate
[01:01:21.460 --> 01:01:28.300] thing here as a mastering tool, because it also balances the frequency pretty well and
[01:01:28.300 --> 01:01:35.180] has a limiter in at the limiter stage and the transient shaper stage, and you can easily
[01:01:35.180 --> 01:01:51.380] just increase here the limiter and get a nice balanced sound.
[01:01:51.380 --> 01:01:56.340] And I can already see here on the left side on the thing that we are already pretty loud
[01:01:56.340 --> 01:01:57.340] with them.
[01:01:57.340 --> 01:02:04.580] It's probably too loud already, so it's not hard to get a loud mix down in my opinion
[01:02:04.580 --> 01:02:09.260] if you start from the ground up with all your instruments or make the right selections
[01:02:09.260 --> 01:02:15.260] for kick drums now, and so on, balance the drums evenly, nicely out, mix the drums
[01:02:15.260 --> 01:02:22.820] and the bass well together, and then bring in your musical parts, pad sounds, keys, and
[01:02:22.820 --> 01:02:29.060] so on, FX sounds, mix these separate, then bring the music part and the drum bass part
[01:02:29.060 --> 01:02:30.540] together.
[01:02:30.540 --> 01:02:36.140] And then on the mastering brush you don't need to do that much anymore, because you have
[01:02:36.140 --> 01:02:40.900] already the loudness here on the drum bass part, and the music part here is transparent
[01:02:40.900 --> 01:02:47.980] as fuck, or how much you want to have, you want to have it, and then you mix these two
[01:02:47.980 --> 01:02:54.540] together, and you don't have to do that much anymore on the all part here.
[01:02:54.540 --> 01:03:07.620] You can see we have here minus 6 left max, which is super loud in my opinion already.
[01:03:07.620 --> 01:03:13.260] I know that some drum bass artists are go below minus 5 or so minus 4 or something like
[01:03:13.260 --> 01:03:21.780] this, and you can drive this mix down here even more if you want to just put this up.
[01:03:21.780 --> 01:03:47.940] Maybe you noticed that some of these sounds are getting too trashed in the end, when you
[01:03:47.940 --> 01:03:55.620] put this up here we are now at minus 3.9 left, which is too much, but you can hear that
[01:03:55.620 --> 01:04:01.160] sometimes the kick on the snare gets too trashed, right, the transients are too much or
[01:04:01.160 --> 01:04:29.020] clipped too much, so I tend to go then into the tracks here and say, so I go then into
[01:04:29.020 --> 01:04:35.540] the tracks and maybe reduce the volume just the tap from the snare and the clap and so
[01:04:35.540 --> 01:04:45.420] on, get more transients back, or to pull it out of the limiters on each of these groups
[01:04:45.420 --> 01:04:52.500] here to get more dynamics back without losing the loudness.
[01:04:52.500 --> 01:04:57.560] But you need to hear that, you need nice speakers, you need nice headphones, of course,
[01:04:57.560 --> 01:05:05.140] to hear what's going on and you can't visualize that, that's also important, don't focus
[01:05:05.140 --> 01:05:11.900] too much on visualizers, right, I know there are a lot of spectrum analyzers here and there
[01:05:11.900 --> 01:05:19.380] and you can buy a lot of stuff, but you need to hear it, because you make music, if you
[01:05:19.380 --> 01:05:25.260] make music music is for your ears and you need to hear it, what's going on, so you need
[01:05:25.260 --> 01:05:32.180] good headphones, good speakers to hear, transients to hear when something is out of alignment
[01:05:32.180 --> 01:05:37.020] and you can't trust visualizers alone.
[01:05:37.020 --> 01:05:42.380] Also when you focus too much on visualizers you tend to make everything too clean, you
[01:05:42.380 --> 01:05:51.500] cut out a lot of different things in milliseconds and it makes no sense, it's over engineering
[01:05:51.500 --> 01:06:01.020] in my opinion, too much people putting too much emphasis on small things that are not
[01:06:01.020 --> 01:06:07.620] really important, you can hear when something sounds wrong, you can hear it, don't focus
[01:06:07.620 --> 01:06:11.060] too much on visualizers.
[01:06:11.060 --> 01:06:17.740] So yeah, this is basically a rough rundown of how I mix down most of my tracks, it depends
[01:06:17.740 --> 01:06:23.860] like I said on style and genres, a lot of these things here I did for this drum bass
[01:06:23.860 --> 01:06:29.220] tune, this is basically the extreme part with grouping drums into drum groups and the drum
[01:06:29.220 --> 01:06:35.780] group into drum bass part with the bass together and then into an all group, but for techno
[01:06:35.780 --> 01:06:45.180] and house I'm a bit more loose and it could be that I have in techno or house, maybe
[01:06:45.180 --> 01:06:52.940] the kick drum alone here in the in the all part and then I have a music or kind of a mixed
[01:06:52.940 --> 01:07:00.180] group here where I have a let's say a side chain on that and the kick drum is basically
[01:07:00.180 --> 01:07:09.100] unprocessed and pretty raw from my external analog synth or something like I don't want
[01:07:09.100 --> 01:07:14.140] to process it too much at all, I want to keep it raw and then I have this alone and this
[01:07:14.140 --> 01:07:21.900] defines the whole mix down the kick drum and then I have the rest in this group here also
[01:07:21.900 --> 01:07:31.380] not so much processed maybe a goal force on it which is an automatic here tool for removing
[01:07:31.380 --> 01:07:42.420] resonances, I use this a lot sometimes on transparent sounds, so yeah it depends basically
[01:07:42.420 --> 01:07:48.580] on style, I'm genre what I do and also it's how much I dial in these clippers, how much
[01:07:48.580 --> 01:07:55.140] I dial in the limiters, for certain styles I don't use clippers at all, so for house
[01:07:55.140 --> 01:08:03.740] and techno as for me it should be sound warm and round and there's no place for clipping
[01:08:03.740 --> 01:08:12.340] for hot clipping in my opinion so you need only compressors and limiters and yeah for
[01:08:12.340 --> 01:08:18.900] for glitch hop and something like this I think you can saturate the fuck out of everything,
[01:08:18.900 --> 01:08:26.180] it only benefits you in a way, this is how I do it in drum bass here, so you have to find
[01:08:26.180 --> 01:08:33.340] your own ways of grouping these things together here, for me this works pretty nice, I'm
[01:08:33.340 --> 01:08:41.260] pretty fast with this workflow to get a nice good sounding mix down that is also loud
[01:08:41.260 --> 01:08:52.740] and consistent, what else tell you, yeah you have to listen, I mean that's what I hear
[01:08:52.740 --> 01:08:59.340] all the time everywhere, you have to listen and it's completely true, you have to know
[01:08:59.340 --> 01:09:05.380] you have to know when you dial in something too much in terms of clipping and over driving
[01:09:05.380 --> 01:09:14.140] and so on, you have to think about five steps ahead maybe sometimes, so when I choose
[01:09:14.140 --> 01:09:19.380] a kick drum I think about my bass, I think about my pad sounds all the time, what I want
[01:09:19.380 --> 01:09:26.060] to do next and just then decides what kind of kick drum I choose, also the sound I'm
[01:09:26.060 --> 01:09:35.220] going for, do I go for a new raw funk tune, do I go for a kind of atmospheric drum bass
[01:09:35.220 --> 01:09:42.620] thing, so this basically defines everything, so it's like I plan out in my head multiple
[01:09:42.620 --> 01:09:52.380] steps ahead sometimes, and this then defines what kind of decision I do in the moment,
[01:09:52.380 --> 01:10:01.460] also it's not so important that your first mix down sounds great, I would advise you
[01:10:01.460 --> 01:10:09.860] to, when you start out making music and you are not sure what to do, don't do anything,
[01:10:09.860 --> 01:10:16.820] so you can do or you can make super nice sounding tracks without dynamic process or
[01:10:16.820 --> 01:10:22.940] so on, for instance compressors are basically made for when you record something, when you
[01:10:22.940 --> 01:10:29.460] record a drummer and a drummer can't play every hit at the same peak level, it's impossible,
[01:10:29.460 --> 01:10:34.740] it's a human, right, so you have inconsistencies in loudness in the snare, in the kick and
[01:10:34.740 --> 01:10:42.700] so on, therefore compressors are invented, inside the door, inside the box, if you put
[01:10:42.700 --> 01:10:51.260] on a kick drum here, this quick drum is always the same loudness, the same peak level,
[01:10:51.260 --> 01:10:55.980] maybe there's a oscillator in the kick drum here that's not triggering exactly when you
[01:10:55.980 --> 01:11:01.500] trigger the notes, so you have kind of sometimes a click here and there, but most of the times
[01:11:01.500 --> 01:11:10.140] this kick drum or these snares or these sounds you trigger from digital instrument are
[01:11:10.140 --> 01:11:15.020] same loudness and there are no inconsistencies at all, so you don't need compressors or
[01:11:15.020 --> 01:11:22.220] everywhere, you can make a nice sounding well mixed down song without using limiters and
[01:11:22.220 --> 01:11:28.860] compressors and distortion and overdrive and so on, it's possible, so if you are not sure
[01:11:28.860 --> 01:11:35.620] what to do, then maybe don't do anything, just concentrate on the creative part, you can
[01:11:35.620 --> 01:11:47.020] cut these transients any time later on, so it's most of the times you do more damage with
[01:11:47.020 --> 01:11:52.540] not knowing what to do and then putting a lot of things on it and you confuse yourself
[01:11:52.540 --> 01:11:59.020] also with a mix down because you don't know what happens at which point, so maybe you
[01:11:59.020 --> 01:12:03.900] dial in a compressor and it puts too much emphasis on the snare drum, then you pull down
[01:12:03.900 --> 01:12:08.540] the snare drum and then the kick pushes out too much because your compressor setting
[01:12:08.540 --> 01:12:16.900] is too extreme, so you make your life more harder than it should be, so don't you
[01:12:16.900 --> 01:12:24.540] use dynamic processes at all when you maybe start out and if you watch sometimes my streams
[01:12:24.540 --> 01:12:30.460] I do complete tracks or the loops, the first eight bar loop here, the first six in bar
[01:12:30.460 --> 01:12:39.700] loop, sometimes also without putting too much dynamics or emphasis on dynamic processes,
[01:12:39.700 --> 01:12:44.940] it's sometimes faster even just to put your creative things out of your head into the
[01:12:44.940 --> 01:12:53.500] track and concentrate on that instead of how could I do this much louder, right?
[01:12:53.500 --> 01:13:00.820] Okay so that's a lot of rambling probably this time in this video, I recorded 56 minutes
[01:13:00.820 --> 01:13:06.220] holy shit, hey you made it through the video, thanks for watching all the complete video
[01:13:06.220 --> 01:13:12.420] in itself, I think it's over two hours, so please if like if you liked the video I hope
[01:13:12.420 --> 01:13:19.500] you liked it and also leave a subscription on the channel if you want to see more videos
[01:13:19.500 --> 01:13:23.700] activate the bell, the notification bell, thanks for watching and I see you in the next
[01:13:23.700 --> 01:13:50.660] video, bye.