Hooray for delay! Some on the beat, some not… etc. Easy to overdo but even then tends to be darn cool and useful effect.
I didn’t want to make a new topic. But for those who listen to techno and house, how do artist from Afterlife (Tale of Us, Mind Against, Adriatique, Solomun etc) mix their music, to get the synths so loud. I keep having trouble with the compression of my synths (I use synth1), I realized you don’t need expensive synths, if your mixing makes up for it, however the learning curve is hard.
This is my reference track currently, and I’ve struggled to match it’s energy:
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Mr. Canal talks a bit about his approach in this interview (link below).
The main message is something like: If you keep on learning and working on what interests you, you’ll eventually get better.
It might seem like a flippant thing to say, but I think it’s true for almost any craft.
The track you link to (which does indeed sound nice), uses a number of different tricks and techniques, - which would be both time-consuming and difficult to analyse and describe in detail. You’re likely to get better replies if you ask more precise questions about specific details in the music.
Here’s the link:
Ive read that Marino Canal interview before, it was a great read and he’s honestly a really inspiration artist.
As for my specific questions for A Fire in the Sun:
What do you think Canal did to achieve loudness in his mix? I feel like the synths before the drop (3:06) are all on the same bus, while the drop has a different compression rate all together.
Also I wanted to learn more about the idea of phase cancellations and transients. Correct me if I’m wrong, but does Marino barley have any transients because he’s using a fast attack on his buses?
I think you might be overfocussing on the use of compressors.
The overall sound is, in my opinion, more likely a result of detailed synth-based sound-design, - using the built in amplitude and filter envelopes on the synthesizers themselves to shape the individual sounds to “fit in” with the other elements. There are plenty of transients in the sounds btw, - but the transints of each individual sound have been carefully shaped, timed and EQ’d so they don’t “mess each other up”.
And then of course, it’s been subjected to some next level mastering, which is hard to compete with on your basic bedroom set-up.
Mike Senior’s book: “Mixing Secrets For The Small Studio”, has some good info on phase issues and how to work around them (and is a valuable and inspirational source of information in general).
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So you feel like he’s able to get clarity in his track simply by using his synth’s setting correctly, and EQ? If that’s the case, would the implication be that the vst used helps determine the sound quality?
I don’t think it’s so much having the right VST as it is knowing how to use the VSTs that he does have. It kind of goes back to Balafonman’s earlier post about practice. When you use enough of a certain synth, you get to know i’s oscillators, it’s amps, and it’s envelopes so that you can better make it do what you want.
I haven’t had a chance to check your reference track (and won’t for a while) but one thing I can say is that the number one thing that made my mixes more clear was when I started mixing in mono. Doing that really forces you to carve out room in the frequency spectrum for every instrument and forces you to decide what’s important and what’s not. You will find yourself cutting way more stuff with EQ to make your most important parts come through. When you bring that back out into stereo, everything has plenty of room and you can hear a lot more detail in each individual part.
Yes.
Well, except there ultimately are no “correct settings” (since that’s alll subjective).
But yes: The instrument creates the sound - and different intsruments will generally sound different from each other.
A compressor is basically an automated volume control.
And since changing the volume of a sound doesn’t change its inherent frequency composition, there’s only so much you can do with it.
The amplitude envelope on the synth basically does the same thing, only it does it for every individual note you play. So in many cases, especially with monophonic type sounds or chords, it’s more expedient (and simpler) to control the volume charcteristics directly on the synth.
Having one ampitude/volume character on the synth, and then trying to change that with a compressor, can easilly result in a more muddy (badly defined) result.
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So it’s a matter of making sound design choices, that don’t conflict with the other synths. For example, my mix has the potential to be crowded if I make plucks that have similar amplitude settings.
Parametric EQ and proper separation of frequencies is also key 
I keep hearing this tip… I guess I should pay attention and try it… but it sounds so counterintuitive.
My mixes started getting a little better when I learned how to design better sounds in general. Unfortunately my process takes years and progress is extremely slow, but every advancement feels authentic and nice
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I don’t mix in mono but my room correction and monitor controller allow me to check things in mono quickly and as a result I’ve been paying attention to how the mono compatibility is working, esp as I work w a lot of stereo widening and Hass effect for “stereo wow”
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Agree with that… it’s an iterative process. Learning mixing techniques leads to better sound design leads to better mix… rinse and repeat. 
Gotta love that Hass effect! It’s the little things that make a big difference! 
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I’m trying this new thing where I turn the output of my audio interface down really quite and listen to the track on repeat while working on house projects… everything that sticks out I adjust, we will see how this works
A common tip I see on here a lot is to high pass elements of your mix that don’t have any musical value in their lower frequencies, but still carry inaudible low frequencies that pile up on your master. For example, I always high pass my hi hat samples because a lot of them carry those inaudible sub frequencies. Just be careful not to go too crazy with it because you can make certain elements in your mix sound wimpy.
This is great advice, I cut the mud out of most everything, even my master bus gets a HPF around 35Hz.
One of my approaches is to have an eq on the master bus, and occasionally boost and sweep through the lower midrange (a problem area for me due to my overuse/abuse/awesometechnique of using excessive reverb). When i find resonances or “ugly” frequency bands i’ll solo channels to note what instrument or where it is coming from. I then address the channel(s) that contain that frequency to tame it by notching that freq out and then resetting my master bus eq.
Additionally, and its been said in this thread before, one of the best things one can do is compose with a mix in mind and design sounds with a mix in mind while writing. Its far easier to mix tracks that dont have huge overlaps in frequency bands. I tend to use a lot of more plucky type sounds, especially in my House material as it makes mixing easier and its cool for creating complex and pseudo polyrythmic sequences.
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For checking my master bass/sub response, I keep a basic EQ plugin with a lowpass filter at about 200 hz I can cut in whenever I want to check (on the master outs). I find that 100-200 is where the bottom of a lot of the main instruments lives, and then below that should really just be kick and bass. So if I check that and the bottom isn’t clear, then it’s time to examine the highpassing I’m doing for each channel. Lately, I find myself going higher and higher and trying to keep more of the midrange clean. I’ve caught myself with leads HPed as high as 280-ish hz, and even stuff that isn’t HPed that far is being rolled off with shelves. And hats are all the way up around 1-2k sometimes. I tell myself I’m making room for the snare, but I really don’t know.
I couldn’t agree more about approaching a track with the mix in mind from the beginning. I draw the line at spending hours picking out, for example, one snare sample. But undoubtedly being discerning with sound choices from the beginning makes a huge difference in achieving a clean mix, where all sounds compliment each other.
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