Samples with a decent Signal to noise ratio, sample rates, recording equipment, the lack of or conversely proper usage of artifacts in various frequency spectrums, eqing so that frequencies dont conflict or cancel out phases when messing with the stereo field, with a scouch of compression and properly balancing the different dry/wet signals for each sound would be my guess
So many great tips in this thread!
The one that keeps apearing over and over is eliminating overlapping low frequencies from different tracks. it’s all about clearing the mud!
Second most popular is creating space in the frequencies moving up spectrum… so really… the same “clear the mud” starting at the bottom and moving to the top.
It’s interesting that the same philosophy applies to composition … in other words “Space! the final frontier…” (cue the the theme to Star Trek)
I miss that Jean-Luc Picard Face Slap Imogee! 
When in doubt, chart it out! Infographs like these have always helped me “visualize” a clean mix as I write in new instruments and patterns, put them on the mixer and tweak them accordingly.
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One ‘trick’ or helpful approach I’ve learned when using synths + large amounts of reverb: let the reverb be your ‘sustain / release’, rather than your synth. If you hold sustaining synths (pads come to mind, of course) while also applying lots of reverb for a big spacey ambient sound, you wind up doubling a lot of freq content between the two. One answer is to heavily EQ the reverb, which is often a great approach. But, Sometimes you want the reverb to remain as rich and dense as it sounds without any EQ. So, cut off your notes / chords much sooner than you ‘normally’ would, and let the (long) tail of your reverb act as the sustain and release of the sound. Tweak the attack and release of your synth so the transition feels smooth.
If you listen to Aphex Twin Selected Ambient Works Vol II, I feel like he’s doing this over and over again. It allows the tracks to have excessive amounts of reverb without getting muddy or clogged with ‘ugly’ frequency buildup / resonances.
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Not a fan of these mixing charts. It’s very misleading for experimental compositions where each track can be very individual unless you’re making some very rule-driven music that has this generic selection of “instruments”. How much you gotta boost the kick, etc…, exact frequencies… Nah, I’ll pass there formulaic guidelines.
What I realised after all these years is very obvious one: you got less content in a track you got less stuff to clean. When too many layers happening at once tons of post-processing to get it “right” won’t be in your favour. Mixing on a go is/was always the answer but even then you need to remove stuff to clean up the mix sometimes. Some layers become very unnecessary once you get some dominant ones that take the most of the track. If you can barely notice that one micro-layer just get rid of it, there’s no reason to keep it in.
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didn’t read the thread but figured that this is somewhat related so anyways thought that this might be helpful to keep in mind…
personally ive noticed that different mediums headphones, car speakers, boombox, cds, tape, vinyl, etc…process the sound output differently which will affect the way you perceive the sound…due to physics…yes actual physics…which should be obvious…
so anyways in comparing the mediums which are made as products by different companies, each will give your mixes a different sound, which is kinda of a pain in the ass, because if your mix sounds good on headphones A it will sound different on headphones B (with b&A are made by diffrent companies) which is kind of a no brainer…however keep in mind that when mixing especially if your cheap and have limited funds, and if you take music seriously your mix will have to sound adequate throughout different mediums…
i would offer more help with this but i suck…and im still figuring shit out…my guess when eqing do a combo of mixing by numbers and by ear…also watchout for phase shifting when playing around with the stereo field being that in some cases simple panning will suffice for getting that full sound…
also i’d say {eq, compress, and gainstage (ecg for short because its a pain in the ass to type it out repeatedly)} all the individual elements in your track appropriately and more importantly seperately… i.e the drums will have a different amount of ecg than the pads and the bass will have a different ecg than both…and don’t throw everything into the same bus and compress it until you’ve ecg’ed each of the individual track elements…seperately
most importantly dont do try to do everything in one shot…i.e. making the track and mixing it as you go along
so yea good luck
and the reason why im saying this is because i have wireless headphones now and i listened to my old tracks and they sound like shit so…yea hence my post about keeping different mediums in mind when mixing
but i also suck and dont take music very seriously so take this post with a grain of salt…
edit: lol forgot that i posted in this thread like x months ago…
Trust your ears
Read every guide/tutorial/book about mixing
Trust your ears
Mix/produce with other people
Trust your ears
Practice until you get mad
Repeat
Edit : read The Art of Mixing
PS : watch every video of Dave Pensado
PS2 : mix on shit gear, lame speakers, shitty headphones, and other cheap stuff
PS3 : make great engineers listen to your stuff and ask them to say to you why it’s shit
PS4 : your snare will always sound like shit
PS5 : dude it’s not even released
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Absolutely… but keep in mind that your ears know what they are hearing, but they don’t always know what to do; knowing what to do can only be learned from trying knew stuff (whether stumbled across or learned from others) and so with hard work and experience your ears get better at hearing subtle effects and imagining smart ways to use them.
That’s why when you listen to your old stuff you hear things that you wish you had done differently.
But you still have to trust your ears every step of the way… in fact… when your ears tell you “that sounds cool” you’re not really there yet. When the hair stands up on the back of your neck and you get emotional about what you are hearing… that’s when you are on to something. You listen to that a year or more later and you will still hear what you accomplished and why it works… even if you think you could do better now… it’s an endless process… hopefully… and the only hope is to trust your ears. 
(even if you have two left ears!)
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So true!
I do a lot of writing for my day job. My process is “…write down every relevant thought, no matter how incomplete or vague. When you can’t think of anything else to say, start organizing the thoughts in a logical order that progresses toward the point. Once you have successfully made your point, copy and paste that to the top and then start deleting everything below that isn’t absolutely clear or necessary to support the point.”
I do the same thing when composing. I build a big noisy muddy mess and then through subtraction clear away all but the gems.
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Here’s a video of Iglooghost actually making a beat. The samples he uses were sent in by viewer of the show so they’re not really what he uses in his own songs but I think he does use a few of his own things, like a kick drum sample and the xylophone type keys patch sound he has on his keyboard. While it won’t reveal how to achieve a clean mix it does give a good indication of his working process. He seems to lay stuff don’t super fast with minimal processing, to get ideas out as quick as possible. And goes for good quality samples, as many people have already noted above, reducing his need to process them. With that being said though he will eventually need to process them. I’m gonna assume that after he lays out the sketch for each section he goes back and fixes up the sounds that need fixing, replacing, EQing, compressing, etc till he’s happy.
I’ve looked him up quite recently myself and he’s fairly cagey about sharing info on his work. He tends to make up bogus answers to questions like that he writes complete songs in 1 hour, and he’s made entire albums while sitting on the back of a bus or some shit shit like that, kinda similar to how Aphex Twin used to bullshit people to I suppose. But he did give what seems to be an honest answer at one point and said that he can actually spend months just on one track. So there’s a lot of mixing and tweaking involved.
A lot of time with complex music to there tends to be a sort of psychoacoustic illusion to it that it’s cleaner than it actually is. Like for instance when I first listened to Igorrr’s music I was amazed by how clean the old school vintage breaks sounded, I thought to myself, “how the fuck did he get them to sound that way” but after a while I realised that the breaks actually weren’t that heavily processed at all instead it was the contrast of tones between the vintage breaks and the modern sounds, the mix levels between tracks, and the use of the stereo field image that created the illusion of clarity. I imagine Iglooghost’s music is pretty similar in that respect.
An example of what I’m talking about is at 1:23 - 1:58
I dunno if this idea of a ‘psychoacoustic illusion’ is an actual legitimate thing or not it but it just seems to be to me anyway, or at least it seemed like a good explanation to myself to help me understand the mixing process in this type of music.
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It might be easier in electronic music and specifically in more minimal styles but honestly just designing and picking sounds that don’t conflict with each other to begin with. It is just a natural part of my process at this point, but I try to EQ via arrangement when possible. I make sure no items with conflicting frequencies sound at the same time.
A big one for me is deciding whether the kick or the bass will carry the sub weight.
These days I’m getting pretty good mixes w/o an EQ on every sound.
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Came across this. In which Igloo mentions his use of Serum, sample packs, and wavetables, and foley bass.
https://www.reddit.com/r/iglooghost/comments/969h2m/iglooghost_patches_songs_sound_design/
And a comment in the post mentions he uses Umru samples as well apparently.
Listening to some of the example Umru sounds it’s understandable why. The sound very much like what you would hear in Igloo’s music. Very clean and well recorded to.
If I haven’t already said it in this thread, in electronic music arrangement can be everything. We have so much choice over frequency/pitch when it comes to sounds and samples. Arrange with EQ in mind and watch you mix worries melt away.
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“That’s a bingo!”
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Lately, a sort of crisis happened. I spent way too much time on mixing beats of mine, that were finally crap, but I was honest enough to acknowledge it only after I spent more than 10 hours on mixing.
I’m not pissed off anymore as it was yesterday. I recognize that if these beats aren’t good (composition, producing etc) - by good, I mean close to industry standards in the Trap genre, and I don’t like them, I can’t mix properly.
But, by doing some mixing (I didn’t, for a lot of time), I remember there is a big, big gap between my clean mix and an industry standard clean mix. Which makes me feel like a noob, in top of a discouraging feeling while making beats because, indeed, I’m a noob. “Producing music” and “making beats” are such a whole different world to me.
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industry standard
my advice…just make music for the fun of it
but always have a day job
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I don’t know what is doing music for fun, never did, my family and surroundings were musicians. Always worked hard all the day since I’m a teen, when I had bands and I lived off (barely, but still) music, until I stopped. After my twenties and all the toxic day jobs I had, I will make a living of it or I will die trying, I’m not able to do something else anyway
Mixing is awful in that video, as well as production (I mean, it’s way better than anything I could do but overcompressed, lots of things seem phased out and squashed) and pretty much everything else. It’s still something that needs to be studied tho.
I would prefer this, production is clean af
(Nowadays I appreciate a good jam with random people in a bar tho, I enjoy playing drums for fun sometimes)
Or this, I like that clean 20hz sub with every other bassy information drowned in distorted reverb, and the beat has some spirit
I read the whole thread, it has a some interesting philosophical moments. Just wanted to say 3 things.
First is, like it has been analysed countless times, as humans, we are inclined subjectively to consider louder as synonym of better. So, when you are eq-ing, you shouldn’t boost your sounds, it’s preferable tu cut some frequencies until you obtain the change that you wanted. Or you will be basically lying to yourself or to your tendency of appreciating loudness.
A second could be, pay attention when cutting the mud, if your HPF is too hard, you could be losing on the organic end of your sound.
And the third, choose your sounds to fit in the spectrogram, ONLY if your primary intention is to be clean, otherwise you are putting shackles on yourself. Some of the most expressive sounds i’ve heard come from the ridiculous overlapping of similar-sounding instruments.
This is a really fun place, i like it.
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I wouldn’t call those tracks outright clean so much as stripped back (the kicks are pretty dirty, especially on the second, and somewhat on the first). But in both cases, you have a basic beat, with exactly one tonal element and a vocal. That’s really easy to get clean because you just EQ your one instrument to get it out of the way of the vocal, keep both out of the way of the bass drum, and then keep the high hats high. Literally the only thing that should have to fight your melody and voice is the snare. All that stuff except the kick drum is super clean and mostly dry, (slight vox delay) and the kick is dirty to give it more harmonics for smaller systems. There’s just not much going on that needs to fight for space, and that is a cool sound sometimes, but it’s not the only way to do music.
Yeah, but the magic is that nothing is dry ; everything is processed to hell, and I like sticking to mainstream because I never learned that much about producing, mixing and music by just studying a genre. There’s so much things going on in those minimalistic beats !
I don’t remember the name of this beat’s mixing engineer, but I watched him when he was invited to Dave Pensado’s youtube channel. It was awesome to listen to those guys, they know so much things about mixing by their jobs in the music industry, and explain everything they know about mixing music. (btw, there are tons of hours of quality content about mixing on this channel, and the guy is awesome)