Even if electronic music allows a lot of experimentation, there are a few rules that should be followed when working, as EKmixmaster experts advise. Otherwise, a good idea will become just a number for the archive on the hard drive. In this article, we will cover the main mistakes.
While you’re listening to your track at home, everything sounds perfect. The mids are crisp and the hi-hats sound nice and clear. Then you play your track for the first time in a club and notice how it literally collapses next to other tracks. Problems in the bass range are often caused by poor acoustic environments. This is either a suboptimal room, or small-sized studio monitors. Therefore, it is worth investing in better studio monitors, but only after you have acoustically optimized the room.
Instead of just adding more bass to the mix, you should focus on the most important instruments first: the kick and bass. You must decide beforehand which of the two should take over the part. Because if both instruments have too heavy subs, you slide right into the next problem and end up with an indefinite bass range.
Conversely, you may have added too much bass to the track, not too little. In this case, either the lower mids are probably still too vague, or there is too much going on in the sub-range. To fix this problem, you should go through all your tracks and analyze them.
If you mix for hours, your ears will eventually get tired. You end up over-emphasizing the high frequencies in the mix, then adding more and more high frequencies. So it’s worth putting off work and relaxing.
No matter how perfect the mix is, if there is no rhythm in the track, you will not get much response from the audience. With a few tricks, you can make the beat a lot more exciting. On the one hand, you can try to import individual elements manually. Depending on how well you do this, you may need to use the sequencer’s quantize function afterwards.
For a track to work well both in a club and just listening to music on the road, the arrangement must be well built. Captivating transitions are an essential part of creating techno at ekmixmaster.com.
Before playing a track in a club, you should have listened to it at club volume. You must pay attention to three things. Firstly, are the high frequencies too piercing. Secondly, whether auxiliary elements, such as a melody or transitions, work even at high volume. Thirdly, either the drum is suddenly swallowed, or the bass range suddenly starts to howl like a beast. In order to meaningfully appreciate the bass range, you should briefly leave the listening position and walk a little.
There are two quick ways to counter this: first, gently lower the high frequencies with a shelving EQ from 10-12kHz. Secondly, you can use band saturation emulation to reduce the harshness of high frequencies. However, it is better to start right away with a mix of individual tracks and optimize the instruments in the high-frequency spectrum separately. For example, with hi-hats, a de-esser can work wonders.
Conversely, listening at a low volume will reveal whether certain instruments are too dominant in the mix. Adjust the volume so that you really hear almost nothing from your track. If there are too loud elements in your track, they should already stand out clearly. Now you can turn down the instruments and repeat the process until the mix is balanced.
