I was working on the mix for a Doxkyn synthwave track this morning called “The View”. Really loving the overall cinematic aesthetic of the track. The only issue was the transition from the breakdown to the drop.
A Problem With “The View”
At the end of the breakdown section there is a nice big 80s tom fill before the drop into the main theme and outro. There’s a few things going on:
- A percussion track
- The drum fill
- A 4 bar noise riser
- The chord and bass
The drum fill was sitting just right but the drop was losing all it’s impact. I cut the bar of percussion as the drum fill enters which freed up some sonic real estate around the fill but that nice big emotional pay-off wasn’t there.
I left it for the moment and worked on some other aspects of the song. I wasn’t happy with the crash/noise sample I was using so I dug around in my one shots for an alternative. I generally like a big and not so big crash/noise sample and I often layer up samples, pitch shift them etc in the LoopCloud player to create my own.
Little Move Big Impact
As I was trialling the new big sample I noticed that the crescendo of the riser ended on the same frequencies as the crash. This gave me an idea. I quickly grabbed an Logic channel EQ and placed it on the riser, put a -3dB shelf from 3900Hz.
Immediately the drop got it’s energy and the payoff was there. Such a simple tweak but huge impact.
The Takeaway: The tweak above isn’t something I haven’t used before in a mix. Narrowing the frequency response of a sound and then “opening it up” when you hit the chorus to give a lift in energy is a fundamental mixing technique. In this case I was coming at it from the other direction and it was a problem to be solved. It’s also a good reminder how a little bit goes a long way with EQ.
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