The WIP thread - work In progress

Music to chill and street fight to.

Started this yesterday. I wanted to add more sounds today, but I think I’ll keep it as it is. It’s short and simple and I don’t feel that it is getting boring. I think the bass line sounds cool and untypical for the dnb drums.

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[Deleted] New version to follow soon™

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wow this sounded annoying using headphones haha :laughing:

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Absolutely. And you should finish and release your songs instead of messing around with the mixes for decades. What’*s the point of creating thousands of SLIGHTLY different mixes without releasing your stuff?

I like your song, but I think that another mix from the past was a little better. Don’t ask me what exactly, it’s been a while and usually you’re deleting your stuff faster than anyone can listen to. I think in this current mix the singing could be placed more in front and maybe also bring slightly more clearness.

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Maybe a better version, with lame parts at the beginning hehe

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I like especially the part before it gets a bit too cheesy for my taste (i.e. after ~1.30 min). The synth that comes in at 20 s sounds great. The beginning has an industrial feel to me and later it goes more into the synthwave direction. Not sure if there’s too much reverb. I could imagine that with less reverb it sounds more direct and punchier.

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Any help how to mix/master this better welcome, it seems the more I try with Ozone, native Stereo expander etc. the worse the sound gets

I don’t know how you mix and I don’t know what you want to achieve with the sound of the current project.
But what I hear without having any information about the project is the following:

  1. the song starts with a kick that is very bassy but doesn’t have any punch at all, and it’s at least 2-3 times louder than the second kick that comes in later at the 2 minute mark (the snare that also appears at 2 minutes is as soft as the second kick - both need to be louder and more in front)
  2. the zap from the beginning beat is even louder than the bassy kick
  3. the arpeggiated synth dominates the whole song because of its loudness in comparison to everything else
  4. all the “background stuff” is pretty soft and needs to get louder

So what kind of tips are you looking for? I can only repeat the same as always:

  1. Mix in mono (put a stereo expander in your master and set it to mono)
  2. Do your filtering etc. as recommended (more details here)
  3. Check your mix through several outputs (speakers, headphones, monitors)

You won’t need Ozone or whatever if you’re doing your mixing right. Ozone can’t fix a messed up mix. And if the mix isn’t right, we shouldn’t think of mastering at this point. The mastering is just limiting and stuff, but the mix is way more important than the mastering. If you’d fix the mix, you won’t have to do much in terms of mastering. Save your money, Renoise is all you need for mixing - and mastering as well.

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Thanks TNT for the prompt reply, yes I think I will remove Ozone and start to mix from scratch each track and use my speakers instead of headphones. This time I tried to “premix” the drums within the VSTs using 2 different DrumMachines (Drumazon and later Addictive Drums2), switching later to my speakers I realized it is not balanced at all. In addition I used a signal follower from the drum track to compress the bass in 2nd track but couldn´t find a satisfying sounding setting here either. To clean up the mess I thought I could use Ozone as a fast helper but like you write this can´t rescue a bad mix. Will follow your other Mixing tips as well and they helped me already with other projects, should stop experimenting and make them routine since Mixing is still difficult for me.

You can still use Ozone for mastering, but you could also do it without it. But first you will have to mix properly. I would suggest to place a compressor in every single track and compress slightly (ratio 2:1) to tame peaks, and also put a filter in every track to cut unnecessary frequencies as seen in the mixing thread. Put a monoizer and a limiter/maximizer in your master.and there you go. That’s the minimal setup in order to get a proper result. Keep it simple. Everything else are details that you can add to your routine as soon as you’re more into mixing and mastering.