Good stuff! I usually find all intros boring, but to me this one was pretty interesting. I like how it transforms from something cinematic to a beat. The lead is a tad too loud, otherwise I like the sound. Reminds me of the Beverly Hills Cop theme

Interested to hear what you come up with for the remix, because to me the original is all about the drop. That little bit in the end does sound promising!

In this picture, the traditional -3db cutoff frequency is denoted by fc:


However, you can also specify the filter by the frequency where the stopband starts, i.e. after which the attenuation is as high as it gets. And my point was that, unlike I first assumed, the frequency control does not have the same meaning between different EQs, or even between different filters inside an EQ.

Bumping this with a couple of my favorites. Only one is about music, the others are just for understanding how humans work.

Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience
The word "flow" is familiar to everyone, but I think people assign different meanings to it. This book defines the term. Completely changed the way I think about creativity.

Thinking, fast and slow
Only a small percentage of the decisions we make daily are done "consciously". And we're prone to make stupid errors when not in the "conscious mode". If there's one book everyone should read, it's this one.

Sweet Anticipation: Music and the Psychology of Expectation
This goes into the science of how music evokes emotions. It's a scientific text, but written in a pretty accessible way. Basically the thesis is that different emotions arise from specific patterns of playing with the listener's expectations. So a lot of the book is about how the brain models music, and what kinds of predictions it makes, say, about where a melody is going to go.

Yeah with the hammer-on-pull-off thing I was referring to the last little ornament that appears for example at 0:39. Hard to say what kind of processing is used for the intro, sounds like it could just be manually chopped. There could be some reverse sample in those rhythmic parts, but again that's just guessing. Anyway, from the part starting at 1:06 it's pretty obvious that some sort of glitch plugin is used. I've never used Ableton, though, so can't think of any obvious ways how it might have been done.

And just to be exact, the cutoff is usually defined as the frequency where the the attenuation is 3db (assuming no resonance), like you see in Mussar's picture.

If you decrease the volume after additive EQing, there's really no technical difference to subtractive EQing; you can get the exact same result using both techniques. This is just how linear filters work. If you use some sort of analog modelled EQ, then there might be differences in the sound.

I think subtractive EQ is often recommended because it fits nicely with the philosophy of giving everything its own space in the spectrum. So to bring something forward in the mix, you should think of where to cut instead of what to boost.

Do you mean that the drop has pauses and you don't want the riser to play during them? I would probably use volume automation, but you could also try sidechaining a gate with some instrument/bus that is silent only during the pauses.