Listened to only this, now I'm hooked on your music<3 Would love you to post more in the mixing section of this forum, since I've really liked your posts there and your tutorials.

1st question: How do you go about slowing down the plucky Synth at 1:41 (after the first Refrain)? And 2nd question: Which tom-samples are you using right before the drop (at 1:00)?

I'm getting kind of confused about this whole layering business, I guess it's the terminology as Marrow was pointing out. I kind of agree with you guys that you should be able to create a good mix with just levels, EQ and compression. But on the other hand, in my opinion, in sound design anything goes; you probably do much uglier things to your sound in a synth than you do with a little multiband and reverb. The question being begged is then, where do you draw the line between sound design and mixing?

E:formatting

Quote from: Miles Dominic on March 10, 2016, 06:11:56 am

Just try and use your ears. I always put a 150/200 hz lowpass on my master while mixing the kick and bass and trying to get the sidechain's release perfect. Also for sidechaining to the kick, I always have an attack time of 0 seconds and the ratio is at the max ratio. (30:1 or something). Then I mess around with the threshold and the release.

So far I've been playing it by ear to hear when exactly my kick gets muffled by the bass being released, anywhere from like 4.11ms to 6ish is the closest I can really come give or take like 1.5ms in either direction.

My ratio is set at 5:1 right now, attack of course at 0, and I've kept the release at 4.85ms.

It definitely sounds decent so I can't complain, just looking for some possible math that may help make it even better

Quote from: Miles Dominic on February 26, 2016, 02:54:42 pm

What I do when layering kicks and snares is a bit complex but it does wonders.

Lets say I have a kick and a snare, I would make a ghost channel for both. So I'd take the transients of both, put them on their own channel and mute the output. This gives me the kick channel, the snare channel, the ghost kick channel and the ghost snare channel.
Then I sidechain the snare channel to the ghost kick, so the kick's transient will punch through instead of being washed away by the snare's transient. At the same time, I sidechain the kick by the snare's ghost channel. However, I only sidechain away the frequency in the kick, where the snare's fundamental frequency is.
Doing this, u make room for the kicks thump (the fundamental frequency) in the kick, and u make room for the kicks transient.

https://soundcloud.com/milesdominic/mako
https://soundcloud.com/milesdominic/in-retrospect-free-dl

these are 2 examples where i used that technique.

ok instead of getting complicated and convoluted, what you can do is just adjust the attack time of the samples that you use when all of your layers are played together.

You can also nudge things a little before or after, i tend to do things after because music is going forward and behind the pocket isn't so bad.

I have quite a few kick and snare layers, but the principle applies to just having a kick and a snare.

You just adjust the attack of the snare drum every so slightly, so that when you do combine the kick and snare together the transients are being applied at different times, and it'll sound like one.

You gotta take into time differences with this as well as frequency perspective.

You should also take that to hear when creating sounds with synths and cymbals.

Still mommy af. The only thing that sounded off really was at 1:10 where the snare sounded far to bassy. Either that or it's just a second kick drum I'm hearing and there is no snare. In that case bring me my snare baby!

Also... I have to jack that sound at 1:25. Been hearing that arpeggiated sound for awhile in a lot of tracks. Really need to learn how to make it at this point.

Musically the track seems on point. Mixing seems pretty solid despite some pretty obvious elements that I'm sure you're already aware of. Arrangement is catchy.

Basically get signed to monster cat already!