Surely it's not that complicated. I'm fairly in love with ilan's productions, and have often wondered how he creates that "wall of sound".

Tons of compression and limiting?

What do you guys think, and could you recreate it?

#curious

I think there isn't a specific technique that will get you there. It is a combination of great chords, clever layering, great mixing and in the end a pretty loud master.

For example in his track '43' on that huge second drop there isn't really a lot going on: you have the kick, drums, bass, his amazing chords, white noise and some background atmospheric elements. However, each sound plays its role perfectly. In this genre, reverb plays a pretty big role, I think that ArtsAcoustic reverb or Valhalla will work pretty good.

It's all about filing the frequency spectrum correctly and giving each element it's own space and role. When you combine all that, you get a huge wall of sound.

Quote from: DV_ on January 09, 2016, 01:26:36 pm

I think there isn't a specific technique that will get you there. It is a combination of great chords, clever layering, great mixing and in the end a pretty loud master.

For example in his track '43' on that huge second drop there isn't really a lot going on: you have the kick, drums, bass, his amazing chords, white noise and some background atmospheric elements. However, each sound plays its role perfectly. In this genre, reverb plays a pretty big role, I think that ArtsAcoustic reverb or Valhalla will work pretty good.

It's all about filing the frequency spectrum correctly and giving each element it's own space and role. When you combine all that, you get a huge wall of sound.

That and multiband compression or even limiting I'd imagine.

Speaking of compression and multiband compression, I'd also be careful not to overuse it or misuse (at least on the chords which are kind of the main theme of the song here). There is  really no purpose in compressing this kind of chords and synths a lot. Why is that? Because most of the times (with sounds like this) your waveform will look  something like this:



There really isn't much dynamics going on here, so with compression you are not really doing that much (SeamlessR mentioned this in one of his videos). Saturation or soft clipping would make more sense to me to increase the apparent loudness or add color but all of that is debatable and highly program dependent.
Compression on other elements is a different story, drums come to mind first but also keep in mind that many samples are already processed and compressed.

He is doing an lot of songs here in O.C. in the Californian sun - I bet that's the secret.. 

Ask this guy

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oqu16Rh8Ak0