Yes, you have absolute freedom to do what ever it is you wanted to do with any thing that you can do inside of the daw

like...https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9zlUxZjNh3A

for real go listen to some IDM and it will give you a clue as to what you can and can't do lol

or even square pusher

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ruc0TnSSi9Y




Your questions are really pointed and specific to a point where it should be handled by dutiful research on your own part.

Your questions are ALMOST, answering themselves. I think this is due to your intuition of being a musician.

Another comment is that you're asking about taste, you have to develop that on your own and honestly the truthful answer to your entire post is "it depends".

...

You have to consider the volume of groups as well as individual components. your individual components ratios are kept by the group volume. The group volume adds another depth of ratio control.

You're literally building up to the master track or pre master in this way of learning mixing with individual elements, mixing with groups, then mixing for the master.

If you've actually listened to those tracks i posted, you'll realize how much you can do. BTW, those guys use analogue gear and then do some weird stuff that i don't even know about, hell square pusher basically made the hard ware to get those effects in like the 90's.

You have to use your earn and use what you know to get the results that are desired as an artist.


EDIT: sorry, i may have come off as an ass initially, but my point still stands. I am all jacked up on coffee,  psytrance, homework, and fatigue.

I'm really just learning, and don't know about the conventions of prog house, but here are my observations anyway. I usually do vary the volume/timbre of the kick in one way or another during the intro. So I would set the fader where it should be in the drop, and then use things like note velocity or a gain plugin, and HP and LP filtering to control and build up the kick during the intro. And I guess the goal is that, if anything, the kick should sound the most powerful in the chorus, so in the intro I could keep it slightly quieter, but not louder!

Quote from: Lydian on February 26, 2016, 04:08:46 am

The same question goes for the bass. Let's say that the kick and bass sound okay in the intro but during the chorus it sounds off when being played at the same volume. How would someone handle this in the mix? Volume automation? Duplicate the track and create a separate "chorus bass"?

What do you mean by "off"? If it's just the relative levels, then automating the volume (preferably a gain plugin, so that the mixer fader controls the overall level) sounds fine. I guess if the instrumentation changes a lot, then it might be easier to make a copy of the bass, which you can process independently.

As for switching samples, if there is a drastic stylistic change from section to section, it might be the most natural option; in fact, that's what I did in my latest WIP: https://soundcloud.com/arktopolis/trance1-newdrop2/s-P6HCR. I wanted a softer kick in the intro, and then a more hard-hitting one in the drop, so I just used two samples.

This is exactly what I was afraid of and was subconsciously the main reason why I asked in the first place. I get that dynamically in most music having a chorus louder than a verse is a desired effect but arrangement wise I feel like using too many instruments (3 different kicks etc...) within a mix just makes it sounds like there's to many different ideas in a song. I've ran into this obstacle years ago before I even produced. The guys on the ultimate guitar forum would listen to string quartets I would write in Sibelius and their primary concern was that there were too many ideas and the track sounded like 3 different songs in one. The way I solved that was by limiting my ideas into one or two themes.

I feel like the same thing applies in music production but instead of dealing with notes now I have to deal with the bad habit of including to many sounds or different instrumentations/timbres.

In the song I'm writing right now I feel like there's a smooth transition between the intro and the verse dynamically. I haven't completely finished the arrangement for the verse but I already know what I want to do for the chorus. I have no idea how I'm going to transition though because the instruments in the verse are different from the chorus even though the notes are the same.

In regards to gain staging... is any of that really important when it comes to dance music? Don't get me wrong I naturally gain stage my synths to a pretty average level to avoid clipping and inaudibility but I thought the whole point of it in the first place was to reduce the noise to floor ratio. It makes sense when I record vocals, guitars, or acoustic instruments but for a synth in which that "noise" is essentially nonexistent does it really matter?

The only clear benefit I see from it in electronic music would be to avoid clipping.