Week 19 - Posted on 2015-07-12 by Jeremy Martin

I want to use my final blog post for the basic program as an opportunity to talk about my final mix project. 

The track I selected was "triangle" by c-fx. The sample clip had a clicky little percussion section that intruigued me, so I opened the song up. I would describe the song as an exploratory progression of sounds. The structure seemed to work well, and the synths droned on a simple melody.

Mixing electronic music is a little different than other kinds. To make a successful mix for this song, I recognized that making the drone synths the feature of the song would be tiresome to listen to. Instead, I relegated the synths into support for a crisp, sharp percussive line. A solid kick/bass pushes the track and synth and ambient sounds keep things interesting and allow the song to progress naturally. I constructed the song around what I consider to be the linch-pin of this kind of music: Bright, front-of-the-mix, snares, claps, clicks, and hats to keep the listener bobbing their head throughout the song. The song immediately struck me as a celebration of stereo space, so I used panning on some of the percussive elements to keep things interesting - especially for headphone listeners. 

I put sends on the percussion to multiple auxillary tracks to add doubling and reverb effects. The 'smash track' is the first aux channel that essentially just doubles the drums based on the amount of each drum you pump into it. A reverb track, which I employed more selectively, brings out transients and adds sustain to the drum sounds. I also threw in some very far-back plate reverb echos with hard panning. Another key element of music like this is if you listen very closely you should notice many different subtle sounds that all build into the overall mix. 

Those sorts of things bring the best out of progressive electronic music, and I think I took the track in a smart direction with a cohesive final product.