How I Mixed my Toccata in D Minor Remix

Hey guys! This one's well overdue but I thought I'd take you through the process I went through in mixing my Bach Remix I put out a while ago as I finally got my hands on some screenshots from my session (I don't have Ableton so I had to go to uni...). Let's jump right in!

Mix View in Ableton Live 9 - Screenshot taken 21/8/18

Arrangement

The arrangement for this mix in general was quite strange as although I was using a house music structure, I still had to abide by and respect the original layout of Bach's sheet music. This wound up setting everything off by about half a beat however, this is what kept the track and elements in time. By having to work around this, the rest of the arrangement wound up being rather quirky and strange but thats not necessarily a bad thing. Below I'll be going through each specific group and explaining how they were processed and placed, lets start with the synths!

Synths

This group consisted of three main tracks: The melody, the main body synth and a secondary synth layer. As these were the main attraction in the mix, I wanted them to stand out over the rest of the mix so I threw a glue compressor on their group bus. This enabled them to stick together rather well and it also allowed me to apply makeup gain to bring them up as a whole in the mix. You'll also notice in the screenshot above that these are not panned and are in mono. Although its hidden, the melody and synth chords actually have an auto-pan plugin on them, allowing them to move throughout the course of the song.

Bass

For some strange reason in this track, there was more than one bass track. The funny part is, I don't even know why. Probably because this was the first semi-house style track I'd ever made and coming from recording bands and other artists, a 'bass' channel was just a necessity to me. I hadn't known around this time about frequency regions and that the sub bass was really all that was needed to rule the 100Hz region so in the end, there were sections that just wound up being a cluster of low end and then it would just drop back out again. As always for bass though, these two tracks were sat right in the middle of the mix in mono. By some miracle however, they didn't clash and actually managed to sit relatively well with the drums!

Drums

Speaking of drums, these were actually quite tricky and still didn't quite sound the way I wanted them to in the end. For a while, I was actually using a kick out of a bass house sample pack so it hit way too hard for a track with this kind of feel. Following this was the snare which by some miracle still remained in the mix for the final bounce. On the topic of the snare, I personally came to find that after producing this track, snares in EDM really aren't my style unless I'm going for something really hard-hitting. Looking back on it, the snare in this mix really didn't suite the track and stood out a little too much and was a bit too powerful. On the other hand, the clap that was used as a replacement in some sections really seemed to sit well in the mix and in hindsight I wish I had've gotten two of them and panned them 100% in opposite directions. That way I would've gained the width I was looking for without overpowering the entire mix with a fat snare slap. On a side note, the toms in the mix only appeared once in the beginning to introduce the first rhythm section. Honestly, I don't really see why they were needed in the first place I sort of just placed them there to try some cool stereo drum techniques :/.

Mastering

If you hadn't noticed before now I'm not the biggest fan of this track, mainly because it was what I used to figure out the initial stages of producing house style EDM. However, I did find mastering this track very fun. I used a relatively simple chain starting with 2 EQ's (one for sweeping resonant frequencies and one for sculpting) and then proceeding into a saturator for a little warmth and drive. From here I entered the compression stage, pulling everything together with a glue compressor and then tightening it the slightest bit more with a tad more compression on top. Now comes the best part, limiting. As it usually goes for EDM, I crushed the fuck out of it, but within reason as I still wanted it to sound clear and have everything coming in nicely without distorting.

Overall

As much as this track pains me to look back on, I am glad that I created it as, just like 'Nervous', it was one of the first stepping stones into my journey of house music. I learn't many things from creating this track such as that there is such a thing as too many tracks (and too much bass :( ) and things can get messy if you don't keep your elements balanced and under control. My next blog to be released will be a very similar layout to this one however, next time we'll be looking at the mixing of my horror sound replacement! Stay tuned!

Levels :)