The majority of EDM songs I receive to mix and master have a few things in common they are either very loud on the verge of distorting or are very busy (have a lot going on).
The loudness can be easily fixed by dropping the faders, however, removing elements from the production to make a song less busy is a little more difficult and most of the time not ideal. Try telling an EDM producer he needs to remove the 85th synth because all it’s doing is muddying up the song.
But I get it. I’ve been there. You get producing and just like a kid with some paint and a big open sheet of white paper, you want to fill the damn thing up. This is the same with the “sonic space” that exists in which we only get from about 60hz to 23,000hz (range of human hearing) to create our music.
Now to be clear I’m not saying don’t have sounds that fill up the low, mid and high frequencies. It would be foolish to create a song that was missing a key frequency band. What I am saying is when you’re producing your EDM song be clear on which band you want this particular sound to fall into it. This is because if you are not clear, your mix will suffer from muddiness due to your sounds clashing with other sounds.
Obviously other genres could suffer from this but EDM in particular because its use of these monster synths that completely suck all the space out of the mix. Again I’m not saying don’t use these synths but use them appropriately. Think of a big sound as the giant monster Godzilla. Whenever we see Godzilla he is taking up the whole screen. So just as when you introduce these big synths, pull back the surrounding sounds through automation and/or eq cuts to give the monster synth some stomping ground.
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