Hmm depends on what you mean by 'crisp' I guess. To me it means the high's of the track, like the sizzle of hihats and the grit on a reece and the snap of a snare and what have you.
---------- Post added at 02:29 ---------- Previous post was at 02:18 ----------
LOL not very helpful was it hahaha
Well for my last production:
I mixed the tune, then exported it as a single wav, and tested it by mixing it with other similiar tunes to see how it sounded, and to my surprise they high end was really low, and the track sounded very muffled. Surprise, because I recently noticed my mixes were a bit light on the high end and conciously tried to counter that problem while mixing this track.
So I went back to the drawing board and did some tricks.
I grouped nearly all my channels to 3 main buses - Beats, Bass and FX. Only thing left outside were a low and quiet pad and a vocal that only came up twice. On all those buses I added an EQ. The beats had the most high end to them of the 3 so that was going to be my highest of the high, and on that EQ I did a boost on 10KHz and up. The bass had some mid stuff going on in it and at highest it hit about 3-4KHz, so it got a boost on that area, plus a smaller on on 1KHz. For the FX (blips, stabs and random noises like sweeps and stuff) I did a huge boost at around 7KHz to give them some edge.
Then I A/B'd my track against some commercial ones (with their volume turned way down to make up for the lack of mastering on my tune) and tweaked a little until I was happy. Getting it sound good also involved some compressing of the buses but that doesn't have to do with crispness.
