djdizzy
Active Member
- Joined
- Jun 7, 2012
- Location
- Atlanta, GA
here's a song ive been working on for almost 3 months. i'm a big fan of the old classics Adam F - Circles and LTJ Bukem - Horizons, so the inspiration for resampling and reworking "Do The Do" for the break came from those 2 songs. aside from that, the song is heavily trance inspired. i like to work in trance elements into dnb, something i started doing about 5 years ago but this is my best attempt.
even though i've been messing around with production since '99 i rarely rarely do any production cuz i'm never happy with the outcome. i'm a long-time DJ (10+ years) and enjoy production but i've never been very good at the latter IMO. this song i've spent a little over 2 months on and in the past i've never really messed around with mastering up until now. my idea of mastering in the past was eq'ing and carefully amplifying.
with this song i've applied parallel compression to give it more loudness without losing much in the way of dynamics. i've spent countless hours reading, watching videos and experimenting with trying to get a proper mixdown/mastering and even though the song's come a long way it still doesn't sound satisfactory to me. i spent a lot of time eq'ing everything the best i could, high-passed the vocals/synths/etc. i notched out areas in the eq for each track and i moved the plucks and supersaws out to the side with an m/s eq. this was because i think things got a little crowded in some frequencies with the drums so that seemed to remedy it pretty well. i tried to automate the volume when i opened up the frequency cutoff around the 2:03-2:14 mark b/c when the freq cutoff was raised, the volume increased a lot. i tried mapping the freq cutoff to the synth's volume but it didn't work that well because the volume increase from raising the freq cutoff wasn't perfectly linear like dialing up/down the volume is, i also tried heavy compression but it didn't do as good of a job as manually creating the volume automation, so i ended up just doing the best i could with watching the meter on a limiter and automating the volume in my DAW until the limiter's meter looked like the peaks were tamed, then i got rid of the limiter - i was only using it b/c it had a better meter than my DAW. i still need to increase the volume some for it to be closer to the average volume of other songs that are out there, i'll probably carefully apply a little more compression and push everything as close to 0db as possible. the song's done but i'm iffy about my so-called mastering
here's a link to the mp3: http://www6.zippyshare.com/v/6295955/file.html
even though i've been messing around with production since '99 i rarely rarely do any production cuz i'm never happy with the outcome. i'm a long-time DJ (10+ years) and enjoy production but i've never been very good at the latter IMO. this song i've spent a little over 2 months on and in the past i've never really messed around with mastering up until now. my idea of mastering in the past was eq'ing and carefully amplifying.
with this song i've applied parallel compression to give it more loudness without losing much in the way of dynamics. i've spent countless hours reading, watching videos and experimenting with trying to get a proper mixdown/mastering and even though the song's come a long way it still doesn't sound satisfactory to me. i spent a lot of time eq'ing everything the best i could, high-passed the vocals/synths/etc. i notched out areas in the eq for each track and i moved the plucks and supersaws out to the side with an m/s eq. this was because i think things got a little crowded in some frequencies with the drums so that seemed to remedy it pretty well. i tried to automate the volume when i opened up the frequency cutoff around the 2:03-2:14 mark b/c when the freq cutoff was raised, the volume increased a lot. i tried mapping the freq cutoff to the synth's volume but it didn't work that well because the volume increase from raising the freq cutoff wasn't perfectly linear like dialing up/down the volume is, i also tried heavy compression but it didn't do as good of a job as manually creating the volume automation, so i ended up just doing the best i could with watching the meter on a limiter and automating the volume in my DAW until the limiter's meter looked like the peaks were tamed, then i got rid of the limiter - i was only using it b/c it had a better meter than my DAW. i still need to increase the volume some for it to be closer to the average volume of other songs that are out there, i'll probably carefully apply a little more compression and push everything as close to 0db as possible. the song's done but i'm iffy about my so-called mastering
here's a link to the mp3: http://www6.zippyshare.com/v/6295955/file.html