Frantic Dance – The volumes, panning and plugins

The mixing stage was very simple for this song, as all I needed to do was increase the volume for the main bass riff and reduce the volumes of the other synths accordingly. The low and high synths were the same riff on different octaves, and I reduced the high synth more than the low one because the higher frequencies stuck out quite a lot in the mix, and I wanted the focus to be on the lower frequencies of the sounds, but with varying volumes throughout the bass synths to avoid making the track sound muddy and cluttered with sounds at the same frequency.

In regards to the mastering of the song, I found that there was very little to do to help improve the song beyond what it already sounded like, although I believe the choices of plugins did help to create a song I’m genuinely happy with. Each of the drums and synths received a reverb plugin (a plugin which simulates space), which was adjusted to make the song sound like it was played in a small-to-medium-sized room, with enough reverb to make the effect audible but not enough as to drown the song in constant reverb. This was done because it allowed each of the instruments to feel like they were producing their sounds in the same room, thus giving the sound some consistency across the multiple synths and make the timbre sound fuller (where it covers more of the frequency range).

However, as I quickly discovered, there were some frequencies I didn’t want in the song, as it made the song sound slightly too muddy for my liking. This was where the master track came in – I applied an EQ onto it, which I then used to reduce the low-end frequencies (from 100 Hz downwards) to remove some of the lowest sounds which weren’t completely audible to the human ear (they can hear from 20 Hz – 20,000 Hz), but were still enough to make the song sound too ‘boomy’ (where the lowest frequencies are raised higher to make the bass sound excessive). Cutting these areas added some clarity to the bass sounds (as described here) which was important because I didn’t want the song to be a cluttered mess of muddy sounds all conflicting with one another, as that would make the song sound much worse than intended.

The song, prior to the mixing/mastering stage, sounded like this:

The song now sounds like this: