So far in this Electronic Beats special, we’ve shown you how to program great beats and select - or even create - the right sounds to use. While these are fundamental to creating great drum tracks, no matter how impressive your sequencing skills, poorly mixed beats will always fail to satisfy. This can be frustrating for the less technically inclined musician or producer, but getting big, clear-sounding drum mixes isn’t as complicated as you might imagine.
The golden rule is to give each element its own space in the mix. This can be done by manipulating frequency (with the help of equalisers or filters), stereo panorama (using mid/side utilities, reverb and auto-panner effects, among other things) or volume (via sidechain compression, gating and specialised dynamics processors such as Logic’s Enveloper or Cubase’s Envelope Shaper).