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).
Getting your drums sounding right is of the utmost importance when you’re making dance music, and in the following walkthroughs we’ll show you how these techniques can be used to transform some very raw drum tracks into professional-sounding, club-ready beats. Of course, there’s no one-size-fits-all-genres approach to mixing, so we’ll be covering three different flavours of mixdown: a full-on drum ’n’ bass banger, a more chilled-out dubstep beat and a stripped-back minimal house groove.
We’ll use a number of DAWs for these walkthroughs, but the techniques we’ll be describing are universal and equally applicable, no matter what software you’re using - in fact, all of the plugins involved are from each DAW’s stock effects library. We’ll show you how a common-or-garden compressor can be used to enhance a drum track’s transients, and how modulation effects can be used to ‘stereoise’ mono signals. Getting to grips with good beat mixing technique can help inform your drum programming too, so once you’ve followed these guides you’ll be on course to make your best ever electronic beats.
Step by step
1. Mixing beats and breaks in Ableton Live
1 Begin by setting the project tempo to 174bpm and dragging Kick. wav, Snare.wav, Closed hat.wav, Ride.wav, Crash.wav and Angry break.wav onto separate audio tracks. Set up a cycle loop around the bar containing the parts, and turn all of them down to -6dB so that they don’t clip the master.
2 In their raw form, these elements sound like a big mess! The easiest way to get a handle on what we’re working with is to mute everything apart from the kick and snare. When we do this, we can hear that the snare is way too loud for the kick.
3 Drop the level of the snare track down to -13dB. We can see from the ‘uneven’ level meters on the kick and snare tracks that both are in stereo. We want the kick and snare to sit at the dead centre of the mix, so drag Live’s Utility effect onto the kick track and set its Width parameter to 0%.
4 Do the same on the snare track. Next, add an EQ Eight to the kick track. Set the first band to 12dB low-cut mode, and bring up the Freq knob until you’ve removed the excess weight from the low end. A setting of about 80Hz gives us a lighter, less stompy sound that won’t interfere with a bassline as much.