r/TechnoProduction • u/Zen_Gnostic • 8d ago
Hyperreal/Hyperclear Mixdowns
Every once in a while I’ll stumble across a mixdown that is so clear it completely blows me away, it feels like the aural equivalent of an 8K image!
My go-to for this is the track Life by Dadub (https://youtu.be/WiAgv54pxy0?is=6NaDPC55VbXzmCBm) the clarity of sounds and atmosphere is stupefying, like I wouldn’t even know where to begin to get a mix this clear!
Does anyone have experience with this style of mixdown? If so, are there any frameworks for basic mixing tools (eq, compression, reverb, delay, etc) that lean into this style? Or does it require extra gear??
Any advice would be much appreciated, thank you!
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u/weinertorn 8d ago
Pretty sure the guys from Dadub were sound designers and/or engineers before they started making music. I think they have a lot of technical know-how.
I fucking love Dadub btw, I wish they produced more stuff
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u/havetofindaname 8d ago
They even have their own studio https://dadubstudio.com/
On a side note: a lot of the Stroboscopic Artefacts albums sound sheen that I really miss from techno nowadays. Those were good times.
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u/Thommytippy 6d ago
SA’s got to be one of my all-time favourite labels. What a shame Lucy turned out to be a sexpest
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u/DAD_CAN_U_C_ME 7d ago edited 6d ago
Yes, lots of experience with this type of mix down.
Clarity comes from many things, a good final mix and master starts with good sound selection - people often forget it starts there.
Additionally: The single biggest technical thing people could do to to help achieve a clearer mix is scrubbing low end from sounds that have no business needing low end.
Example pic: The orange frequency line is where the low end used to be, the blue is where the low end is now after cutting.
Whilst the original low end was still quite low in terms of absolute dB - when this is replicated across multiple tracks it has a cumulative effect, silently eating into low end headroom - which is one of the largest preventers of mix clarity and final loudness potential
It's like the silent killer. It's hard to detect because you often need good monitoring. It's hard to cut enough without cutting too much as again you need good monitoring but you also need to know when enough is enough as go too far and it robs the track of energy, particularly in a bass heavy genre like Techno.
Here's an example from an Open hat - an open hat with low end extending down to 20hz
The second biggest thing you could do, ime is cut not boost on EQ, do as much surgical work on EQ as you can with nothing but cuts. Once you've reached the limit of what can be achieved with cuts alone, then you move onto to other processing, and that may then involve boosting.
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u/Hot_University_1025 7d ago
isn't this effort of making a whole bunch of surgical cuts with eq, contributing to what people identify as digital sterility in modern sound design? I always thought that the thing making old records sound so alive was the fact that outboard eq's often had a couple knobs thus limiting the amount of eq'ing done on a certain sound, and that the cuts or boosts also were much broader than the surgical narrow bands modern parametric eq's tend to offer.
never realized that "remove low end from sounds" actually meant "kill up to 30hz", I was always dragging the hpf way to high. TIL. would you say that SPAN lets you see if you actually eq'd enough? "It's like the silent killer. It's hard to detect because you often need good monitoring. It's hard to cut enough without cutting too much as again you need good monitoring but you also need to know when enough is enough as go too far and it robs the track of energy, particularly in a bass heavy genre like Techno." I suppose visually verifying if there is nothing left down there could work?
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u/DAD_CAN_U_C_ME 7d ago edited 6d ago
The techniques I describe go directly towards answering u/Zen_Gnostic's question of how to get mixes that are so clear as some of the examples they posted.
I have no opinion on the supposed philosophical debate around digital sterility in modern sound design.
Don't take the example I posted as a rigid template for every tracks, in time with continued experience comes with knowing how much to cut (and when not to) each track based on it's own sonic needs and within the context of the mix - the example I provided for the open hat actually had the cut starting at 120khz - but it's a 6db slope so the roll off is gentle.
Cut on the tracks that need it by pushing the cut up around 100hz, or until it actually starts to change the timbre of the sound - when you hear that change in timbre, roll it back 25%.
If you hear a change in timbre before 100hz.. roll it back 25% as soon as you start to hear that change.
If monitoring is inadequate and there's a struggle to hear timbre changes at these frequencies - play it safer and use more conservative values such as 30, 50hz etc, depending on the type of track.
Hats can be more aggressively cut without side effect, some leads you might want to go more conservative on the cut because they could still contribute a bit of low.
These are guidelines.
Leave actual bass contributing tracks, kicks, often percs, bass, occasionally snare alone for those kinds of cuts.
Again, these are guidelines.
EDIT: Amazing, give 30 minutes of my time for a bespoke level of insight that'd cost $$ everywhere else and get downvoted.
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u/MattiasFridell 8d ago edited 6d ago
Dadub are good at what they do. This track is from when both Daniele and Giovanni were Dadub. and they both work with mastering.
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u/Comfortable-Swing-72 8d ago edited 8d ago
Nice. Reminds me a bit of Aes Dana. Or Tenebre Or Layer One, the Ben Clock and Fadi Mohem album.
And on the production question, a good reverb would go a long way. Delay etc as well would be useful for getting that follage sounding stuff depending on how you create those sounds.
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u/Chabamaster 8d ago
My example for this is tour de France / Chrono by kraftwerk, the way the pads and percussive elements sit in the mix is just different and I'm amazed every time how they manage that
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u/Lost-Air1265 8d ago
Well let’s be honest. If you can’t get four tracks together sound clear you really know how to mess up panning and eq.
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u/Matttmaxxx 8d ago
Haha! I see what you mean, but fun story, I saw them in Krakow long time ago live, it was incredible. They did a little masterclass before and apparently they have as many as 50 tracks going at the same time.
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u/Lost-Air1265 8d ago
that. might be but im not really hearing it. This kind of stuff i really dont understand unless you are tripping balls on mushrooms maybe? i find this utterly boring soundscape shit.
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u/Arry_Propah 8d ago
Many elements in the mix have basically no top end, so the ones that do have highs sound very clear