How to Write Sick Beats

You can use the concept of contrast in your production to write tracks that stand out. There are lots of different ways to apply this idea but I'll list off a few quickies to get you started:

-Too many people are rewriting and rehashing the same thing over and over again, so contrast your track and personal style against other tracks and artists within your genre. Your colourful take will stand above the muddy blur of unremarkable music. Stand out from the pack.

-Create LOUD vs. quiet sections in your composition, like breakdowns to give the dancers a break, and then when build up to the main section. When it drops, it feels fresh and strong again.

-Similarly, make your tremendous bass sound bits bigger by contrasting them against sections without the bass. If you hammer someone over the head all day, after a while the hammer feels normal.

-Contrast between two concurrent elements. An example of this would be layering an agressive beat with some camp sample or a thin sounding instrumental sound.

-Contrast in timelines of musical culture. Bring in elements from the distant past of your music history, to work alongside your shiny new tune. These echoes from the past can sit so well against a modern backdrop.

A big part of writing great electronic music is finding ways to make things that don't normally go together, work hand in hand. Beautiful contrast has always at heart of the innovations in electronic music.

Jibbs' "Chain Hang Low" is a great example of a certain kind of contrast. Heavy beats and rhymes set against the schoolyard melody and children singing:

If you're not already doing this, using busses to group your tracks is a great way to improve your mix. At the beginning, a producer will usually route all of the tracks to the same channel - the main mix. This is fine, but as the number of tracks and complexity of a composition grows, it becomes useful to create subgroups. This gives you the power, for instance, to have one fader to control the level of all the drums, another for the bass and so on. Its really handy when you notice that the level of the vocal parts needs to come down overall, to be able to make that adjustment easily by turning down one fader, without having to go into each vocal track and try to turn them all down in proportion.

Its worth pointing out that it can be useful to route busses into other busses, subgroups within subgroups. Personally, this is something that I do all the time. For example, in a song I'll use multiple snares and claps, and since I tend to use all of these sounds in a similar way, I'll route them all to a shared bus labelled "SnaresClaps". Now when I'm mixing the snares and claps, first I'll get their levels right relative to one another by setting the levels on their individual channels. Once that's about right and all of these sounds sit well with one another, I then have a handle to tweak the level of all the snares and claps together. This SnaresClaps bus feeds into the Drums bus, where again, I can control the level of the drums as a unit. The Drums bus then feeds into the main mix where I do some global compression, limiting and EQ.

I can remember a time when it seemed intimidating, and maybe pointless to use busses in my production. Looking back I don't really know why I felt that way, especially now that I see how much my mixes improved once I started using them. I'm sure that there's others out there who feel the same, and to you I say:

Dive in, its really easy and makes it way easier to get a damn good mix.

After you've spent time being creative and building up a track, its time to take out the garbage. In dance music, and probably art in general, less is more. When you have an overcrowded mix, everything is competing with everything else, so its time to trim back the weeds, and let the flowers shine through. 

Sometimes you'll find yourself turning a sound or track down, until its barely audible in the mix. There's a place for subtle presence, but experiment with removing it completely, and listen closely to the difference. Chances are, it will leave more room and everything else will sound a bit better.

Often when writing it's easy to become attached to a particular sound or track, especially if you've put a lot of time into tweaking it, and making it sound just right. But you need to be brutal with your own work - ask yourself honestly if the element is really contributing to the track. If not, chop it out. You can sample the bit you're removing first - maybe it will be usefull somewhere else down the road. But never keep something around just because you worked really hard on it. Everything in your tune needs to be there because it's belongs. No one cares how long you spent on it, it just needs to rock. 

Equalization is one of the most powerful ways you can shape audio. Its the one effect you can find on almost every track and at every stage of a mix. The art of EQing is something that improves with practice, but here is some time-honoured wisdom to help you hone this skill.

-Don't worry about which plugin to use for EQ, for all the hype there isn't much difference between them. Just find a good parametric EQ that has a nice interface, and decent visualization so you can see what you are doing.

-Be bold with EQ. Approach EQ like you're making furniture out of a tree trunk. Start with a chainsaw to get the right shape, then switch to a chisel to fine tune it.

-Favor cutting over boosting. This is a safer bet, and tends to produce a better mix. As with any 'rule' there are plenty of exceptions. When boosting use a broad bandwidth, when cutting, narrow bandwidths.

-Check out shelf EQs for boosting/cutting the high and low ends. Sometimes a peak EQ centered right on the bottom (20Hz) or top (20kHz) can be just the ticket.

-Very important for dance/bass music: Remove the bass from everything except the actual bassline, kickdrum and maybe snare. This is because bass sounds terrible when its cluttered, multiple elements playing on top of each other in the bass end sounds like mud. Try to achieve a monophonic bass signal. Its amazing how much better a song will sound once you master this concept. There are many ways to achieve this, EQ is just part of the picture.

-Try to focus sound into frequency pockets, so that if something doesn't "need" a certain part of the frequency range, cut it out. For instance, sometimes I'll have a clap sitting slightly in the background. I might cut out all the bass, and all the highs, leaving just a band-passed handclap that still works rhythmically, but leaves room for other elements by not crowding the frequency spectrum.

-If something sounds harsh, it could be some junk in the high end. Sweep a notch filter around in the highs to find what frequency range to scoop out, and how much. If something sounds muddy, poorly defined or boxy, try the same thing in the bottom or mids.

-Sometimes when I'm EQing a sound, I picture in my head how I want it to sound first, then I make a vowely sound out of it. So if its a snare I might decide I want it to sound more "E-ish" or "O-ish". Then I get on the EQ, and fiddle with it until I achieve that vowely character. Thinking of EQ in terms of vowels can be a useful internal language to conceptualize sound, and our brains are wired to be sensitive to vowel sounds, so it becomes a good way to communicate the sound to others as well.

There's plenty more for you to learn in the studio, so get in there and start tweaking!

The most basic, fundamental element of getting a good mixdown is setting your levels right. Here are a few tips to help you get it right.

Use your ears. Pay close attention to all the elements in your mix. Is anything standing out too much? Turn it down. Is something getting lost? Turn it up, or decide if you need it at all. Its best to be minimalist with dancefloor tunes, your whole track will sound better on a big system if you cut out all the junk that you can barely hear. As always, there are exceptions.

Know what dB is. Mix like a pro and pay attention to your levels in terms of dB. Your ears always get the final say, but it helps a lot to pay attention to your meters and faders. As a rule of thumb, if you turn a sound down by 6dB, it will be half as loud. Remember that: +6db = twice as loud, -6dB = half as loud. That means when you turn something up by 3db, its about half again as loud**.  0.5dB is about the smallest adjustment that you can conciously perceive. You can hear smaller adjustments on vocals because our brains are very sensitive to the human voice.

Compare your track to professional, amazing mixes. I have a few reference tracks that I find sound amazing that I use to compare my mixes to. When you listen to your own song over and over again its hard to be objective about the mix. If your writing tunes for the dancefloor, they're getting played in the mix, so compare your own mix to the outstanding material that you will expect it to stand next to.

Listen on different soundsystems.Everyone will tell you this: Test your track on as many different systems as you can. These days that means you especially want to think about how people will experience your music. Try it on your shitty computer speakers. Try it on your laptop. Chances are your audience will first check itout on something like that. Don't forget iPod headphones, maybe the most common soundsystem of all these days. A home stereo, a your car. Most importantly, test it out in the club, and pay attention when you do. Take note of what parts of the mix need to be improved.

There's lots more to the art of mixing down a dance tune, but hopefully you'll find some of these pointers helpful!

**It's a actually a bit more complicated than that, because perceptively it actually takes a 10dB difference for us to sense a doubling/halving of loudness. Don't worry too much, its all very subjective and depends on a lot of things. Its a good habit to stay aware of the numbers, it helps...