Recently I'm often not entirely satisfied with my mixes. They don't sound like they have enough body, unlike a lot of my older tracks. Those older ones are nice and warm sounding, but at the expense of a degree of clarity, as everything is over-saturated.
I've linked some tunes with mixes that are characterful, yet clear, and I wondered if any of you have any tricks up your sleeves for achieving that kind of sound. Any hints to do with effects chains, signal levels, sound design, or literally anything else you think is relevant would be very useful! :)
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(2/2) Something else I notice is the panning stategy: everything is either center, hard left or hard right. Nothing halfway between those points. I'm not totally in favour of this, but I admit that just having three panning points makes for a very stable, balanced and separated mix. Then you can afford to have "dirty" noises full of character but they don't muddy your track because their space in the stereo field is so well defined.
I think that's it. It's about simplifying your arrangement, prioritizing sounds into foreground and background, limiting the frequency spectrum they use, deciding which ones are clean and which are gritty, which are panned to the sides and which are centered and filtering everything you don't need. I hope this helps.
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(1/2) Very good reference tracks. The first thing that strikes me is how clean the low end is. I think that the first thing you can do is to filter out low frequencies (everything below say 125-150 Hz) from every sound that doesn't belong to the low end, namely kick and bass. Also, I think you could high pass filter the final mix (prior to mastering) and remove everything below 30 Hz. You might not hear those ulra-low frequencies, but they still take headroom and might trigger mastering compressors, etc.
Another thing is the arrangement, trying to have as few simultaneous sounds as possible. At any given time I hear six or seven sounds at most playing simultaneously. This simplifies your mixing and leaves more space for each sound to occupy its part of the frequency spectrum. Of course the sounds change from section to section to maintain interest. So in one section you'll have one set of sounds and in the next section you'll have a slightly different set of sounds.
Also, these tracks show a very clear separation of main sounds (two or three max at any given time) and supporting sounds. The main sounds are more prominent in the mix (louder, wider space in the frequency spectrum) and the supporting ones are more in the background (much softer, less space in the frequency spectrum, panned to the sides). The background sounds are also the ones that are more treated to sound lo-fi (filtered, added noise) and give the "character" to the total mix. Of course, just like before, you can change which sounds are the main ones and which are the supporting ones, or drop sounds entirely and leave just supporting ones to create anticipation and maintain interest in your arrangement.
Something I thought of lately and it makes a noticeable difference, is using hardware synths, live playing/tweaking your parts. Make sure your patches have some good modulations like aftertouch, velocity mapping, modwheel etc. It adds a lot of life to otherwise sterile synth lines.