MIXING BEATS

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