Preparing EDM music to professional mixing

There is no way to expect for commercial quality sound from EDM music at professional online audio mixing mastering services if the music producer hasn't made all his best to get as much "perfect" sound as possible at music production stage. No doubts the best is when engineer who is engaged in mixingmakes final decisions on audio processing. Yet there are procedures which are the best to get executed by producer at arrangement stage. Thus producer assures oneself the actions he takes are proper and he delivers to dance music mixing and mastering the edit which is the closest to desired final sound.

1.Filter up Bottom end

Since EDM genre mixing is exceptionally demanding to sound clarity and transparency, there is  strong recommendation to cut sub lows at most elements of the music track except Kick and Bass. Beyond dispute it's absolutely right! But it's really important not to carry out this procedure mindlessly otherwise you can harm the audio  quality easily. There is a trick broadly used by engineers. In the first instance they build song's foundation by setting the Kick's and Bass' balance up. And only afterwards they add midrangy instruments and sounds - starting from ones which have lower fundamental tone and so on as fundamental tone increases. Say, we have bass, Kick drum, piano progression with broad tessitura, synth pad and saw waveform based lead. Let's get the mixing  started. We're adding to perfectly working foundation the next element - most likely it will be Piano since it's register incorporates quite low sounds. Now it's time to clean up bottom end. Apply and rise High Pass filter until your hear piano sound gets thin and wimpy. If engineer did his job on preparing edm track to mixing and mastering services right Piano's lows loss won't get audible thanks to Bass. It compensates the loss with own bottom harmonics. Say, saw Lead will be the next. Most likely it will have to be filtered out at online music mixing and mastering services even more intensively by cause of already three low sounding elements. Working altogether they give plethora of low and mid harmonics. 

2. Clean up the Top End

Alike as lows opposite hand of frequencies range claims for cleaning up as well. Making mixing for a song engineer often Low Passes audio underneath 10kHz. No one prevents you of doing that right away. Thereby the saw lead won't hurt your ears at online mixing and mastering with redundantly sparkly highs if filtered. Track's sound will get more comfortable in overall and thus you'll prepare space for percussion in music. The same procedure will have to get carried out at vocal mixing on synth Lead. You will be surprised how much clearer your music will sound after these quite simple steps accomplished. What amazes even more - eventually this kind of mixing allows to achieve even more music brightness. Getting rid of some audio unnecessary, sharp overtones engineer stocks up for brightness increasing at mastering stage. Keeping clarity and audition comfort at the same time!

3. Check the phase

Since layered kicks are used in EDM music pretty often before sending the track to professional music mixing studio make sure all layers are in phase. If that's so - then they will work together really good and won't cause issue at mixing. It's quite easy to make sure the layers are in phase. Drag and drop any plugin equipped with "polarity inversion" option and invert one of the Kick's layer. If bass drum overall sound got hollow and weak - that means the phase was right initially. If opposites - the Kick has got more energy, that means phase is fixed now. Many engineers preparing EDM tracks to online mixing and mastering use advanced plugins for this job - such as SoundRadix Auto-Align. Intuitive interface and convenient operation make the process exceptionally comfortable. 

4. Clean up reverbs and delays as well

Considering space treatment as just common audio effect is quite wrong. At mixing sending sounds to AUX channels (e.g. reverbs and delays) engineer introduces another extra instruments which require for individual space in a record without loss of audio transparency and overall music clarity. It all ads up to that this elements equalization might be needed as well. In fact it means you'll have to make their complete rap mixing and mastering services. Since even being added at considerably low volume level they still require for space in recording already busy with other sounds. So the starting point of their elaboration is very alike common instruments and/or sounds mixing and mastering. Firstly reverberation should be filtered of the very sub low frequencies - there is no any legibility, just a muffled mumbling obscuring Bass and Kick. For more clarity you better High Cut delays - of course if you're not aiming for specific effect with clearly audible echoes. This simple approach is straightforward way for engineer to right away put the delay further back in music. Thus delays perfectly does it's job of imparting music better feeling of space. 

In busy music tracks isn't easy sometimes to recognize which exactly frequencies clogging up entire sound of the record. In this case most of audio mixing engineers are making such a trick. They crank up delays and reverbs AUX channels so that their presence in the song got more obvious. Now it's quite easy to define audio muddiness sources and chunk them out with an EQ. What's important - experienced engineers are taking care of clarity of the audio even before equalization. Just with setting up right-minded reverberation decay time and delay's feedback. A short pre-delay on reverberation plugin will also make further professional mixing and mastering more simple and help to separate sounds from each other. 

5. Being idle is still work

Mixing is a very multifaceted process. During it engineer makes dozens decisions on equalization, compression, space treatment etc. Or decides that would be better to leave this particular instrument as it is. And this is also a part of mixing orchestral music process - to make a decision that particular sound does it's mission great with no need for extra processing of the audio. After all ultimately mixing engineer's task is to achieve the music's most transparent and dense sound yet not to just apply own skill to all elements for no reason. Musical post production veterans have their reasons to remind everyone continuously that one strongly recommended to realize the purpose of applied audio processing. Think about it also from this perspective - mixing mastering engineer beyond dispute has to allocate foreground, middle plan and the rear one. Namely he has to allocate space depth of the music. He already has done sound foreground everything he meant to be there so with saturation. Leaving other sounds untouched engineer puts them deeper into the mix. By this 

mean he emphasizes space feeling of the music avoiding sounds conflicts at the same time. In case of EDM music sound design of synthesized instruments already incorporates use of various filters. That means that lot of work on their sound elaboration performed even before professional EDM mixing and mastering. If producer's idea carried out wisely, redundant processing may only make things sound worse. To evaluate the situation correctly and to make the one and only right decision in this case - to leave the instrument unaffected - is also considered a part of the workflow. And everyone who starts learning EDM music mixing and mastering should bear that in mind.