I’m wondering what you think a good mixdown sounds like?
I hear a lot of people saying “needs a good mixdown before mastering” but in techno I hear lots of different mastered tracks. Maybe techno is more flexible and experimental?! Is it about leaving enough headroom or is it making sure you kick and bass sit together nicely
Do you house and trance producers always try and work to a formula? I don’t lol
What’s your opinion on this guys?
I think that this is such a subjective question - where everyone will give a different answer
[quote]Mussi81 (03/08/2011)[hr]I’m wondering what you think a good mixdown sounds like?
I hear a lot of people saying “needs a good mixdown before mastering” but in techno I hear lots of different mastered tracks. Maybe techno is more flexible and experimental?! Is it about leaving enough headroom or is it making sure you kick and bass sit together nicely
Do you house and trance producers always try and work to a formula? I don’t lol
What’s your opinion on this guys?[/quote]
Leaving enough headroom is essential whether its a good mixdown or not.
I’d say it’s important to get your eq’ing, low cutting, panning and levels sorted before going to the mastering stage.
A lot of compression can be added at the mastering stage, but again for more control over separate channels needing more or less compression, this is best to sort before mastering.
Like you said though, there is no hard or fast rule, at the end of the day its about getting your tracks as loud and crisp as the professional guys … so use the methods that work for you!
What I’ve been doing lately, which a lot of people will tut at is creating a 16bar loop that I’m happy with. Then with all the elements of track running I drop an Ozone on the master. With this I tweak the EQ and the multiband compressor slightly to get a good overall sound, then mix into this. Been getting pretty good results! 
Im looking at it from a different perspective. I’ve always considered the mixdown to be “levels” and “panning”. I see eqing and cutting frequencies as part of the producing process. Now I understand what the **** your all talking about :hehe:
[quote]Mussi81 (03/08/2011)[hr]Im looking at it from a different perspective. I’ve always considered the mixdown to be “levels” and “panning”. I see eqing and cutting frequencies as part of the producing process. Now I understand what the **** your all talking about :hehe:[/quote]
As John McClane says – Welcome to the party pal! 
I’m with you Mussi. Just started diving into this part of production. Been watching videos and reading forums like a mad man for the last week. Finally got some tools to start mixing properly.
I think when it comes to techno what alot of people **** up on is the low end. A good techno track will have mabey the tightest well rounded bottom end in all of electronic dance music and this is where alot of people go wrong because you need fat subs and a clean listening environment for optimal results. There are ways around this and spectral analysers are your best friends.
Also with techno you have to understand that for the most part its all about your drums, I mean you domt have a lot of big synth lines to fill up your mix. So a big must do is to make sure your drums are sounding beastly, they need to be crystal clear and not smush into each other. This is simply because in most Techno this is what carries the track. You have to look at a genre and realise what your key components are and get them sounding amazing. Like in electro its all about your bassline, in DNB its all about your Kick, Snare and bassline and in dubstep its all about yoir big dirty modulated bass.
Once you realise what your key elements are you will tend to really spend a lot of time on them and get them sounding amazing, this in turn will help your overall mixdown.
Hope this helps.
the simplest explanation is that a track isnt mixed until there is ZERO clipping.
if you see your master channel go into the red AT all. its not mixed right.
The above post is not correct, all depends on floating points etc…
IMO a good mixdown is where you can hear all your tracks elements nice and clear
thats essentially what it is…