https://soundcloud.com/jefferson-knight/cristal
started that one with a simple plan:
- imagine it’s a band. so only few instruments, drums, bass guitar, two synths and if i find vocals (which i didnt) those as well.
- the drums play a monotone rhythm without any hihats and the only important thing there is the snare drum.
- the bass guitar is the important instrument and overpowers everything.
- two chords (mainly).
in some aspects that works. the main problem is the bass guitar. it occupies so much space that i’m just cutting a lot of from the synths that they start to sound thin and instead of a rich wall of sound i get a muddy, harsh sounding blob. i’d like to have a pad with a warm, strong body in there. but there is no space and i don’t want to cut anything from the bass guitar.
spent another day on the song and couldn’t make it work. i have no clue what to do with those instruments. in the end i changed everything to plastic using arturia’s moog modular and jupiter 8 instead of omnisphere. bit boring but sounds better now.
Completely different from the first one indeed, which in terms of darker feel and loudness was kind of better even if it was ending in a muddy mix. 
Changing your instruments or sources is not the way to go to solve the first issue.
I would suggest to go back to your first mix and try the following workflow :
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GET YOUR MASTER VANILLA ( No mastering chain or whatsoever ) and keep your master Level at 0.
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MUTE ALL TRACKS AND SET THEIR LEVELS TO - ∞ ( No sound ).
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START with your Bass Track, make it MONO and slowly raise the track Level to get a proper level not exceeding -12 dBfs - EQ that Bass and remove unwanted very LOW Freq. and some Uneedeed HIgh Ones. ( There’s always low cuts to make, even for bass !! The goal is to retain a correct low end but avoiding rumbling or muddy sound when pushing the mix later on. Cutting high freq. is to free up some room for your synths. Later on during mixing when bringing your synths tracks in, you can play the bass track against those and adjust your EQ to get rid of some mids freq. too ).
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Bring your Drums and snare track in and raise the level to have a nice Bass & Drums mix already, same rule for the levels, don’t exceed -12dBf and keep in mind that all levels addition themselves. The goal is to have an evenly & consistant mix hitting around -12dBf on your master.
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To get those elements ( bass & Snare ) working well, you could use side-chain comp ( feed from the Snare track ) or tools like Xfer LFO Tools or dynamics EQs.
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Then bring the synths & other tracks in your mix, proceed the same way : adjust the levels and don’t be afraid to EQ each tracks and cut unwanted LOWs & Highs.
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For the synths, you could as well use side-chain comp on the bass and I would also play with the stereo field & spread of each synths tracks and perhaps panning too, to give space to each one. ( free Ozone Imager could help ).
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The goal is too get a clean mix in terms of frequencies & dynamics without any master chain involved.
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Once you get there, you can use MID-SIDE EQing, Mastering EQing, Compression & Limiting to push your mix from those -12dBFS to -6dBFS / -3dBFS
Good Metering ( dBFS & LUFT ) & FREQ. ANALYZER tools are your best friends here.
Gain staging & monitoring at low levels + avoiding frequencies duelling + place & space of instruments should help to make those first instruments play well together within the mix.
OK, so that was my break from my training… LOL
Hope that could help
Cheers !
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wow. that is really helpful. thanks a lot. worked more on the track using your post as a guideline and drums and bass work much better together now. the synths still sound strange but we’re getting closer.
Nice to know that could be helpful
Levels, gain staging, frequencies masking, place and space of each instrument & mixing at low level on a vanilla master channel is a good approach to mixing ( in my humble opinion ). It is old school, it takes time and requires a lot of work and trial & errors finding & using the right tools, plug-ins… It’s not the most creative way to make music, but once you get your midi ( or audio ) in and find your sound, it’s a good habit to gain stage & EQ per channel right from the start.
It’s tempting to setup a “magic” or “one million $ plug-ins” Mastering chain on the master to get THAT sound right from the start but without doing the first level it will lead to disappointing results after adding a few sounds & tracks in your mix. Again, it takes time to get there & it is not always fun… 
I’ve been told that once : “the more you expand your knowledge, the more you raise your pain”, which turned really true with audio & music production 
But if you’re agree with that, here is another consideration… 
For synths on a general basis, make them fit in the mix will likely depends of things like the amount of effects applied within the synth plug-in you’re using ( i.e : if you’re using a preset very much processed by the plugin VS dry ). On one hand you’re reaching for a ready to use sound which in many case will work but sometimes it can help to reduce the soft synth effects amount and to process the sound yourself ( especially if you’re layering instruments ).
Another thing to pay attention is to be as much in tune according to your track root key and to perform a fine EQ on the synth, especially if it’s generating lot’s of harmonics, it may be that those harmonics are creating frequencies masking at certain points & fine EQ those ( reducing them ) might help. The problem with synths will be when pushing them with a limiter or compressor at the mastering stage. Soft synths are not producing steady waves forms like hardware synths and paying attention to those harmonics could help.
A good spectrum & frequency analyzer is handy in this case. The free Voxengo Span is quite a good one and it might be beneficial to spend some time on the settings because you can adjust many parameters and get much more responsive and fine details than using the default configuration…
Yep, told you, some more pain… 
Cheers !
one problem that i often see is not knowing how a single instrument should sound like in the context of a mix with many instruments. not knowing what the role of the instrument should be on a purely technical level and what its problems are when added to a mix. for example in this song: there are two pads that are pretty strong in the 500hz area and also have lot of content in the higher frequencies. both sound great alone. how do i fit that second pad in when the first one is already very active in the spectrum? i want both because one pad/melody alone is too boring.
fiddled around with the project template last night. tried to be less mono and to keep the instruments apart, partly by pushing the melody tracks to the right side of the spectrum and leave the open space for the second bass line/pad.
I think that mostly, it’s a matter of knowing if one instrument should be in the front or in the back of the mix and then the first step to achieve that “placement” is with levels and then other things like mono/stereo field, panning, chorus, reverb.
For those 2 synths it’s again a matter of low & high cut filtering and then more surgical subtractive EQuing in the High range frequencies. Side-chain or dynamic EQs could help too. But what I here in this track is that the snare is really loud with lot’s of bottom and also a tail, reduce the volume and EQ that one first to get rid of unwanted freq. and then you’ll have more room for your synths…
But that’s another track BTW, where’s the Cristal one ?? … 
It’s good to experiment, but finishing one track is also an achievement -
Once you found your suitable techniques & tools things should get easier with any new mix.
What’s your DAW of choice BTW ?
I Like very much Ian Bland @blandystudio workflow & approach to mixing and I really think there’s a lot to learn about the concept already exposed in this topic following his tutorials on S.A : Ian Bland Artist Profile - Watch video tutorials with Ian Bland
so the snare shouldn´t have that content in the 120-200hz area? different topic but a good sounding snare is one of the many problems i have and without those lower frequencies i always find the snare so weak and “wrong” when there are not many other instruments playing.
the cristal track is making baby steps. bit frustrating song because after listening to it so many times it´s also quite boring.
am using ableton live nowadays. sometimes i still use fruity loops or if i feel like doing weird fx experiments jeskola buzz.
Sorry for late reply, was away for a while.
For the snare’s bottom end, I felt it was more a level issue than a low range frequency problem, the high frequency tail of the snare should be more filtered but of course like you mentioned you want to retain the attack frequency in the lower register and remove only the unwanted lowest frequencies bellow the snare attack. You can also use tools like transient shaper to increase the snare’s attack after filtering, frequency based compressors & audio effects can also help with this.
If using Ableton Live, the saturator can also help you shaping your drum’s sounds, and of course if on Live 10, the new Drum Buss & Pedal audio effects are also very handy.
didn´t much progress on the song itself. it always turns into a muddy mess whenever i try to do something with it.
what i´d like to achieve is to capture that feeling of something like this but within ableton and without the ability
to play a live instrument:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ImyPz4tqPFU
It’s because you don’t have any piercings…
This song is muddy as hell too, I just like the synth in there.