Gating: The best friend your heavy mix never knew it had?

People have often asked me, "BYTE, how do you get such aggressive mixes on just a crappy laptop?", to which I respond,  "What the heck are you talking about? These mixes are awful! They're wimpy as hell!" I know my sense of humour is dry and unfunny, but I do, however, have a few tips on getting a nice clean mix that can actually make track sound solid and more direct; more aggressive.  These tips can also be used for music which doesn't have to sound aggressive, so keep reading even if you are not interested in making dance music with Renoise.  OK, so here goes...

• Avoid redundant compression

  When using breakbeats or pre-recorded loops, stay away from compressors. Breaks are already compressed, and using compressors on them will only take away from their dynamic range.

• Gate breakbeats

  Instead, use gates to make them more punchy. Renoise's gate is a brick wall gate, but there are gate VSTs out there that have a gradual threshold. Multiband gates are particularly nice, as you can to things like gate the bass to get rid of muddiness, then amplify/eq the bass to get the punch back, whilst not gating the mids and trebles.

• Try gating other instruments

  Use gates on other channels too! Gating synth hits and such will get rid of the reverb tail that tends to raise the noise floor. This may sound nuts, but it makes a huge difference when you're trying to make your mix sound big and angry. If you still want that air in between the hits when the beat's not playing, then you can turn on some reverb, or kill the gate for a pattern or two.

• Avoid too much reverb

  Avoid putting reverb on everything. Reverb is the number 2 villain in regards to muddying up a mix. Beware too, because many synths have built in reverb and echo. It may sound cool by itself, but when placed in a heavy mix, it can be disastrous. Gates can be used to clear this up.

• Take advantage of the power of silence

  Use negative space to your advantage. Keep in mind that for a song to sound heavy, sometimes you need to consider what's not playing. The human brain gets used to stimulation very quickly, so sometimes you need to take a break before you attack it again. This is common knowledge among professional torturers, and now you know it too =D

• Apply Volume Envelopes to shorten tails

  The Instrument Editor's Volume Envelope in Renoise is great, because it allows you to create a short hit region on drums and such, fading out the reverb trails quickly. This is especially important on those amazingly long 808 kicks that never cease to plague the low end of my mixes.

• Gate at the front of the DSP Chain

  Gates should come before every other DSP in the chain, ESPECIALLY DISTORTION. Gating after distortion is pointless, as the sound data the gate uses to trigger(ie: volume threshold) is lost with distortion. If a break you're using is already distorted to all hell, don't be afraid to chop it and envelope the volume in the instrument editor.

Well, that's about it for now. I often spout off about how gates kick ass, and how compression tends to just muddy up mixes more than everything, so I figured I'd write an article on it. From now on, I'll just link to this when people ask about how to clean up their mix *Heh* By the Smasher of Bytes