Getting a good, detailed mixdown is a tough proposition at the best of times - and balancing your bass, drums and melodies is certainly the essential part. But once you're past that hurdle, there are a few subtle tricks you can do to add movement, detail and interest to your mixes that will really give it that extra ten percent to catch the listener's ear.
What we're really talking about here is "ear candy" - things that aren't necessary to the overall message of the track but can help to keep the interest, and build up an overall sense of detail and atmosphere.
The most obvious option is simply to layer in some incidental effects, fairly quietly, at appropriate moments in the track. Use them subtly, and maybe panned quite hard off to one side, so as not to clash with other key elements in your tune, and they will help build up the soundscape, giving you a fuller and more interesting mix. Suggestions for such things coud be some analogue squeaks and bleeps, bounced, timestretched and effected. Or some random sounds you recorded with a microphone. But it doesn't even need to be that complicated - something as simple as a hihat, reversed and pitched down a couple of octaves, will still sound interesting and completely unlike a percussion instrument.
But these are all extra sounds; and if you make a mix stuffed full of sounds and effects, the overall impression can become cluttered, busy and confusing - and end up taking the listener's attention away from the main act. So instead, it can be useful to consider some more subtle options.
Delay is a very popular option which this author uses frequently; a simple "slapback" preset can really thicken up a sound without having to make things overly loud. Just use an auxilliary send to route some of your sound to a buss, with a very short delay on it - in the region of 50ms or below. Filter off the extreme highs and lows, and make sure the feedback is very low - then turn the delay channel down somewhat. You can then put a chorus or stereo widener on, after the delay, to make the thickening effect even more pronounced - and try tweaking the panning too, to see what sort of effects you can create. Long delays may clutter your mix, so think carefully before reaching for the 'mega-dub' preset!
On the subject of panning; don't forget the wonders of autopan. As befits the theme of this article, extreme use is discouraged - you don't want your vocal track flying from speaker to speaker. But a subtle shift around the stereo image can work wonders for a pad sound or synth line.
Autofilters are similarly useful - again, we're not talking about a major LFO wobble on your bassline. But for background harmonies and pads, a slight change in (say) a high-pass filter, over a period of several bars, can help give the extra interest you need.
Phasers can also provide the impression of detail and movement - and many's the time we've all heard tracks with a dry, upfront hi-hat line which seems to just drill a hole in the forehead. At times like this, a phaser on a buss channel (make sure it's in stereo) cycling gently out of sync with the track, would take the edge off the sharpness, and suddenly make that simple channel a whole lot more listenable.
We went into some detail on reverb not long ago - but it's such a useful tool that it bears mentioning again! Aside from big, atmospheric sci-fi reverb sounds, you can also create very short, quiet reverbs that don't place your sounds in a cathedral hall, but rather thicken it and add some warmth (try filtering off the top and bottom again).
Another simple trick is the classic "dub send". Set up a big effect on a buss, and then occasionally during the track, send a channel to it for a beat or a bar, before pulling the send pot back to zero. The effect jumps forward into the mix, grabs the listener's attention, and just as quickly recedes into the background, before it has a chance to get boring or clash with some of the more important aspects of your track.
These are just a few options open to the mix engineer - but hopefully they've given you some food for thought. The important thing to remember is just the classic maxim of Less Is More - a little effecting on a lot of channels will be much more useful and interesting than a couple of huge effects on one or two channels! So fire up that mixdown, listen closely, and get filling out that soundscape...
