Over the last couple of years, dance music has taken a turn for the harder, nastier sounds. From Drum & Bass to Dubstep and Electro house, 'filth' has become one of the most popular sounds on the planet. You only need to see the Youtube viewing figures for the likes of Skrillex and Pendulum to confirm this - and that's if you missed their constant arena-level tours of America and Canada. But it takes a lot of skill and practise to be able to produce and engineer such viciously hard tracks. So here are a few tips to help you on your way to noise complaints from the neighbours...Despite what a certain class of musical snobs would insist, it's actually not as easy as it looks to put together a mixdown of fierce intensity and maximum impact. It's certainly a lot trickier than engineering a genteel dub soundscape with delicate percussions, and is as much about what you remove as about what you leave in the mix. Soldiers in the Loudness War may, however, wish to look away now.
For the purposes of this article we'll assume that you already have your filthy, screeching synth sounds, hyped up vocal samples and possibly even some electric guitar. Indeed, you can take the recent collaboration tracks between Korn and Skrillex as a good reference point; they combine metal and electronic sounds very well, and while this author wouldn't listen to the album for pleasure, it's a well engineered and very loud example of what's possible.
It's all about considering what's important in your track. Obviously, drums are crucial; to give a solid pulse. So you need plenty of weight on your kick (boost around 100 - 150Hz, leave below that for the sub) and also on your snare (boost around 200Hz, maybe even layer in a quiet kick drum too). You'll also need plenty of top end - right at the top, 8kHz and above, to make sure the drums cut through the screaming midrange of that bass synth. Then you should overdrive them a touch and compress them to within an inch of their life; better still, use a plugin like GClip to hard-clip any pesky transients off them.But this is where it gets interesting. Having turned everything up to 11, we now need to consider what you can lose. Obviously, transients and dynamics are the first things to go - we don't want live and funky here, we want the sound of a bus falling down the stairs. The next thing you can lose is sonic character. Again, listen to Sub Focus or Chase & Status; the drums are usually bland and featureless and this is no coincidence. The character and interest of a snare is often around 1 - 2kHz; but that's where the screech of a Massive patch or the grit of an electric guitar lies. So do a subtractive EQ cut around this area of your drums; a more subtle cut around 400 - 500Hz will also help avoid muddiness without interfering with the 200Hz boom of your snare. With such a bare sound, a slightly harsh reverb high-passed at around 10kHz (so it basically sounds like a hiss) can sometimes help the snare be heard over the maelstrom.
Another thing that needs to go is subtlety of programming. If you're going to have the biggest drums in the world, you can't really have delicate little fills going on, and trying to make any ghost-notes audible above the blare of your lead or bassline will not only be an uphill struggle, it will simply detract from the impact of said bassline. A ride cymbal on straight 8ths or 16ths layered into the drum beat will help give the impression of energy. But you may want to use an envelope shaper to remove the attack from it - in the mix it will largely be overpowered anyway.
When it comes to those huge synth riffs, clearly you need to make them as big as possible; lots of stereo width, plenty of short-medium reverb, loads of high frequencies so that they're audible on a car stereo or iPod headphones, and only have one at a time. This kind of mixdown is often as much a case of arrangement as engineering; while having two or three big synth sounds all playing heavy riffs at once may seem like a good way to increase the intensity of a track, when they're all huge sounds they'll just seem muddy and confused. Going the opposite way and having just one, but also cutting out the drums and FX so that it fills the whole frequency spectrum will sound much heavier, and will also give plenty of impact when the drums crash back in half a bar later.The one riff can (and maybe should) be doubled up with other sounds, however. A simple warm bass sound will help give some backup to the screaming distortion, and a fizzy topline that's comprehensively high-passed will bring an even more unpleasant texture for the headbangers to clench their fists to.
Essentially, what you'll end up with is a mix where your drums occupy the lower frequencies, a huge synth, vocal or guitar the midrange, and the drums again are peeping over the top at the highest registers to help emphasise the rhythm on smaller speakers (to this end, don't be afraid to have some very high frequency 'click' on your kick drum too).
Once you've got your drums and synth banging, it's a case of trying to fit all the extra details into the mix in such away that they don't interfere with the main groove. Any extra drum breaks and ride cymbals can be high-passed and side-chained off the kick and snare. Indeed, almost everything apart from the main riff should be side-chained like this, and if possible only occupying the space it absolutely needs; as well as high-passing things to avoid clashing with the drums, you should consider low-passing them too if possible; often cutting out frequencies above 12kHz on certain non-essential sounds will help give some much-needed clarity at the top.
Finally, it's even more important to take regular breaks than normal, as such a sustained midrange assault is very fatiguing on the ears and can lead you to make some wrong decisions.
This article, it must be acknowledged, goes against a lot of best practice in mixing music. But then is the mosh-pit at a Skrillex rave really concerned with best-practices in music engineering? We can assure you that it is not. So if you want to produce the biggest, most abrasive sounds in dance music, here is your starting point. Now give your parents some earplugs and crank out those brutal sonics!
