Automate weird things

Tonight I was working on a mix. It’s for this excellent artist from Finland, whose work to my ears is somewhere between shoegaze (the chime-y side of that genre) and downtempo dance. It’s hypnotic, evolving, and deeply emotional.

His arrangements are based on repetitive structures, with parts stacking in and out like vertical building blocks. And I’ve learned that it works optimally well when I can figure out ways to always keep things moving. Which often takes the form of subtle automations!

But sometimes volume automations are too overt. Sometimes I don’t want a whole sound to come forward for a little spotlight moment — sometimes it’s just part of a sound.

For instance: just now I had a triumphant moment in a broken-down verse 2 of this one particular song. The section is minimal, so there aren’t a lot of levers to pull on. But what I found worked amazingly well was to automate up the gain on the high-frequency EQ on one of the synth basses for the first half of the verse.

At the second half, this sequencer thing comes in, and that verse was good from there onward — I just needed to bridge that little gap, and keep the energy moving. And bringing the “boing” part of the synth bass forward subtly, just a dB or so, totally did the trick. Just a little subliminal ear candy to fill a little hole.

Always on a swivel — jamie