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Originally posted by Blake_Jarrell mixdowns are definitely getting more crowded and masters are definitely slammed to the point of lunacy but heres some things i think about when im in the studio: i feel like the loudness war is important in the DJing sense that you are mixing tracks into each other and they have to be cohesive. when i mix a really old track (when compression wasn't so abused) into a newer slammed-beyond-all-reason track, the life just falls out of the mix and the dancefloor. it all of a sudden just sounds like something is missing. dance music is supposed to be somewhat overwhelming, especially on a big system. but i find alot of the really intricate things in really crowded tracks get lost when they are played so loud and they are already slammed through a limiter in the studio and then again at a club. this leads me to question alot of the extra layers in my tracks...are they really going to get heard? or could i take this out of the mix and my mixdown would be alot easier to compress, eq, etc since its not as much stuff fighting each other for space. i think the real "dynamics" in dance music are in the arrangement. of course its good to make sure each sound has its own space and is full of dynamic and character, but i think the easiest way to counter act this is to be really careful about how you arrange things when you have so many possible tracks/sounds in your mix. just my way of looking at things when i write tracks. some other really good points in this thread as well.

DJs are just going to make the sound quality go down. They'll figure out someway to "better" the music, and that inevitably makes it worse.

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Originally posted by dj_alfi change your avatar for fucks sake.

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Originally posted by DigiNut Anyway. I'm just saying all this to highlight the fact that my previous post was not intended to be a complete dissertation on all of the interdependent variables in a mix, it was only intended to address the specific question being asked here.

I'm not trying to gump your hump. Maybe Richie.

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Originally posted by dj_alfi change your avatar for fucks sake.

mixing old tracks is hard, some aren't mastered and you see a -10db gap, you can increase the volume but still the overall energy is less, the "trick" for me is making very long blends 1 minute or more while mixing, leaving mostly the 20hz-3khz frequencies and fading the recent track slowly, so you've the pads and melodic elements of the old track playing while the pumping bassline keeps playing, in the end you'll drop the old track fully and the sound is not as crowded, but you made it in a progressive way so it's not a really noticeable change.

On big systems you don't see a "volume" change, the problem is that for some reason some of the old kicks seem weird and you hear the "clip clop trainwreck" when it's indeed matched

I dont mind having a "crowded" sound as long as the bass has a clear pattern and groove. I really hate the wall of bass feeling and sound.

You CAN have a rolling bass without mushing everything into one bucket of goo.

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boink!