Listening to the work of producers and artists you admire can be a double-edged sword. On one side, taking influence from such visionaries often provides the inspiration to write new tracks of our own. On the other, getting anywhere close to the same level of production and mix isn't easily done. In the struggle to match the power, drive and punch of such mixes, frustration can boil over to the point where new tracks are simply thrown into a mix without due consideration; extra effects are employed in the hopes of hitting upon something ear-catching; or output limiters are cranked up another few decibels in the belief that overwhelming volume alone will inject the adrenaline our own tracks seem to lack.

Through this tutorial, we'll explore a counter-approach that could produce better results. Often, less is more. By ensuring that the very best ideas within your productions are given room to breathe and to really make themselves heard, you can give your mixes more power and clarity. We'll also see how individual tracks within a mix can combine in creatively to make those stronger moments stand out. The musical ideas that form the backbone of a track are hard enough to lock together in the first place; let's try to ensure that they're not diluted at the mix stage as we strive to give space to them.

First, let's use a couple of pads to demonstrate how it's often better to reduce the role of certain parts rather than boost the levels of everything around them. Pads and other harmonic parts of a track often spell out the chord progression and provide harmony—but they serve a less useful role in the mix if they're left simply to play statically, drawing life out of the more interesting musical parts.

Overwhelming pads: In our first musical example, the start point of the mix is suffering from a bloated pad treatment. The pad you can hear from the start of the track is a little loud and, even though the mix isn't filled with lots of elements, it's still weighing everything else down. To make matters worse, a second pad joins in halfway through the eight-bar phrase.

For now, let's mute the second pad and explore a few of the ways we could bring more life to this first pad sound while simultaneously freeing up some mix space.

Sidechaining: The first thing we could try would be compression, using another mix element as a sidechain control source. This will enforce dynamic changes upon the pad, with peaks in the sidechain input forcing the pad's volume to drop, while freer areas, where the sidechain input is quieter, would allow the pad to come through more strongly. We can achieve this by using the loop as the sidechain input source and in the following clip you can hear these two elements playing together for four bars, before the rest of the track joins in again.

Sidechaining with filter: A similar approach would be to use tone as the chosen parameter to provide movement, by swapping the compressor for a filter plug-in. If you have a plug-in that allows for a sidechain input signal to be analysed and converted into tone data, whereby loud input signals cause a boost in tone but quieter ones allow for a more muted tone to play back, the results can be equally effective.

Both of the examples above benefit from the fact that the rhythm of another mix element is imposed upon the pads, unifying the groove of two mix elements. We're going to explore the power of this same idea later in the tutorial, but we could also decide to bring both movement and more mix space to the pad without routing in a sidechain signal.

LFO filter: We're using UAD's Moog filter to provide ramped tone rises in quarter-notes, so that each beat features a "wah" sound. This makes the pad more featured, but it also creates more space for the other elements. At the start of each beat the pad is less audible before it ramps, leaving more room for the initial transients of the beats and the bass to make their presence felt in each bar.

Of course, to demonstrate each of these treatments clearly, the level of the pad in each example is too generous, so let's bring this down to a level that still gives the pad a role within the track, but which obscures the delayed vocal part less. Let's also re-introduce the second pad sound and consider another parameter we could modify to create space within our mix. Usually, it makes sense to pan sounds that you most want to capture your listener's attention centrally. So it equally figures that any sounds that are playing a more supporting role, but that are also panned centrally, are leaving less mix space for those more important musical parts.

Pad autopanning: For this second pad, let's set up SoundToys' PanMan to force the sound to jump from one side of the mix to the other.

This will serve two complementary purposes when combined with the rest of the sounds in the mix: it will make this part sound quieter while also adding extra stereo width, subtly making the track more interesting overall.

Balanced pads: Let's hear both pads, at appropriate volumes, with the rest of the mix.

As you can hear, this final mix introduces another key feature in the bid to maximise mix space. This second pad employs volume automation to slowly increase its level through the second half of this eight-bar phrase. Volume automation can either be used like this through whole phrases or applied more dramatically. If you're balancing a vocal within a mix, it may be necessary to employ a volume offset on each and every note.

When we turned our attention to using a compressor and locked the rhythm of another mix element to our pad via sidechaining, we hit upon an important feature of any well-balanced mix: a co-ordinated rhythmic shape played back across a number of parts. As you probably know, the rhythm section of a rock & roll band doesn't refer to the drummer alone; instead, it's about how the inherent rhythm is unified through drums, bass, keyboards and often rhythm guitar, too. Even if you don't make rock music, it's worth keeping this in mind through electronic production, as you can achieve both power and mix space by assigning a single rhythm across a number of parts.

Disconnected rhythm: Let's see how that can work within an electronic production. Here's a track that features a beat loop and three separate sequences that fill up much of the frequency range between them.

This is a common process for producers to adopt, either by importing a series of loops from a sample library or raiding software instruments for arpeggiated patterns that lock together. And yet, if you listen closely, this track doesn't lock these patterns together at all. The beat loop has one rhythmic identity, the stab sequence has another still and so on; each new part obscures any real sense of rhythmic identity, rather than reinforcing one ear-catching rhythmic pattern.

Underlying beat: Let's start by soloing the beat loop. Buried under the rest of the mix it's not easy to hear its rhythmic pattern but there's an interesting skip in the kick drum of the second bar that we could make much more of.

Bass rhythm: Let's bring in our main bass loop. This is playing a one-bar sequence pattern generated by the arpeggiator in Spectrasonics' Trilian. In the first bar of the pattern it works well against the beat loop, but as the sequence is only a bar long, it doesn't respond to the loop's second bar skip.

Better bass: By editing the arpeggiator sequence in Trilian, we can build a sequence that matches the rhythm of the loop better, including notes to reinforce the skip. This involves taking the arpeggiator up to 32 steps, to cover every 16th note of the two-bar phrase. The result locks the bass and the loop together much more effectively.

Disconnected filter sequence: Let's introduce the filter sequence now. This is giving us two problems. The pattern itself actually follows the loop skip nicely, but this is obscured by the internal delays within Trilian. Secondly, the amplifier envelope is too long, so that rather than providing staccato "bite," each note outstays its welcome and makes the mix too bloated.

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Better filter sequence: By bypassing the Delays and modifying the Amplifier Envelope (dropping Sustain to zero) and setting a short Decay time, the rhythmic tightness of this sequence improves dramatically.

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Disconnected stabs: Let's bring in the stab sequence now. This is using Omnisphere's arpeggiator to generate an offbeat feel. This isn't helping either, as the power of the track now favours the downbeats rather than the offbeats.

We could modify the arpeggiator again, but another effective way to edit sequences like this is to convert them to audio files and chop them up.

Chopped stabs: That's what we've done here. We then moved the resulting audio file back by an eighth note to place the stabs on the first two 16th notes of each beat, before chopping around the skip towards the end of the second bar to create a different rhythm that matches the other sequences.

To finally tie the mix together and provide more space, we can use another example of a compressor treatment.

Grouped sequences: We've set up an auxiliary bus and are sending both the filter sequence and the stab sequence to it directly. There's a compressor on the bus, and once again we're feeding the beat loop into it as a sidechain source, which ducks the volume of the combined sequences to give the whole mix more space.

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It's still early days for this track, but the power in this mix is becoming more apparent now, mostly due to the sense that all of the parts are feeding into the same rhythmic structure. Whenever you're programming, look to achieve something similar by stacking parts on top of one another so that three or four sounds play the same notes, rather than each featuring its own rhythm. It's a great way to build real drive into a track without filling in every single rhythmic hole.

As we saw with the filter sequence above, internal effects can also be killers of mix space, often obscuring any sense of clarity. There, a delay treatment obscured the rhythm we wanted, but reverb treatments can be just as guilty of filling a mix unnecessarily. Whether applied to synths, percussion or vocal parts, over-long, over-bright or over-bloated reverbs are potential mix killers. Fortunately, there are plenty of ways we can modify them to wrest back some of that lost clarity.

Shared reverb: Here, the vocal is currently employing a long plate reverb that's obscuring the vocal phrase itself. The same reverb is also applied to the bottom track (a percussion loop from Geist). While sharing the same reverb treatment across tracks helps glue the mix together, the percussion part is swamped by the four-second decay—which happens to work well for the vocal phrases.

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We need a way to retain the reverb length in the gaps between phrases, while also lessening the reverb treatment while the vocal phrase is playing. There are two solutions. First, we could use automation to drop the level of the reverb bus during the vocal phrases and ramp it back up between them. However, a more dynamic way to achieve a similar result would be to use compression again.

Ducked reverb: By inserting a compressor after the reverb on Aux 1, we can route the dry vocal track into the compressor to act as a sidechain trigger. This way, the volume of the compressor is reduced whenever the vocal line plays. And since the compressor is placed after the reverb, the reverb level ducks accordingly. We can then set an appropriate release time so that rather than unnaturally washing back in after the end of the vocal phrase, the compressor recovers more slowly and fades in the reverb more subtly.

The next issue for the vocal part is that the reverb itself is too washy in the mid-range. We want it to be brighter and dreamier between those phrases, but at the moment it's overloading in the middle. Again, we can use effects that bear on the reverb but not the original vocal tone by adding another processor to the auxiliary bus after the reverb and the compressor.

EQed reverb: Here, we use DMG's Equilibrium EQ, using a low-shelf to remove lots of unwanted bottom-end, a bell curve at 241 Hz to scoop out the most active mid-range frequency, a high-shelf to increase the treble end of the reverb above 5 kHz and another bell curve at 2.3 kHz to slowly ramp up the upper mid-range. This gives the whole reverb treatment more sheen.

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However, the knock-on effect is that the rhythmic loop that feeds the same reverb treatment is affected, too. But this isn't a problem, really—the reverb on this sound is too long anyway, so we were always destined to adjust it. The problem this time is that we do want to knit the mix together using similar reverb treatments, so again, we need a creative solution.

Percussion loop reverb: By setting up a second auxiliary, we can copy the reverb plug-in from Aux 1 into Aux 2, without the compressor or EQ treatment. Then we can shorten the reverb length on this second auxiliary so that we still get the same kind of tonal response from it without swamping the percussion loop to nearly the same extent.

The mix is already sounding clearer from these subtle mix changes, and copying the same reverb treatment across a number of auxiliaries so that long, medium and short variations on the same spatial theme can be called upon for different parts within a mix.

As we've seen through the examples above, there are lots of ways to breathe space into a mix. There are plenty more besides, however. If you find two elements are fighting one another, set up EQs on both and enable frequency analysers to see which frequencies overlap; it's likely that the bloated sound comes from those elements contributing to the same frequency bands. Decide which of the two sounds is the more important in that frequency range and use EQ to drop the level of the other sound at the same point. Similarly, try not to program sounds that are likely to interfere with more important mix elements. In film music, a golden rule is never to program solo or loud parts for instruments like violins or flutes while dialogue is being spoken, for the simple reason that the music will obscure any talking. There are lessons to learn there for dance and pop music, too, so be ready to apply volume automation or sidechaining to sounds that fight a lead vocal. As we've seen, you can achieve effective mix treatments via levels, pan, tone and reverberant space as well as through a range of other effects and DAW tools. So as ever, use your imagination to create solutions. Your mixes will sound all the clearer for it.