To producing euphoric and frissonistic work.
The key is not in melodies nor techniques, but how you convey the sounds and control them. The energy you produced in the track, and how you gonna spend them, is what the key to creating truly euphoric work. It has nothing to do with specific genre, style nor theme of the track. Bear with me, I'll explain why.
I'm working on a track for Madness Day, involving a lot of edge cutting sound design that I've been exploring for the past few months. While generic Madness music are very Cheshyre-esque type, heavy techno and bass, inducing claustrophobic feel. I wanted to keep this style, however I seek for different emotion. It's not something accidentally discovered, but through multiple tries, with different fusion of genres, including my latest upload.
There is a reason I'm very drawn to synthwave, and always incorporated 80s synth in almost all of my work, cinematic or not. But there is something else caught my attention when I binge listened to synthwave mix. It's how euphoric synthwave gave you. That nostalgic feel is real, but it was the euphoric production like mixing and sounds used that produced that unique feeling. I've seek out so many different genres and synthwave came close to be something that I wanna nail it.
I used Viking VK-1, Dexed and Harmor for synth, and used free reverb plugin Dragonfly to enhance the sounds. Since it does not matter what melodic content is it, I kept the melodies minimal, however focused on the complexity of sounds and mixing. Wide mix and huge sound design with low perc in the background.
The mixing was pretty fun.
The classic way of mixing is that loudness mean loss of dynamic. But that's another problem because without loud mix most of the time you can't really tell if the sounds are balanced. Also I'm legally deaf on the left ear. However I found a workaround. What I do is cranking instrument's volume to max, host volume (in this case Ubuntu) to 75%. When I mix it I'd adjust host volume until it reach my target mix volume, I also have limiter on to keep DAW play sound from going crackle. I then record in Edison, the great thing about Edison is it keeps dynamic even if you maxed out your wavelength intensity. If you keep normal recorded sample, your headphone will crackle, this is obvious. I then normalized the sample, and saved down. Then I compressed the normalized sample to maximum loudness and rendered into MP3, OGG and FLAC. This way I could keep the dynamic, but still with pretty loud mixing.
The final product is dark, punchy, and powerful yet very euphoric sounds for my Madness Day work. I'm gonna release it on Madness Day.
I have never shared that much details nor techniques that I used before, but here they are. :)
Have a great weekend.
