Tricks You Use All The Time To Give Your Tracks That Extra Something...

I know i have a few effects / settings i pull up in every new track i work on and i was curious what some of the things are you guys like to use are.

1. New thing i've learned about - Parallel compression. This on drums brings things to life and fills them out a bit. My drums sounded holo and unprofessional before this trick and just adding a bit of it goes a long way with the sound of everything.

2. Sidechaining. I usually have 2 Sidechain channels going at the same time with just some random duplicated bassdrum kick to trigger it. I have one that's super heavy and more of an effect (That pumping sound) and i use one that's more subtle if i just want to give more room in the mix and try to not have it be as noticeable.

3. Massive reverb tails reversed as intros. I'll use a big reverb tail and bounce a solo track to bring in a new sound / element. It sounds a lot smoother than just hitting a crash and bringing in a new segment. It sounds a lot less like you just slapped a bunch of loops together.

4. Simple Drum fills. These have become KEY in turning a track around from being too tracky. Snares are the easiest to do and get the job done, but if you are super good with drums you could do much more with your fills like with toms and cymbals etc.

5. Making sure my track is super DJ Friendly. 1 Minute intro, 2 minute outro with the bass dropping after 1 minute. This way somebody could just pop the track in without knowing much about it and mix it pretty much flawlessly.

6. Noise sweeps with a ton of dely/reverb. There are a lot of ways to get the effect, but the simplest one is white noise with a bandpass filter going from low to high. Works really well and with a long tail adds a lot of build up for breakdowns and big transitions.

Hopefully you guys have some more awesome tips that can help all of us

-Josh Billings
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just simple but automating delays, but automation in general.

Used to think it was swing and shuffle settings i needed but it was sync'd delays and shifting their timing for the swing i wanted.

and the automation - for making simple kind of minimal stuff then without automation its just basically shit here. Can get the sounds decent but doest really come alive and speak so to speak until automation. did i say automation.

For intro style stuff i like to assigne master tempo to a midi control. and have plenty controlls on fx, sends to reverb/delays and controlls on them etc etc. then a few samplers looping with controlls to to start/end points. then just hit play and twist knobs - more of a techno result here.
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I started paying more attention to the frequencies usind voxengo frequency analyzer. You will be amazed how much cleaner you cen get your track to be with simple elimination of low frequencies in elements that don't need it. For example just because its a hi-hat doeas not automatically mean that it does't have lows when sampled (there could be a reverb tail hiding in the low frequencies). Pop your analyzer and check, I try to cut all the elements in my mix at about 150 on exception to KICK and BASS. I mean 150 is just an estimate, some more a little more.
And effects effects effects!!! I used to be afraid to use a lot of reverb and delay because I felt my mix was becoming out of controll, but dam without effects there is no life in the track.

Ghots loops also help for movement, I take a loop and put it underneath my drum sequance and cut like 200-300 low ferquences out and have it sit very quet in the back of the mix, really helps to fill up some space.

And I officially compress every element in the mix, just a little but I still do...unless its been compressed already. I just love how compression adds wormth and makes the elemets big sounding...don't get me wrong, just a little bit not a whole lot

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Question:
I am interested, what do you guys think about adding some reverb on the whole drum channel and using it along with the parallel compression, if not the whole drum channel, what would you send to it?

Answer:
Make sure you have another Dry Drum channel, then you can send to another buss and put reverb there(but makes usre you cut the lows on the reverb bus). On top of that you can have another drum channel and thats were you scwash the shit out of the drums. That way you have thee chennels. If you got enough juice in your system take all these three channels and send it to one Big drum group, and add some compression on it. And Now you have yourself one FAT sound Oh and even on the buss with parallel compression make sure you cut like 80-100hz so the dry kick is got space to breath.