The mix sonics here have clearly been optimised for the most mass of mass-markets, in that the priority is clearly maximum audience reach rather than necessarily the most pleasant listening experience. So not much mix real estate is going to headroom-stealing low end, for example. There’s no EDM weight to the kick-drum here, despite abundant disco influences elsewhere in the pro...

In a sense this feels very much like an old-school Akai MPC production in the way it’s based around a core eight-bar ‘construction kit’ (which you can hear in full at 3:00-3:19) comprising a triggered drum-sample pattern (primarily a combination of distorted kick drum and what sounds like a noisy cymbal-tail) and a handful of heavily processed and edited four-bar sample loops fe...

One of the fundamental truths of audio mixing is that human tonal perception is adaptive – in other words, we tend to adjust our perception of any mix tonality we’re hearing to match our preconceptions of how it should sound. This is why referencing is such an important part of the mixing process, because doing A/B comparisons between commercial releases and our own mix work goe...

This is a song that really capitalises on the musical power of harmonic rhythm – ie. the rhythm with which the chords change. A surprisingly large number of songs maintain a consistent harmonic rhythm throughout, which naturally means that this characteric is common to a lot of the AI-generated music that’s now flooding the internet, so it’s worthwhile investigating alternative ...