I think this song is getting close
to being 'finished', before I spend some time really working out the mixing kinks. I added one single track, Track 17, which just swells in a single synth, playing a C, as the other tracks fade out towards the end of the track. Originally, this spot was left blank, which was a cool effect, everything just dropping out, but I think I prefer having this there, as the volume swell helps to crescendo us into the outro with all the tracks playing together.
Listen to Laser Sunrise 4 here.
In order to help the individual tracks
stand apart, I went through and did some serious panning. In the last couple of versions, most stuff was right up the middle, and that definitely doesn't help with the muddiness. As you can see in the screenshot below, everything has been moved to its own place in the stereo spectrum, including the synth basses. I initially didn't do those, but the sidechain compression on them wound up working well with the panning, and gives them the feeling of being sucked towards the middle of the mix at points.
Tomorrow night, I'm going to spend
some time with headphones on, really mixing this thing. There are no points where the volume of any track drops/rises, except for actual fadeouts, so I need to go through and automate some more volume changes to allow certain things to pop in and out. I also removed the super heavy compression on the master track for this version; I must've accidentally left it on at 100%, as the last version sounded WAY different than intended, so hopefully that helped make a bit of a difference.
