How do they get their mixes or masters so clean? Like any studio pro album.
Its just so clean no reverb highs on the hi hats or nun of that but full of reverb and clean.
Side reverb during mastering? Is that plus a great mix and master it?
Or is it just certain sounds?
DJ Mustard Y G songs too. Like Why you always hating. It sounds way too clean.
Less instruments it?
Do they add air from a processor or is that just the analog sound that engineers love?
It is many things, maybe most of all good sounding recording rooms so that there is little annoying resonances building. Much of the "silence" of a great sounding mix comes from not having a lot of annoying resonances present in the recording. Both the dynamics and EQ processing happens in multiple stages, but the bulk happens in the first stage during recording. Then during mixing and mastering, quite a lot of the quality comes from signal economics in combination with context orientation.
An example. Imagine for instance what happens when you turn the hi frequency EQ knob of the lead vocals to the max (just to illustrate the point), it turns too loud in the hi frequency range. But when you then use the volume fader to compensate, you are essentially bringing down the low and mid range on a constant basis to the mix. But by compressing the vocal signal on top of that, now whenever there are harsh frequencies in the vocals that contribute to loud peaks, the compressor softens the low and mid range even more, so you have two types of signal releases - static and dynamic. These you then combine with certain side chained compression and other techniques and all of a sudden you have a lot of air in the mix. The "clean"/"clear" comes from things like good phase and good gain.
In terms of the "ambience", a lot of it comes from not having to add so much additional reverb to the mix, the rest comes from proper reverb application, also in this case context orientation is used.
So it is a lot about dealing with signal limitations by understanding what goes into perception.
All of these moves are then contributing a lot due to the monitoring quality.
