Need help with octaves and giving tracks sense of depth in production!!!

[TomAusProducer]

So i produce house music and i've noticed with professional tracks, they have that obvious feel of depth, like instead of just sounding like "synths playing out of a flat computer screen" they sound like they have incredible depth/dynamic. I was wondering to create this (prior to any heavy mixing/mastering) should i am to put the synths on octaves close to eachother but not conflicting or should i aim to have the bass and the leads far away from eachother on the frequency spectrum? Because i sometimes think "Ok this bass should be down low and this lead should be up higher so they dont conflict and other times i think "ok everything should be close but not so close that they start melding together then i cut the unnecessary frequencies. I've been listening to Avicii's Sweet Sad Disposition bootleg and the first drop sounds really good, and i get the sense that all of those sounds are close together but not conflicting. Professionals, help if you can!! Thank you. Edit obviously volume levels come into play too

Avicii's bootleg

 

[bandcoach]

try using two or more oscillators with upwards and downwards detuning for all of your sounds to begin

then consider whether you need chordal parts or not before deciding how to link your bass and lead sounds - some reverb on both (different amounts for bass and lead, more on the lead usually)

 

[Free Spirit]

So i produce house music and i've noticed with professional tracks, they have that obvious feel of depth, like instead of just sounding like "synths playing out of a flat computer screen" they sound like they have incredible depth/dynamic. I was wondering to create this (prior to any heavy mixing/mastering) should i am to put the synths on octaves close to eachother but not conflicting or should i aim to have the bass and the leads far away from eachother on the frequency spectrum? Because i sometimes think "Ok this bass should be down low and this lead should be up higher so they dont conflict and other times i think "ok everything should be close but not so close that they start melding together then i cut the unnecessary frequencies. I've been listening to Avicii's Sweet Sad Disposition bootleg and the first drop sounds really good, and i get the sense that all of those sounds are close together but not conflicting. Professionals, help if you can!! Thank you. Edit obviously volume levels come into play too

Avicii's bootleg

The rule of orchestration is to have bass/mid parts more spread out than the higher up parts. Aka you don't want 2 basses playing at the same time, whereas 2 high melodies playing at the same time would work fine.

Then delay/reverb/eq/stereo imaging is used to separate the instruments from each other a move them backwards in terms of depth.

Add a reverb'd delay to a sound and it pushes it back in the mix. Cut out a few dB about 5khz on a track and it sounds in the background (since high frequencies are attenuated in nature when the sound is further away).

Then if there are two melodies occupying similar frequency regions, they are probably opposite eq'd and spaced differently in the stereo image for maximum separation.

 

[bandcoach]

Aka you don't want 2 basses playing at the same time

I'm sure that you mean two different bass lines playing at the same time but just want to emphasise this is the case

also don't forget that a lot of the rules of orchestration get broken to great effect at times - like you will have double basses playing the underlying chordal motion and violoncello's above playing a melodic line that dips into the realms of the bass part but is distinct due to the different timbre of the cellos compared to the basses

i.e. it is more about function of the different lines and tone colour/sound design than it is strictly about keeping different instruments separated in different parts of the audio spectrum

 

[DarkRed]

So i produce house music and i've noticed with professional tracks, they have that obvious feel of depth, like instead of just sounding like "synths playing out of a flat computer screen" they sound like they have incredible depth/dynamic.

I think you can grasp the concept of depth if you begin to think like this:

- There is good and bad loud low range
- There is good and bad loud mid range
- There is good and bad loud high range

Depth is the process of gaining the mix based on an understanding of the above. When you do so it's like the whole mix becomes alive, it's like you bring frequencies out of the sound sources you did not know where there. The high end becomes thinner, the low end becomes fuller, the snare becomes fat and it's like you can start to hear all of the attack nuances on all the sound sources, it starts to groove. The sound becomes more electric/tube sounding, which sounds cool. The tools to become good at are MB COMP, EQ + COMP, COMP + EQ and EQ + COMP + EQ. This stuff I'm writing is probably what you are not focusing on right now, am I right?

 

[MarcDHall]

I have no idea how Avicii produces or how his stuff is mixed. I don't think I've ever listened to anything he's done. But, anyway, the real world is full of EQ. Synths aren't. The reason things have depth in real life is that everything in the environment is distorting the sound and reflecting it back to everything else.

- The signal that comes out of a synth is flat. You might use ten different patches but they all abide by the same flat frequency response shape (even if you are using filter envelopes). Again, in real life, everything has a different relationship with the world and has it's own unique frequency response shape. So when it comes to sound design EQ is about more than fixing mix issues as such IMO, it's also a way of giving things a different overall frequency response (which indirectly makes mixing easier because it makes it easier to pick individual things out). Again, I'm not talking about cutting this so it doesn't overlap with that. I'm talking about broad cuts and boosts to give the whole spectrum a different shape. This is also kinda true of compression but to a far lesser extent, compression doesn't really happen in the real world except for in things like recording devices or in our auditory system.

- Another thing that makes synths sound less flat and up-front is reverb, preferably high quality convolution IMO. A good analogue synth with a good convolution of a nice hall works magic.

- On final idea is: RIDE EVERYTHING.

 

[Nystagmus]

in really really old-fashioned music (4 part harmonies), each primary instrument stayed within it's own octave most of the time with just a little bit of overlap with other instruments.

but in modern music, there are no rules. do what sounds good. Also modern day sounds and instruments can be multiple octaves played at the same time.