05-07-2021, 10:31 PM
Before you read this guide, please read my other two guides. Also read LucentTear's tutorial. That will give you all the information you should need to fully understand everything discussed in this guide.
DISCLAIMER: I am NOT trained professionally! Everything I say here is from my personal experience with my own songs. If you are looking for professional mixing advice, you may not find it in this guide.
So, you have a completed song structure and it sounds ok, but you are finally ready to make your song sound amazing and really wow yourself and other OS users. There is that problem though, you have no clue how to do that. This guide will attempt to teach you to transform your song from sounding like my Dew song ##1004956 to sounding like my Rain song ##1988265 (sonically, not musically)
Part 1 - Listen to your music accurately
The first thing I would like to say is all audio playback systems are not the same, so when you mix your song on crappy laptop speakers, it will sound awesome on the crappy laptop speakers, but on a pair of ok headphones, it may sound awful.
All audio playback systems have a frequency response, which is a graph of volume as a function of frequency. This shows the volume of any frequency in the entire human hearing spectrum. This is important to know about for it is a filter of the audio you hear, distorting your perception of the sound similar to how a stained glass window may distort your perception of colour. Most of the time, this is no big deal and can even be desirable. In fact, most consumer headphones and hifi speakers change the frequency response intentionally to boost bass frequencies and cut some of the mid frequencies our ears are more sensitive to.
In the case that you are creating music, however, this becomes an issue, as it distorts our perception of what the audio really sounds like, and we may end up working against these frequency responses in negativr ways. Take, for example, a pair of gamer headphones with extreme bass. Since we are listening to our music with the bass at a higher volume than it really is, we may find ourselves not adding enough bass to the song for other people with less bassy audio playback systems. Or perhaps the opposite is happening, and we are listening to music on crappy laptop speakers. Since the speakers cannot actually produce bass frequencies, we will add way too much bass, and for those people listening on the gamer headphones, it will break their ears.
Another thing to go along with this is, the louder you listen to your music, the less accurate your hearing is, and also,the faster your ears get tired and stop listening as they should. Please, keep your volume at speaking level or lower, or you eill not percieve your song accurately. It is very important to take breaks at least every hour when mixing your song also, or you will be stricken by the menacing evil that is ear fatigue.
The solution to this frequency response problem is to have a flat frequency response. This means there is no boosting or cutting made by the speaker itself, and it aims to play back the music as accurately as possible. These kind of audio playback systems can be fairly cheap (under $50 for entry level headphones) or really damn expensive ($4000+ for hugh quality studio monitoring speakers), but either way they are going to be more accurate than gamer headphones or laptop speakers, and are a great investment if you take your music seriously. The cheap headphones do work well enough to mix on, for proof look at mine and Guest's more recent songs in and out of OS. Also they are quite reliable in my experience as far as their lifetime, you can get them used.
If you don't wish to invest in that kind of thing because you are a child with no job or money, or don't care enough about your songs (which is completely fine) to want to make them as good as possible, then I would probably choose the most accurate audio playback system you have. This is very generalized, but I would go hifi stereo > decent consumer headphones > decent gamer headphones > cheap headphones > bluetooth and laptop speakers.
It is worth noting that some headphones and hifi have very close to flat responses also.
Part 2 - General concepts of mixing
The goal of mixing is to make sure all the instruments in your song sound clear, and also don't interfere with other instrumemts im your song. We use panning, EQ, and most importantly with OS, instrument choice, to achieve a large, clear sound.
When mixing your song, however please note that not all instruments need these processed applied to them. Use your ears to determine if you need any of these at all.
There are three dimensions to sound. There is pitch, being how high or low a sound is, measured in Hz, there is volume, being how loud a sound is, measured in db, and there is panorama (panning), which is how far left or right a sound is, measured in %L or %R . Every sound is a vector with each of these values, and we can plot any sound in an imaginary 3D plane. Lets make y = pitch, x = pan, and z = volume. This is a great way to visualize your instruments for mixing, as it helps you to see the parts of instruments that are in the way of others.
First I will discuss pitch and volume. Pitch is how high or low a sound is, however since you read my other guide, "How To Make Your Songs INSTANTLY Better!!", you know that sounds are all just sine waves layered atop each other, and that every sound, other than sine waves, takes up a whole bunch of frequencies. This is important to consider, especially if you have many different instruments in your song.
Think of a song with a piano, an acoustic guitar, drums, and a bass guitar. Lets start by analyzing the piano.
The piano is playing in the third octave, and therefore is occupying the lower midrange frequency area. The acoustic guitar is also playing in that third octave and has a lot of low mids, even more than the piano! The acoustic guitar also has a lot of high frequency harmonics. Now we also have a drum kit, and it sounds like it has a few short low frequencies and a lot of really high frequencies. And finally there is the bass guitar, which occupies most of that low frequency area.
In this example, we can imagine that it sounds good with just the drums and bass, but the piano and the acoustic guitar tend to sound bad when played together for they interfere with each other in the lower midrange. Depending on the song, the piano or the guitar may have more of a focus there and we will want to make one of them more present there than the other. Since these instruments both have higher harmonics, we can choose to emphasize a different part of their frequency ranges with EQ. Lets imagine the guitar takes up this lower area better than the piano in this example. In that case, we would want to lower the piano volume in just those frequencies with EQ, however, since OS EQ is limited and can't do that well, it may be better to boost the high frequencies on the piano a bit more so it is better heard, and perhaps even remove some of the bass, because low mids and bass are close, and with OS EQ the bass slider does affect a bit of the lower midrange. Now, our piano, and our guitar can be heard clearly and aren't getting in each other's way.
The most important frequencies to keep clear are the bass, sub, and low mids. Try to avoid any clutter in tgose areas for the best sound.
Panning will really help bring your song to life if done right. You can use OnlineSequencer's pan slider to move your instrumentd from your left ear to your right ear, or anywhere between. If you haven't yet been using it, it will literally open a new dimension in your songs. The reason we use panning is to create a sense of space in our music, and also to help make our instruments clearer.
When we pan an instrument, we areoving it to the side so another instrument can be heard more clearly, so it is generally good to pan your background instruments more than you would pan your main instruments.
If you have two similar instruments playing a similar part, you can pan them all the way in opposite directions for a very pleasant, very wide sound. You don't need to do this with a lot of instruments to make your whole song sound wide, and its generally best to avoid using more than 1 to 3 opposite panned instrument pairs in a section.
One thing important about panning though, is most of the time, we are going to want the volume and frequencies on the left and right balanced, so if we have a quiet high xylophone and hihat or something in one ear and a loud low piano chord in the other, it may not sound very good.
Another thing to mention is never pan your bass, kick drum, or snare drum. This will always end up sounding weird and unpleasant. Panning your main melody instruments is generally not smart either.
So lets imagine we have a song with acoustic guitar, jazz guitar, a piano, flute, violin, drums, bass, and a xylophone main melody.
Right now everything is not panned and sounds ok, but panning would make this song much better. Lets say the jazz guitar and acoustic guitar are playing very similar lines, so we will pan them all the way apart. This sounds great now. The piano is playing mid pitches fairly loudly and after tweaking the pan a bit, it seems to disrupt the balance of the song too much to pan it, so we leave it in the middle. The flute and violin are playing different parts but in the same frequency area so lets try panning them a little bit to left and right. Hmm, imagine it sounds off a bit so you need to pan violin more than flute. Now that sounds great and the xylophone melody is very clear and easy to hear in the middle. It was clear before but now its really good.
Now, we know the basic idea of the three dimensions of sound and how to manipulate our sounds to sound better together.
Part 3 - Helpful tips you should read
Your goal is to produce the best sound for your song as possible, and so it is important to rely on your ears. Often, people rely on their eyes and mental ideas more than thry should and that leads to them doing things they shouldn't do in their songs. I am very guilty of this, especially for high end boost.
It also is a good idea to get distracted while listening to your songs so you get a better idea of what everything sounds like together. Try playing a videogame with your song in the background, or perhaps iron all your socks. This way, all the parts blend into one sound and you will notice anything that sounds bad.
Another thing you REALLY should do, is find a professionally mixed song by a commercial artist that is similar to yours, then observe the differences in the mix between your song and theirs. Perhaps their song has more high end, or perhaps a clearer bass area. This is a great way to know if you are doing the right thing with your mix.
Its worth noting that not every part needs to be heard. Don't be afraid of adding very quiet parts that don't seem important, if they make the song better, put them in there. Just make sure that the drums, bass, and main melodic instrument are more present than the rest and can be most easily heard. A song is perfect when there is nothing more to take away, not when there is nothing more to add.
Sometimes a little is a lot, just one really wide panned instrument may make entire song sound huge, or perhaps just one reverb instrument will make the song sound full of reverb. Don't do these cool things with too many instruments or it will make your song sound quite confusing and cluttered.
You don't usually want to make your instruments sound unnatural, which is easy to do with EQ. It is very easy to ruin a song with careless over-EQ. Avoid using EQ on instruments that don't need it unless you are doing some creative effect, like removing all the bass on an instrument to make it sound intentionally low quality, as if it is played through a bad speaker. (This can be a very desirable effect sometimes).
Don't be afraid to remove stuff that just won't fit, even if it does sound good alone. If it is hurting your song as a whole, you shoupd remove it
Please remember this is just a guide, and you should do whatever is best for your song. I am just trying to give some general advice that should work for a lot of different styles of song. If your song is different, and needs a bit more something, or far little something else, don't be afraid to ignore this guide. As long as the result of your songs is good, do whatever it takes.
The knowledge enslaved by this guide can also be used to work with real songs in real DAWs or even hardware studios. I do recommend reading a bit about compression and distortion, and also mid/side and parametric EQ before mixing your DAW songs though.
Part 4 - Fun stuff
Here I will give away some tips for creative effects you can use on instruments to give your songs a unique atmosphere.
You can use EQ and reverb to make your instrument sound like it was played through a bad speaker. You can remove all the high and low frequencies to do this.
You can use another instrument as a reverb instead of the OS built in reverb. This will give you more control over the volume and length of the reverb, which can really help if you want a reverb, but the built in reverb is too loud or long. I would recommend using a pad-like instrument such as smooth synth or trombone to do long reverbs, and similar instruments to the instrumemt you are reverbing for shorter reverbs. Also put reverb on that instrument to make it more reverby.
A lot of instruments have bass frequencies that cannot really be heard, but they stack up over time and interfere with the bass you are trying to hear. It can be helpful to cut the bass a little on some higher pitch instruments to it doesn't interfere with the actual bass and make it sound quiet.
If your song is feeling a little empty, you can try using a pad to play the chord prog, which is a long, quiet instrument like smooth synth. What I usually do, it make the pad play in whatever area of frequencies is making my song feel empty, and turning the volume way down, so its very in the background. This really makes my dongs full and beautiful.
You can get white noise from the 8bit drumkit. That can then be used as many things, like a riser, and old lofi effects, with markers and EQ.
A lot of people in EDM have a lot of big instruments and basses, and usually like to clear space for their drums unconventionally by using a technique called ducking. Traditionally, they would input a kick drum track to the sidechain of a compressor, and that would make the ducking effect so the kick is undisturbed in silence, and then all the other instruments come in. This is why a lot of people commonly mistake ducking for being called sidechaining. Sidechaining is just a technique to achieve ducling, its not the ducking itself. You can also this manually in OS using markers. All you need to do, is lower the other instrument volumes and restore them gradually, every time a kick drum hits.
You can get some pretty awesome synthy effects by gradually modulating the high EQ on certain instruments using markers. This is usually called a filter sweep and its best on padlike instruments.
Using the new Detune feature, you can actually make some unsustainable instruments have more sustain! This will also make the instrument sound a bit weird though. Just turn Detune all the way down to get the longest sound.
You also can use detune on your basses to give them more low range. OS is limited to C2 but with detune, you have a new octave and can achieve all the way to C1!
Having some higher frequencies in your bass will make the bass easier to hear on bad systems like laptop speakers.
You can hold shift while detuning to get notes in between notes. This is really good for synths as it offers a chorus effect. What I love to do, is I like to have saw and square play the same thing, then pan them all the way apart, then give one of them a little detune. This makes it even wider sounding!
You can get thunder sounds with low pizzicato on random atonal notes.
Xylophone is really good for main melodies.
You can use markers to gradually pan an instrument, this is a fun thing to do sometimes.
OnlineSequencer has a cool feature called Chat, which is used for getting feedback on your songs. This can be very useful for often these people will hear something you may have missed.
Using different velocities for your drums, especially cymbals, can make your drums sound much more realistic. Try to imagine the velocity a real drummer would hit each note.
OS has some built in limiter thingy, which basically compresses the sound when it gets too loud. If you go even louder, it begins to distort the sound. A lot of people already know this and display it in their "lag tester" style sequences. It can be a useful effect for some songs, but I would try to avoid it and for most songs, I would lower the master volume until it doesn't compress.
You can solo all your instruments and use the export as audio features to get audio you can edit with more detail in other applications, such as a DAW. Audacity is a great pick for this since its easier to use than some DAWs. You can use any DAW though.
If you find your song is still not good after properly executing the techniques in this guide, that means its probably too similar to MegaIovania.
Please show me some before and after songs, I would like to see how well my guide works. Also, if your have anything to add, tell me. I would love to hear your thoughts and suggestions!
DISCLAIMER: I am NOT trained professionally! Everything I say here is from my personal experience with my own songs. If you are looking for professional mixing advice, you may not find it in this guide.
So, you have a completed song structure and it sounds ok, but you are finally ready to make your song sound amazing and really wow yourself and other OS users. There is that problem though, you have no clue how to do that. This guide will attempt to teach you to transform your song from sounding like my Dew song ##1004956 to sounding like my Rain song ##1988265 (sonically, not musically)
Part 1 - Listen to your music accurately
The first thing I would like to say is all audio playback systems are not the same, so when you mix your song on crappy laptop speakers, it will sound awesome on the crappy laptop speakers, but on a pair of ok headphones, it may sound awful.
All audio playback systems have a frequency response, which is a graph of volume as a function of frequency. This shows the volume of any frequency in the entire human hearing spectrum. This is important to know about for it is a filter of the audio you hear, distorting your perception of the sound similar to how a stained glass window may distort your perception of colour. Most of the time, this is no big deal and can even be desirable. In fact, most consumer headphones and hifi speakers change the frequency response intentionally to boost bass frequencies and cut some of the mid frequencies our ears are more sensitive to.
In the case that you are creating music, however, this becomes an issue, as it distorts our perception of what the audio really sounds like, and we may end up working against these frequency responses in negativr ways. Take, for example, a pair of gamer headphones with extreme bass. Since we are listening to our music with the bass at a higher volume than it really is, we may find ourselves not adding enough bass to the song for other people with less bassy audio playback systems. Or perhaps the opposite is happening, and we are listening to music on crappy laptop speakers. Since the speakers cannot actually produce bass frequencies, we will add way too much bass, and for those people listening on the gamer headphones, it will break their ears.
Another thing to go along with this is, the louder you listen to your music, the less accurate your hearing is, and also,the faster your ears get tired and stop listening as they should. Please, keep your volume at speaking level or lower, or you eill not percieve your song accurately. It is very important to take breaks at least every hour when mixing your song also, or you will be stricken by the menacing evil that is ear fatigue.
The solution to this frequency response problem is to have a flat frequency response. This means there is no boosting or cutting made by the speaker itself, and it aims to play back the music as accurately as possible. These kind of audio playback systems can be fairly cheap (under $50 for entry level headphones) or really damn expensive ($4000+ for hugh quality studio monitoring speakers), but either way they are going to be more accurate than gamer headphones or laptop speakers, and are a great investment if you take your music seriously. The cheap headphones do work well enough to mix on, for proof look at mine and Guest's more recent songs in and out of OS. Also they are quite reliable in my experience as far as their lifetime, you can get them used.
If you don't wish to invest in that kind of thing because you are a child with no job or money, or don't care enough about your songs (which is completely fine) to want to make them as good as possible, then I would probably choose the most accurate audio playback system you have. This is very generalized, but I would go hifi stereo > decent consumer headphones > decent gamer headphones > cheap headphones > bluetooth and laptop speakers.
It is worth noting that some headphones and hifi have very close to flat responses also.
Part 2 - General concepts of mixing
The goal of mixing is to make sure all the instruments in your song sound clear, and also don't interfere with other instrumemts im your song. We use panning, EQ, and most importantly with OS, instrument choice, to achieve a large, clear sound.
When mixing your song, however please note that not all instruments need these processed applied to them. Use your ears to determine if you need any of these at all.
There are three dimensions to sound. There is pitch, being how high or low a sound is, measured in Hz, there is volume, being how loud a sound is, measured in db, and there is panorama (panning), which is how far left or right a sound is, measured in %L or %R . Every sound is a vector with each of these values, and we can plot any sound in an imaginary 3D plane. Lets make y = pitch, x = pan, and z = volume. This is a great way to visualize your instruments for mixing, as it helps you to see the parts of instruments that are in the way of others.
First I will discuss pitch and volume. Pitch is how high or low a sound is, however since you read my other guide, "How To Make Your Songs INSTANTLY Better!!", you know that sounds are all just sine waves layered atop each other, and that every sound, other than sine waves, takes up a whole bunch of frequencies. This is important to consider, especially if you have many different instruments in your song.
Think of a song with a piano, an acoustic guitar, drums, and a bass guitar. Lets start by analyzing the piano.
The piano is playing in the third octave, and therefore is occupying the lower midrange frequency area. The acoustic guitar is also playing in that third octave and has a lot of low mids, even more than the piano! The acoustic guitar also has a lot of high frequency harmonics. Now we also have a drum kit, and it sounds like it has a few short low frequencies and a lot of really high frequencies. And finally there is the bass guitar, which occupies most of that low frequency area.
In this example, we can imagine that it sounds good with just the drums and bass, but the piano and the acoustic guitar tend to sound bad when played together for they interfere with each other in the lower midrange. Depending on the song, the piano or the guitar may have more of a focus there and we will want to make one of them more present there than the other. Since these instruments both have higher harmonics, we can choose to emphasize a different part of their frequency ranges with EQ. Lets imagine the guitar takes up this lower area better than the piano in this example. In that case, we would want to lower the piano volume in just those frequencies with EQ, however, since OS EQ is limited and can't do that well, it may be better to boost the high frequencies on the piano a bit more so it is better heard, and perhaps even remove some of the bass, because low mids and bass are close, and with OS EQ the bass slider does affect a bit of the lower midrange. Now, our piano, and our guitar can be heard clearly and aren't getting in each other's way.
The most important frequencies to keep clear are the bass, sub, and low mids. Try to avoid any clutter in tgose areas for the best sound.
Panning will really help bring your song to life if done right. You can use OnlineSequencer's pan slider to move your instrumentd from your left ear to your right ear, or anywhere between. If you haven't yet been using it, it will literally open a new dimension in your songs. The reason we use panning is to create a sense of space in our music, and also to help make our instruments clearer.
When we pan an instrument, we areoving it to the side so another instrument can be heard more clearly, so it is generally good to pan your background instruments more than you would pan your main instruments.
If you have two similar instruments playing a similar part, you can pan them all the way in opposite directions for a very pleasant, very wide sound. You don't need to do this with a lot of instruments to make your whole song sound wide, and its generally best to avoid using more than 1 to 3 opposite panned instrument pairs in a section.
One thing important about panning though, is most of the time, we are going to want the volume and frequencies on the left and right balanced, so if we have a quiet high xylophone and hihat or something in one ear and a loud low piano chord in the other, it may not sound very good.
Another thing to mention is never pan your bass, kick drum, or snare drum. This will always end up sounding weird and unpleasant. Panning your main melody instruments is generally not smart either.
So lets imagine we have a song with acoustic guitar, jazz guitar, a piano, flute, violin, drums, bass, and a xylophone main melody.
Right now everything is not panned and sounds ok, but panning would make this song much better. Lets say the jazz guitar and acoustic guitar are playing very similar lines, so we will pan them all the way apart. This sounds great now. The piano is playing mid pitches fairly loudly and after tweaking the pan a bit, it seems to disrupt the balance of the song too much to pan it, so we leave it in the middle. The flute and violin are playing different parts but in the same frequency area so lets try panning them a little bit to left and right. Hmm, imagine it sounds off a bit so you need to pan violin more than flute. Now that sounds great and the xylophone melody is very clear and easy to hear in the middle. It was clear before but now its really good.
Now, we know the basic idea of the three dimensions of sound and how to manipulate our sounds to sound better together.
Part 3 - Helpful tips you should read
Your goal is to produce the best sound for your song as possible, and so it is important to rely on your ears. Often, people rely on their eyes and mental ideas more than thry should and that leads to them doing things they shouldn't do in their songs. I am very guilty of this, especially for high end boost.
It also is a good idea to get distracted while listening to your songs so you get a better idea of what everything sounds like together. Try playing a videogame with your song in the background, or perhaps iron all your socks. This way, all the parts blend into one sound and you will notice anything that sounds bad.
Another thing you REALLY should do, is find a professionally mixed song by a commercial artist that is similar to yours, then observe the differences in the mix between your song and theirs. Perhaps their song has more high end, or perhaps a clearer bass area. This is a great way to know if you are doing the right thing with your mix.
Its worth noting that not every part needs to be heard. Don't be afraid of adding very quiet parts that don't seem important, if they make the song better, put them in there. Just make sure that the drums, bass, and main melodic instrument are more present than the rest and can be most easily heard. A song is perfect when there is nothing more to take away, not when there is nothing more to add.
Sometimes a little is a lot, just one really wide panned instrument may make entire song sound huge, or perhaps just one reverb instrument will make the song sound full of reverb. Don't do these cool things with too many instruments or it will make your song sound quite confusing and cluttered.
You don't usually want to make your instruments sound unnatural, which is easy to do with EQ. It is very easy to ruin a song with careless over-EQ. Avoid using EQ on instruments that don't need it unless you are doing some creative effect, like removing all the bass on an instrument to make it sound intentionally low quality, as if it is played through a bad speaker. (This can be a very desirable effect sometimes).
Don't be afraid to remove stuff that just won't fit, even if it does sound good alone. If it is hurting your song as a whole, you shoupd remove it
Please remember this is just a guide, and you should do whatever is best for your song. I am just trying to give some general advice that should work for a lot of different styles of song. If your song is different, and needs a bit more something, or far little something else, don't be afraid to ignore this guide. As long as the result of your songs is good, do whatever it takes.
The knowledge enslaved by this guide can also be used to work with real songs in real DAWs or even hardware studios. I do recommend reading a bit about compression and distortion, and also mid/side and parametric EQ before mixing your DAW songs though.
Part 4 - Fun stuff
Here I will give away some tips for creative effects you can use on instruments to give your songs a unique atmosphere.
You can use EQ and reverb to make your instrument sound like it was played through a bad speaker. You can remove all the high and low frequencies to do this.
You can use another instrument as a reverb instead of the OS built in reverb. This will give you more control over the volume and length of the reverb, which can really help if you want a reverb, but the built in reverb is too loud or long. I would recommend using a pad-like instrument such as smooth synth or trombone to do long reverbs, and similar instruments to the instrumemt you are reverbing for shorter reverbs. Also put reverb on that instrument to make it more reverby.
A lot of instruments have bass frequencies that cannot really be heard, but they stack up over time and interfere with the bass you are trying to hear. It can be helpful to cut the bass a little on some higher pitch instruments to it doesn't interfere with the actual bass and make it sound quiet.
If your song is feeling a little empty, you can try using a pad to play the chord prog, which is a long, quiet instrument like smooth synth. What I usually do, it make the pad play in whatever area of frequencies is making my song feel empty, and turning the volume way down, so its very in the background. This really makes my dongs full and beautiful.
You can get white noise from the 8bit drumkit. That can then be used as many things, like a riser, and old lofi effects, with markers and EQ.
A lot of people in EDM have a lot of big instruments and basses, and usually like to clear space for their drums unconventionally by using a technique called ducking. Traditionally, they would input a kick drum track to the sidechain of a compressor, and that would make the ducking effect so the kick is undisturbed in silence, and then all the other instruments come in. This is why a lot of people commonly mistake ducking for being called sidechaining. Sidechaining is just a technique to achieve ducling, its not the ducking itself. You can also this manually in OS using markers. All you need to do, is lower the other instrument volumes and restore them gradually, every time a kick drum hits.
You can get some pretty awesome synthy effects by gradually modulating the high EQ on certain instruments using markers. This is usually called a filter sweep and its best on padlike instruments.
Using the new Detune feature, you can actually make some unsustainable instruments have more sustain! This will also make the instrument sound a bit weird though. Just turn Detune all the way down to get the longest sound.
You also can use detune on your basses to give them more low range. OS is limited to C2 but with detune, you have a new octave and can achieve all the way to C1!
Having some higher frequencies in your bass will make the bass easier to hear on bad systems like laptop speakers.
You can hold shift while detuning to get notes in between notes. This is really good for synths as it offers a chorus effect. What I love to do, is I like to have saw and square play the same thing, then pan them all the way apart, then give one of them a little detune. This makes it even wider sounding!
You can get thunder sounds with low pizzicato on random atonal notes.
Xylophone is really good for main melodies.
You can use markers to gradually pan an instrument, this is a fun thing to do sometimes.
OnlineSequencer has a cool feature called Chat, which is used for getting feedback on your songs. This can be very useful for often these people will hear something you may have missed.
Using different velocities for your drums, especially cymbals, can make your drums sound much more realistic. Try to imagine the velocity a real drummer would hit each note.
OS has some built in limiter thingy, which basically compresses the sound when it gets too loud. If you go even louder, it begins to distort the sound. A lot of people already know this and display it in their "lag tester" style sequences. It can be a useful effect for some songs, but I would try to avoid it and for most songs, I would lower the master volume until it doesn't compress.
You can solo all your instruments and use the export as audio features to get audio you can edit with more detail in other applications, such as a DAW. Audacity is a great pick for this since its easier to use than some DAWs. You can use any DAW though.
If you find your song is still not good after properly executing the techniques in this guide, that means its probably too similar to MegaIovania.
Please show me some before and after songs, I would like to see how well my guide works. Also, if your have anything to add, tell me. I would love to hear your thoughts and suggestions!
x3
x1
![[Image: jojo-kakyoin.gif?dateline=1606955510]](https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-lIBMZRr6l-M/X8gwj7ryP-I/AAAAAAAADLc/mkQY9azjJNEIDQFqoId6GhHurOGA3BEdgCMICGAYYCw/s83-c/jojo-kakyoin.gif?dateline=1606955510)
x1
![[Image: OS-Icon.webp]](https://i.ibb.co/xXSSV2n/OS-Icon.webp){kind=icon}
