Could someone give me some pointers on 3 and 4 deck mixing (eq and volume control)

DJ Life & Community General Discussion
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Could someone give me some pointers on 3 and 4 deck mixing (eq and volume control)

Yeah, so I’ve been dabbling in 3 and 4 deck mixes for the first time this weekend and beyond the obvious stuff like keeping track of what’s where and what decks are active, you know the mechanical stuff I’m really curious about how some of you eq the whole deal, I find with drum and bass the highs get awfully bright and the lower end of the mids is kinda muddy, like poorly mixed basslines…also the volume gets out of control pretty quickly…As far as mixing styles with 3 and 4 decks go, what I’ve been doing mostly is just cueing up and getting tracks going so that I don’t have to jump ahead as much…I know there’s tons more to be learned, so if anyone wouldn’t mind giving me some pointers I’d be grateful

Mike

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practise with some tech house first mate … D&B is pretty technical with more than 2 decks :wink:
Use the third deck as a “bridging track”

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Indeed, do as Jester said -third deck = bridging deck. Get used to playing loops and tools in that then move on.
You will have to mix with the EQs a lot more if you keep more than two decks playing out to the master. At this point unless you’re mixing stems, there’s no way you can have all your EQ knobs at 12 o’clock without the result sounding muddy/busy. What mixer do you use?
Decrease some frequencies somewhere to make room for them in the other channel(s) - I find having full kill EQs helps. You’ll figure out what/where just by listening and figuring out what you want to keep in each channel.
Phrasing helps a lot there too -even with the best EQing, making three or four BUSY parts running together will sound bad.
Filters usually become even more useful at this point because sometimes, cutting all the bass just won’t be enough for example. Just beware of the resonance.

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Easy Mike, nice to see you pushing the envelope!
You dont need to treat the 3rd deck as a bridging track, treat it as a track in its own right.

How I approach my 3 deck mixing is this:

Setup decent loops at the beginning of every track, Cue2 is my go to. Hammer that in time and let it roll. Now you can effectively leave this to do its own thing and bring it in when you feel comfotable.

I usually go for something melodic and in key, neuter the bass and take some off the top, but leave the mids. Bring it in with the linefader about 2/3rds up.

Take some off the two rolling tracks mids and highs to make room for number 3, bring it up slowly when nearing the drop/break.

A lot of dnb tends to have small 4 bar breaks where everything goes silent just before the drop. Use this to switch the bass to the incoming track.

On the drop, kill 1 outgoing track totally, kill the bass on the track thats still going, roll down the highs and take the line fader down a notch.

Now go grab a new tune for the deck youve just stopped. Rinse, repeat, double drop.

Theres a LOT to do in a small window of time aswell as making sure everything is tight! Never have 2 basslines going at the same time, it simply doesnt work with dnb.

Its also very difficult to do 3 decks with liquid dnb, theyre so sonically full already your gonna end up with clashing vocals and all sorts. All other sub genres tend to work nicely as only half the tracks have vocals.

Treat the eq like a cup of water.

1 track fills the cup 3/4 full. If you put another whole track in there your gonna get all wet. So take out some of the sound to make room for new sound.

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I don’t play D&B, but it’s pretty much this for me with deep/tech house. Although I tend to leave the highs and take a little off the mids more, but that’s just the way I mix. Plus different mixers will sound different in this aspect.