Something that is often overlooked is movement in the mix. You want people to move, make the track move first! But what is movement in a mix? It’s about making things change and in any way that gives them life between the bars. There are so many ways we could do this, too many for this newsletter, but I’ll give you a few ideas of how to approach this.
Movement with Panning Let’s say you have a track where there are two kinds of hi-hats that play off each other. Panning on far right and left can give not only space, but make things feel like they are moving back and forth in the ear depending on the rhythm you’ve used. The simple approach to this would be to have the two hats on different tracks and pan them. But you could also do this with automation. You don’t even need two different hats, you could do this with a hi-hat roll and pan just those specific notes from side to another to make things interesting.
The next level of this would be to use plugins like PanCake 2 from Cable Guys (free) PanMan from SoundToys (premium) that can automate panning to the rhythm of the track. Great for dope vocal effects with ad libs, experiment raps (like Kendrick Lamar) and so on.
Movement with Volume You can also make the mix move up and down, not just left and right, by automating the volume of a track. Maybe there’s a dope note of a guitar on the one beat, you could use an automation curve to emphasize and bring the track back down after. It can add more emotion to the track or fix issues where an artist stepped back while recording.
You can even step it up and use plugins that automate volume changes to the rhythm such as using a tremolo on a 1/8th note, but only 50% wet so that it adds the sense of movement but not entirely cutting out the sound.
Next Level Movement There are many plugins that can add a very unique sense of movement such as wobble effects found in plugins like RC-20 by XLN Audio or warping effects like Brigade Chorus by UAD. These unique flavours are like seasoning for your track, strike the right balance and it’ll evoke immediate emotions from the listener.
As always, if you got any questions, hit me up on Instagram @musicbydarcy, I’m more than happy to help. | 
