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I’ve been a massive fan of the producer J-Break for many years, ever since I heard some of his chart-topping records like “The Rhythm” and others. His music has been supported by big names like Deadmau5, The Crystal Method, Paul Oakenfold, BT, and many more. His distinctive style, focusing on textural drum breaks and breakbeats with a lot of swagger and attitude, is balanced by a nuanced texture that shows his veteran status as a producer. So, when I heard he was starting a new project called Midnight Stereo, leaning more into a retro, almost borderline synthwave vibe, I had to check out the magic he’s creating in the studio under this new alias and with this new group.
To celebrate the launch of his latest single, we invited him to share what plugins he’s using, if there are any differences from his previous work, how he approaches making music in this style, and to give us an inside look at the project overall. So, listen to the track below to get your ears acclimated to some of the secrets he’ll be discussing in this article before diving into the latest iteration of How It Was Made: Midnight Stereo, “Dreams.”
Celemony Melodyne
Melodyne has been around for over 20 years now, but it first became widely known as being the main vocal tool for Skrillex’s early albums. There are even similar tools available in Logic Pro, but we’ve always preferred Melodyne.
There are a lot of options for this one, from fixing tuning issues, adding harmonies, to adjusting modulation and drift of your vocals. We used Melodyne on this track for layering additional harmonies on top of vocals in several parts of the track. We were really pleased with the outcome.
Arturia Mini V
There are a million different MiniMoog emulations out there, and some are better than others. Although The Mini V isn’t the most authentic in terms of the distortion and bite of the original, we’ve always come back to this one over others after using it on and off over the past 20 years.
For “Dreams”, we wanted to have a real spacey breakdown similar to the progressive rock bands of the 70s. First, we started with two different saws set to two octaves apart on the oscillators, and a triangle on oscillator 3. Then we turned up the glide a bit with this sound to really accentuate the sci-fi feeling of it. We set the attack at 0, and brought the decay & sustain up a lot. Finally, we added a lot of reverb and delays to increase the width.
The Mini is such a classic sound and it really works well with any type of electronic music, whether you are looking for a nice classic bass sound, or even a lush analog pad. This plugin has been around long enough that you can find a limitless number of patches that producers have created online that you can add to your arsenal.
Arturia Augmented Strings
The Augmented Strings Is a very curious hybrid string plugin. If you can’t get the philharmonic orchestra to come play for you, it’s the second best thing. We’ve always really loved strings in electronic music like one of our favorite groups, Hybrid, so we are always looking for great strings we can incorporate into our tracks. When we found this one, we fell in love with the interface of this plugin and how intuitive it is. We like when plugins can quickly be tweaked and don’t have an overcomplicated GUI that makes it difficult from a user’s perspective.
We didn’t need to do much tweaking on this one, as we really liked the way it sounded. We mainly adjusted the attack and decay, so it sounded very natural for bowed strings. We started the track with some minor seventh harmonies with the strings to compliment the guitars at the beginning.
About halfway through the intro, we added an additional string harmony, and added some reverb and delay to widen it and fill out the stereo field a bit. We sprinkled some more strings throughout the track at times, just to give it some more depth.
Klanghelm SDRR
The SDRR is just a simply amazing saturator plugin that we use on almost everything to give the tracks warmth. It’s also a compressor, an EQ, a bit-crusher, and can give some movement and a little bit of stereo widening if that’s what you’re looking for.
On “Dreams”, we added the SDRR to all the synth & drum tracks to give it a nice warm analog feel by selecting the Tube setting, turning the warmth knob all the way to max, and setting the drive to around 2. Since we were dealing with a lot of distorted guitars and other analog gear on this track, we needed the digital tracks to match the similar tonality.
You really can’t go wrong when it comes to adding saturation, however there are times when you can sometimes push it a little too much and it starts to break up in the mix. Just listen to your ears to find a good balance of warmth you are comfortable with. Normally, we would add saturation to the vocals as well, but we were going for a very clean vocal effect on this track and had already used a hardware preamp and compressor to give it a more warm tone to begin with.
Tips when mixing electronic with live/acoustic elements
Tip #1
Use subtle saturation, harmonic distortion, and transformer plugins on your tracks. This will give your overall sound a very cohesive polished sound that doesn’t make anything stand out in a bad way. When your track is being played loud, it won’t sound harsh on the high end and the low end will sound nice and smooth.
Tip #2
Know when to use stereo effects and widen tools, and when to keep a track in mono. You should usually leave your lead vocals, bass instruments and certain percussive elements like the kick in mono. Everything else can be played around a bit to give your track a nice stereo image and will sound great to your listeners. Experiment with hard panning on your tracks and the different stereo tool plugins available, as well as delays that have stereo capabilities. Just be mindful of phasing issues!
Tip #3
Roll the very top end down on your high hats in the highest frequencies around 15kHz. This clears up the sound in the high end and allows the other tracks that occupy that space to shine a bit more. You can also do a narrow (high Q) dip on certain tracks that are in the frequencies around the 2 kHz to 10 kHz range, as these are the harshest of the high end frequencies and are usually caused by dirty cymbals, clangy guitars, or raspy digital synths. A fairly well known trick to find the harshest frequencies is to use a narrow Q, sweep across and find harsh resonances in the high-end (2-10kHz) and lower them.
Tip #4
Trust your ears as much as your eyes. I know it’s tempting to always stare at your DAW when mixing to ensure everything looks perfect, but at the end of the day it’s your ears that are hearing the music. Have confidence in your ears.
Will Vance is a professional music producer who has been involved in the industry for the better part of a decade and has been the managing editor at Magnetic Magazine since mid-2022. In that time period, he has published thousands of articles on music production, industry think pieces and educational articles about the music industry. Over the last decade as a professional music producer, Will Vance has also ran multiple successful and highly respected record labels in the industry, including Where The Heart Is Records as well as having launched a new label with a focus on community through Magnetic Magazine. When not running these labels or producing his own music, Vance is likely writing for other top industry sites like Waves or the Hyperbits Masterclass or working on his upcoming book on mindfulness in music production. On the rare chance he's not thinking about music production, he's probably running a game of Dungeons and Dragons with his friends which he has been the dungeon master for for many years.
