Hey guys. I'm working on a project for a client that sounds similar to this Lil Skies song.

After comparing my mix to the Lil Skies track, I'm wondering how the mix engineer got the sample to sound so huge and locked into place behind the vocal. Does it seem like some type of compression with side-chain activated to the kick?

Does anyone have any mixing tricks for making samples like this sound huge but not overpowering the lead vocal and the rest of the mix? Especially when the sample is in the same frequency range.

Any tips are welcomed. BTW, it looks like the track was mixed by Kevin Gomringer out of Germany.

 

Huge as in width and depth?
The bass is a wide supersaw-ish sound (lowpassed). The vocals (centered) are autotuned, mid focused and has some ducked delay and reverb.
The bass is most likely ducked around the knack of the kick (doesn't appear to be much ducking tho). Other elements have more reverb to take advantage of the depth and to make other elements be more upfront.
Other than that it's a pretty straight-forward mix.

 

Last edited: Sep 30, 2019

I'd agree with Baxter that the other elements are dredged in hall reverb,
which amounts the most to the 'spacious' feel.

the vocals, however, are super hard compressed, and has more than a decent amount of auto-tune,
automated-ducked-delays and definitely a flanger and some distortion.
followed up by a hall-reverb, with a kinda huge amount of pre-delay.

The drums don't get as much volume as the vocals (which poke out a decent amount), hardly any reverb(but a decent tail) and
the Hi-hat is nicely tucked away in the back (without any panning/pitch modulation).

I like the track overall, very well executed. great for comparison I think.