@xavier

Yeah, this is all highly actionable! All the stuff I mentioned is stuff I plan on taking into consideration when I mix / master my own songs. not necessarily because i want to make the same kind of music as this song, but rather because i now know so much more about what composition / recording / mixing / mastering decisions would need to be made to achieve the way this song sounds.

For LUFS (which I see via iZotope Ozone, but there are a ton of free loudness meters out there), I've previously been scared to have short term higher than -14, but now i might be more comfortable going to -10. it also helps me to know that the reason a lot of professionally mastered music sounds louder than the music i make is because it just plain is louder. it's not just that they did a better job mixing or mastering.

aside, if you use ableton this is lovely: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=phPv2DUZBF4

also, i've historically been unsure how low to allow bass frequencies to go. i figured that there wasn't any point in letting stuff dip under 60hz, for instance, because i assumed most speakers would suck at reproducing it and it'd just introduce noise/distortion. but i guess everyone has good enough speakers and headphones these days, and perhaps all the psychoacoustic processing in airpods (eg) was designed to handle, like, modern rap/pop music with lots of subbass.

also, seeing that the overall EQ profile has the bass like 6db louder than the mids and like 9db louder than the highs is fascinating. like, i know with my ears that this is what modern music sounds like, but i figured it was achieved by some means that wouldn't show up in the spectrum — because i've always believed (wrongly) that you should mix kinda flat. i'd assumed that the feeling of powerful bass was achieved by, like, something about wave shape or clever use of phase that made bass perceptually loud. nope, seems like it's just raw energy. cool.

also, the way frequencies roll off above 10kHz. that feels intentional. i'll need to see if that's happening in my mixes (i usually roll off the highs and lows on every layer to control loudness and noise — i often make cuts with EQ instead of reducing gain when mixing, for instance).

the stereo correlation stuff is also actionable. to me, this song doesn't sound nearly as narrow as it looks on the meters. i usually try to spread most of my layers somewhere in the stereo field, and have almost nothing dead center except low bass and kicks. in this song, the bass (low AND mid) is almost entirely center, as are the vocals, and much of the synth and drum energy. but, crucially, there's snare and kick in the sides, which helps them pop out compared to the insanely loud bass. so if i wanted to, i now know how i could achieve a mix that has a stereo field like this song does — keep most things mono, but allow non-bass stuff to lightly splash over to the sides (from reverb or whatever), and intentionally use the sides to make things stand out, and then only throw stuff hard L/R (and, especially, out of phase) very briefly for effect.

(aside: it has been like 20 years since i last looked closely at a professionally mastered track through all my metering tools. i should have been doing this all along! like, back then i didn't even know about mid/side.)

also, the bass lives mostly between 90 and 30hz, and the kick lives up at 100-ish, so they mostly stay out of each other's way. that helps because i often wonder, like, where to put them. should the kick be down at like 60, and the bass up in the 70-120 range? turns out: no! not if i want something that sounds like this song, at least.