Buku - Front To Back (Bassnectar Extended Remix) [Spinnin' Remixes] [Out 3.03.17]

So the way it generally works is that a producer will create and arrange all the sounds that are used in a track, apply FX, and balance all of the sounds levels correctly relative to each other.

Some producers (like Flume) have a mixing engineer that assists them in balancing the sounds correctly so they gel together.. which can mean adjusting volume, applying reverb to put the sound in a space, applying EQ to change the balance of frequencies within the sound.

They then export the track into what's called a premaster. Premasters generally don't take up all of the volume "space" available, so the track isn't as loud as it will when it's finished.

In most EDM, the mastering engineer will then take this premaster and jack up the volume, apply compression / limiting to squash the track and take up all the available volume, and apply finishing touches (like boosting certain frequencies and cutting others). They'll generally try to balance the song so that it fits together next to other songs in an album (so it doesn't sound noticeably louder or quieter than the next and previous tracks). They don't generally add sounds to the track, and can't rebalance sounds relative to each other. They make sure the track sounds as good as possible on most sound systems.

In the case of Bassnectar, this loudness is taken pretty much to its limit, and getting that signature sound requires a lot of special techniques because weird shit starts happening to tracks when you make them super loud. For example, if you have a sub note (the lowest sound in the track) and a vocal, and you throw them together into a limiter (which squashes the sounds to the maximum possible level), you'll actually get noticeable distortion on the vocal track that didn't exist until you threw them together into the limiter. So Seth actually has to do quite a bit of work because he might need to process the song different when it has vocals present from when it doesn't.

/r/bassnectar Thread Parent Link - classic.beatport.com