Exclusive Interview: Production Techniques Of Infected Mushroom Sound Alchemy

AF: And on the computer part you never had any crashes while playing live?

Eisen: We did a long time ago because of our mistakes. We had stupidly left an anti-virus program open and it decided to look for an update or something. Today we have a backup for everything almost. But we don’t have crashes for many years now luckily.

AF: A few minutes ago we were talking about your mixes. They are always very ‘precise’, with no redundancies on the spectrum, even when you have big synths playing. For example, I read in your forum that you said “the hard work is to mix things right and remove unwanted frequencies”. Would you reduce the spectrum of most of your instruments when mixing to reach this goal?

Eisen: I high-filter everything except the bass and the kick drum. Actually I made a plug-in in Reaktor that solved the issue of kick and bass. I basically made the side chain EQ in a way. Every time there is a kick, there is a high-pass filter on the bass line for example. Every time the kick plays, the bass line has a high-pass. I used to do it manually. Then I said, you know what, let’s do it in Reaktor, it’s pretty easy.

AF: It’s really working well. The bass and drums are really always very precise.

Eisen: You just clean the mix. Whenever the kick doesn’t play, it still sounds fat. Especially if you always want to have bass playing on the kick at the same time. That’s the biggest problem – you just find yourself doing a bass line that you don’t really want. Bassline without the ones on the kick. For me at least, we solved this issue for Infected. Except that, I low-cut everything that doesn’t need bass, unless it’s a break, and in the break you can bring back all the bass. But when the kick comes, I think most of the mix sounds cleaner when you cut at least 100-120 Hz. Much clearer.

There are so many techniques that I use – stereo synth, so that the synth will sound more stereo. I am doing a technique of double tracking like on guitar. Basically let’s say I have a simple bass line. So I play a little bit with the cutoff, I play a little bit with the attack, with the decay, a little bit with the release of the sound. I am doing a long session that I am playing with it. Like let’s say, 8 bars. I export the 8 bars to an audio file, and then I split them to 4 and 4. The first 4 I put on the left channel, and second 4 I put on the right channel. And then I have this small movement in the bass line, and I recorded the movement manually so it’s not so precise. The left channel is not exactly as the right channel and then it sounds more stereo without any effect.

AF: Like a chorus.

Eisen: Yeah like a chorus. But if you wanted to sound more like a chorus you play also with the tune, the off-tune.

AF: This sounds like you really have two players at the same time.

Eisen: Yeah. It sounds like two players at the same time. You don’t really know what is going on, but it sounds more stereo and more fat in a way. So I am doing it almost for everything, to be honest. Almost any end that we do – we just record a longer version, then we cut it in the middle. The first part we put left, the second part right, and that’s it.