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Ever tried to actually make a commercial heavy brostep kinda song? Yeah... It's not easy. Especially not the mixdown part. I'm used to making 90 percent of my sounds with subtractive synthesis and sampling, but now i'm dipping into the world of massive and FM8 again, and i'm failing hard. Really hard. The thing is, i have no idea how to "work" towards a sound like i'm used to with sylenth1 or whatever. The end result is sloppy, badly mixed, overly gritty as a result of bad distortion, and impossible to mix in with uplifting supersaws and stuff.

So... Any help?

could you maybe post an example of your stuff so we can see exactly what you mean? the most important thing when mixing huge midrange and making it fit in the mix is proper eqing in relation to the other parts of the song.

Well, example of what i wanna achieve is that obvious Nero type commercial sound. Here's my attempt at something simple like that:

Soundcloud

(Don't mind the arrangement, it's faaaar from done, i'm mostly working on my (shitty) sound design skills atm)

sounds to me like the growly synth could use some reverb with a really small tail and the other synth sounds good, maybe try to make it a bit wider, compress and also stick some reverb on that as well.

Surprised you're struggling Rmonik, your shit is huge. Then again, I can see how doing something you're not used would be difficult and I'm coming to understand that now with the sample comp.

Well it's a bit sloppy and not quite as "commercially-clean-yet-full" sounding. I know some people on here have that sound down, like filthzilla n stuff. I think the problem's the base sounds really, can't mix something if it's not yet sounding great to start with.

sounds a little bass heavy.. but i'd say you on the right track

I've read stuff about mixing distorted guitars and one thing someone mentioned that you've made a point of is source material. They said to get your guitar tone as good as you can and get a full sound before you do anything with it. Then you "poke holes" in it to mix it with other elements, since distorted stuff can cover the whole spectrum and will overlap with other instruments entirely.

A lot of these guys honestly limit/squash the hell out of their channels and even clip the master at some stage. What you should be looking at is a wall of sound style of mixing and arrangement.
Most of that stuff, while it may seem busy with all the change ups and such only has a few elements going on at a specific time and usually none of it is overlapping each out frequency content wise.
It allows for a lot louder of a mix, and even then like I said some of these guys will continue to squash the individual channels, the busses, or even the master.
Take a look at pop music over the ages, even commercial metal, and that should steer you more in the right direction for that style of sound.
http://www.gearslutz.com/board/high-end ... ffect.html

Hell one of my faves, Current Value has a very clinical usage of frequencies within arrangement, compression, etc.