I reckon the individual outs help quite a bit.
They sit like a good boy.
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Definitely depends on the context. Just looking at filters as an example, there could be differences in brightness with slope, differences in frequency content when turning up the resonance, and differences in how much you can overdrive the filter. Now imagine you have a filter with a lot of control over these aspects. Does that flexibility make it easier to fit in the mix? Oftentimes, yes. Other times you just need something simplistic and predictable to quickly achieve something that sits.
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The main way analog is easier to mix is by often having characterful and exciting sounds that dominate useful portions of the spectrum while digital often has a lot of garbage in other areas of spectrum that you donāt notice on its own but that makes mixing harder. You donāt have to shape āgood soundsā as much necessarily because letting them be in your face and cool sounding just works. So I find that analog stuff often has far less detailed eq applied while digital stuff needs a little more surgery.
I usually find easier the other way (maybe except access virus)
I think it depends a lot on what youāre after. Mixing a lot of āstrongā sources is hard, but mixing one or two strong sounding analog things in with some more polite sounds can make it easy to let the lead and bass analogs (for instance) shine without producing them much. To me itās really easy to mix synths if they have a sound that only needs to be band-limited and really hard to mix them if they have a sound that needs to have lots of little notches applied to avoid overly clashing with other sounds and I find the latter to be more common in digital sources but I also prefer to use analog stuff as a very up-front sound that is intrinsically allowed to dominate the mix anyway. With digital stuff I am often less happy with the raw sound and so I spend more time dressing up that track in mixing (usually trying to get some of the highs rolled off without losing presence, something analogs just do better since VCOās tend to have more natural sounding band-limiting in the circuit vs. a DAC).
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I am interested in this topic, because Iāve convinced myself, without any scientific foundation, that FM synthesis is the right choice for the music I create.
All my tracks are intended to be played along to by students. One of my musical goals is for the accompaniment to be clear but not overpowering to the soloist or the group. My assumption about FM is that more-well-defined (narrow) resonance peaks are more readily available, compared to other forms of synthesis.
I have produced these accompaniments almost exclusively on the Digitone. The small number of tracks Iāve made with other gear have have struck my ear as lower quality, with more general ānoiseā interfering with the purity of the tones and the clarity of the accompaniment being āwashed outā by the students playing along.
I should probably start using an oscilloscope. I am pretty bad at figuring where the frequency distribution of sounds in my mixes lies, and I frequently redo projects when I discover, while trying the tracks out on students, that the mix is lopsided.
@aMunchkinElfGraduate that is the relevant aspect of what I said. Analog doesnāt guarantee great sound and it might need to be band-limited to avoid the extras in the lows and highs that arenāt necessary for its timbre to be properly represented in the stereo mix but if you have a really lovely timbre that can be allowed to bloom all over a mix I see nothing wrong with letting it do soā¦but you shouldnāt expect to be able to easily mix a whole lot of sounds like this without lots of sculpting and moving things around in the stereo staging. Thatās one of the reasons people will often only have one or two really memorable sounding analog synths and then fill out everything else with digital stuff or samples that can slot in nicely under those more dominant voices.
Mixing 8 tracks of character analogs would definitely be hard but I think having one or two tracks of that give you something to work around that you can think āOK I need these to sound like they do and I can fine tune the other sounds to work around them.ā By committing to them as the primary sounds that need to be respected it makes it easier to know what to cut/boost on the other sounds IMO.
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I donāt think it is a matter of the synths but rather how you record them (eg dry vs dry-wet, mono vs stereo) and which sounds and effects you choose for layering.
On layering, feel free to check out the following thread:
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Very true, I just had this experience with a piece I did the other day. I had a nice groove going with a 303 and some light effects and decided to record it even though I didnāt have any sort of plan for a track. Did a couple of meh takes, threw the drum track away and wrote some sort of off-kilter broken beat with some 909ish sounds, and hit paydirt. Sound design, arrangement, and mixing were about 1/3 adding things and 2/3 throwing away anything that distracted from the core idea.
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I agree with you. One big analog sound is fine, you can let it roll but I usually find a few of them together and the mid to low becomes a pea soup.
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Thatās exactly what I was trying to say in my earlier post. I found that it works particularly good to limit the melodic side of my tracks to just an analog synth that can shine in all of its pristine glory (often more in the bass / deeper register) combined with a more thin and ātoy likeā sounding FM patch from Syntakt or Digitone. It makes for a nice contrast sonically but also tends to work well within a mix.
Thereās something good about a badly mixed track. Put it in the wobbly tape or bad battery fx dept.
I know a lot of people criticised the A4 for not being analog sounding enough in the Moog type of way, and I agree itās not the greatest sounding synth, but I alway found that it fit perfectly in the mix of any songs. For me It had a level of flexibility to it but never seemed overbearing. I was never tempted to upgrade from a MK1 to a newer version with better bass etc as I thought it might go against the nice balance I found with the MK1.
On the flip side, thereās something empowering about an all out powerful sounding synth that can provide a dominating lead sound. It was the Moog sound that attracted me to electronic music even before I even knew what a synth wasā¦
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I find the A4 is more naturally bright in the mids and you have to add the lower end rumble if thatās what you want, where it seemed more like ever present in the Moog synths that have passed my desk.
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Back in thr day, there were only ābigā synths: Moogs, ARPs, Sequentials, drawbar organs. Theyāre all thick. Records hy Vangelis, Jarre, Tangerine Dream, Kraftwerk, etc all sound fantastic.
How did they fit all those hedty synths in?
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Bigger compressors.
spoiler
These guys actually knew how to mix properly. 
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Good mixing skills and great engineers but also: smart composition that really uses space efficiently backed by thoughtful sound design that supported the compositions. They were generally using monaural and monophonic sources and thereās a lot of sections that sound incredibly full and expansive while only really having 3 or 4 actual sounds in the mix, but the sounds are all timbrally distinct and they designed them to actually exist as different textures. You can try it yourself: use one bass with longer notes and possibly paraphonic chord progressions done by modulating some of the oscillator tunings, one more percussive arpy type sound, and a pad/lead that lives in the higher registers, plus a small number of actua percussive sounds. You can build a lot and have it be pretty easy to mix by following that plan but as soon as you try to mix two similar sounds that have similar textures and primarily occupy the same space in frequency domain, life gets hard and you have only stereo separation and EQing to rely on for distinguishing them musically.
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Mixing is about balance, tonal, spacial, spectral, and temporal balance. Obviously even before mixing, orchestration is half the job. Furthermore not all genre are mixed the exact same way, one does not mix Techno like one mixes a jazz track. Therefore āsits well in the mixā is the sort of question people ask themselves online but it doesnāt mean anything.
Does a sound fit your composition? No, then dial another patch. Is a sound too loud? Yes, then make it quieter. Does a sound produce too much basses? Yes then roll off the basses, ā¦
Audio engineering is a job and requires a long education, there are no shortcuts that can be taken when its comes to frequency ear training, acoustic room treatments or mixing practice itself.
In my experience the problem is mostly at the orchestration step anyway.
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Thatās true for about 99% we do in life, including playing an instrument or fiddling with an Elektron device.