I've got into electronic music myself recently, though I have been quite interested in progressive house in some time already.
It is really not as easy as it sounds, and regular AE would only get it once they sit in front of their DAW and say "ok let's write a tune and lets make it sound huge".
Of course most of it comes to the sound you create and use and how you blend them, more than mixing itself.
About deadmau5 and Skrillex, the simple fact they are mentioned together shows how diverse this world can be : deadmau5 has a tremendous collection of hardware synths including one or two modular
Moogs and he actually knows how to use them. Skrillex does almost exclusively everything in live using the native instrument synths, write everything with his trackpad, and nothing else. I'm not sure he mixes his tunes though, deadmau5 probably does.
Tbh I think deadmau5 mixes are very good. As easy as it seems to manipulate synth lines, his signature basses (subtle low deep and sort of organic) are hard to reproduce. There are a tremendous amount of electronic artists who don't know anything about mixing and just throw their synths adjusting their volume, but some do know their stuff. They didn't all come from discovering Fruity Loops in their teen period and stuck with it (not that FL is bad for electro music, but I can see someone who never went outside its philosophy miss what mixing can involve). Deadmau5 didn't steal his celebrity, he really is good at what he does.
To me, comparing them to AEs is irrelevant, they are mostly musicians, their computer being their instrument. They create music more than act as engineers, and maybe rely on something else for that (I think I remember Skrillex say he has a mixer engineer)
Another thing with deadmau5 and Skrillex : deadmau5 doesn't really do dubstep (he has one or two dubstep oriented tunes but it's just his way of capitalizing on the trend) his style clearly is house and electro, and a lot of Skrillex songs aren't even dubstep but almost pure prog house. They are often associated because deadmau5 signed Skrillex and they are friends, but their music has little in common in the end.
To go slightly off topic on the parallel one of metal vs electro in terms of creativity : that's what made me start writing electro music. The process is easy, the sound you use during songwriting are the actual sounds you are using, since it is midi based (except if you're an analogue guy ala Joachim Garraut) editing is flawless, or you can do it all with the mouse, and in a few hours you can have the ground of a new track. When I write electronic I feel like I'm free and just have to think about the music, and not it's playability, or the technical aspect of it. To me it's the thing I missed in creating music, and I think I'll continue creating both metal and electronic music in the future for that reason.
). Basically all I did was look at women the whole time, fuck the music...
