Hey Guys,

Requesting you to listen the track and point out potential improvements regarding mixing and mastering as per your ears.

Here is the track :

http://soundcloud.com/mastertrack-1/follower

I appriciate your time.

Thanks

 

One mixing question - does the NASA sample really have to be that loud (and low midrange-y)? Doesn't the drop become less powerful in contrast to it?

Some highpass cutoff automation on the build-up wouldn't hurt.

It seems a little flat overall, but I could be wrong. Out of curiosity, what's the average RMS on the loudest parts?

 

I don't kow a lot about mastering and mixing, but if i say something as a newbie, the first most noticable thing that imo(of course) don't get together well is after 2 min when lead sound apear. Is like someone just turn down volume knob. I can imagine you probaby want make progression but i think this is not the right way with your particural music in that particular place. If you want leave this lead sound alone as it is with bass in backround, you should start with higher volume to match peaks more with rest of the song and make it more even. Or you can make progression with sound variation buildup rather than with volume buildup.

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y6120QOlsfU

 

The original file is an 128 kbps mp3...? That's a flawed reference. Try flac or wav at least (especially if you want someone to judge it). (Although some things are apparent, like little bass, much and wide reverb conflicting with the bass, pumping, kinda piercing highs and clipped)

@ Baxter

Average DR at loudest part is about 6.2, 7-8 where the kick ...kicks in and around 9-10 at the less crowded parts. RMS at -4,1 to -5,5.

Seriously, turn it down. That clipping distortion is nasty.

 

It's obliviously self-mastered and wrongly-mixed. In particular, the most oblivious thing in the track is the lack of dynamics and the abrupt change in parts on the second build up is a synonym of wrong compression and wrong gain staging. I'd suggest to get back to mixing before mastering it, since the majority of the improvements can be achieved here. Last thing I'd like to point out, try to focus more on the sweeps and parts' changing (transitions between builds and drops, between intro and chorus, etc...) since, without going too far into genre-related suggestions, the builds and chorus parts feel too static IMO.

Cheers, hope this helped

 

I think the issues mentioned are more composition/arrangement-related?

 

Kinda, I tried to keep the musical topic apart from this discussion since personal expression is key in music, and the arrangement doesn't look bad at all (although prog is not my genre). In the end what I hear is more a problem of mixing individual elements and busses to make them more cohesive and then make them louder with mastering, my examples and the NASA sample that Baxter pointed out are all clues that go in the same direction: wrong mixing and, after it, wrong mastering (to keep it audio, it's like when you make wrong EQing decision and then slap a processor such as a compressor on the track but can't make it work because what's feeding it is damaged, same here, and mastering only exaggerated mixing problems)

 

1 month ago a friend told me to have a reference track while mixing , already knew that but the trick was to degrade with eq the reference track to your mix not the opposite because you don't have the hardware , the room or the knowledge compared to a premium grade master studio, and doing this im getting better with EQ and knowing what my crappy room ,monitors ,gear does.
Put a hpf at 300 hz or 400 hz on both tracks and listen,then change the hpf to lpf , try different freq , get the same levels

 

Some of the parts sound really squashed, would of been usefull to help more if you had made the pre mastered version available as its pretty hard to judge once you've sledge-hammered it with limiting. if you were to look at the frequency response over the length of time it would look like a almost flat line, with a boost bump in the bass, the bass shape looks slightly unnatural to me, it's looks like it had a 10+db boost, which seems like a lot to add at the mastering stage, if it needs it then it needs it but just a thought that your doing too much reduction at the stage before the eq-ing in the first place. The only range with any freedom and to escape the battering is about 200Hz to 500Hz and even there there's not a lot of difference. A compressor to gently tame the bass and leave the higher freq alone could be useful or some multiband could prove useful. you should be aiming for the peaks to line up flat but still have a little bit of curvature to the overall response, because over the length of this small track some frequncy's would be more prominent and others less so.

 

The intro starts really good, you have a good balance of effects and instruments there. Up to the space guy talking. That guy really needs to be high passed and turned down a couple of dB's. Then things go a little wrong when the synths come in all together. You have a build up in the high mids that makes it sound kind of unclear. Here's a possible solution for that. To my ears the problem is between 500-1000Hz. Cut the synth at 500Hz, 2-3dB, and cut the bass synth at around 1000Hz for the same amount, and also try turning it down 1dB. Sweep around to see where the cut work better and clears things up and cut more or less as you see fit.

The thing is with this track, you have 2 powerful synths competing with each other. They're also both wide in the stereo field. Either keep the bass synth wide and narrow the lead, or the other way around. That will make things more clear and give both of the instruments more space to play.So you need to pick only one to dominate when everything kicks.

 

If you add up all the above and put them together its 2 simple tings you should do:

lower the compression there is nothing useful to say about frequencies when everything is flat


the build ups can use fades around 3 db ( human perception is weird 3 db difference results in twice as hard)
you might think it's weird to hand of 3, people do everything to make their track as hard as possible on the db meter but it is human perception what counts in the end.