umm so I'd love to know just what was done here!!! anyone who can help? i pretty much own just home studio level stuff, and i mix quite well, but i can't quite crack what saturator was used for the top end, vocal chain, mastering chain all that. THIS SONG JUST SOUNDS PERFECT TO ME!! I mean i love staring at the tonal balance "graph-line" stuff

I use fl for producing mixing and mastering, a basic scarlett solo2 for recording and a shitload of plugins, could i ever achieve that quality?

 

in order to be able to mix perfectly , the circumstances have to be right ... i will name a few of them ...
1. Know-how
2.a pair of really good and practiced ears
3.from the start, a clean and good signal
4..acoustically optimized room
5. boxes with a linear frequency response

 

Nice piece but notice that the good sound depends only of the lack of stacked layers of instruments. The arrangement is so simple, just voices, guitar, percussion and a mellotron like keyboard sometimes, the bass is limited to play only in the first measures almost all the time and at the end enters that minimal flute-like solo. The song is breathing. Less is more.

 

This! And I like the rhythms a lot!

 

You can already see the end result or the finished product, but as always, the road is long and rocky.
As you know, it is always a long way to the master, because everyone starts small. For most professions, a 3-year vocational training is mandatory, then several years of work experience and then with a lot of luck and talent then the master.

If you are willing to read a few books and have a little patience, you too can become a good musician.
Read a little, apply, practice and listen...!

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Sounds great! Nice sub-bass. Kick deliberately light though? Not very present, but I don't care - the sound and mix is just super. If you DID push the kick, I wouldn't up the volume, but just put some more click or something to give it presence. Otherwise - don't touch a thing!

 

Experience. Sparse mix. Complementary elements.

Learn the basics of gain-staging, subtractive EQ/filtering, subtractive mixing, sample selection, M/S, etc. Make mistakes and learn from them. Treat/tune your room and learn your (correctly placed) speakers and sub(s).

I'm 25 years into recording, production, mixing and mastering and this is what I would say to myself starting out. My current part-time job is mastering. "Your ears" takes time to train and will be your main tools (not your "shitloads of plugins").

 

Last edited: Jul 16, 2022

shape your mix into the perfect master. leave the tracks as untouched as they can be

 

You seem to be looking for a general formula for getting to this sound, and that's simply very unproductive. There's no such thing. Even if there was one formula to get to a specific sound, the most important element in that equation would be the starting point. Without a starting point, it's just guess-work and hypotheticals – nothing practical to communicate. If you could share your starting point, then there might be a conversation to be had, you know? And there would certainly be many different little formulas, little paths of processing, that people could suggest to you.

 

The mix master of this music was done by dj swivel, check his youtube

 

What???

No. The very reason we come here is to collect as many reverbs/compressors/twinkies so that we can overload every track with everything...all at once.

THAT is what makes my mixes so awesome.

 

I would recommend to test his plugins, also here is a Vid where he is talking about mastering.

 

any time I see a dj or mixer with their own "signature plugins", my expectations of them are never high. His are quite good, compared with anything I would have expected. He probably does actually use them. You would expect him to hype them anyway; but it's certainly believable he does use them beyond when only the camera is rolling. (the way others might, just to sell them).

But to the initial question, my (100% complete) guess to the saturation question is going to be that he has instances of Decapitator on many individual channels of his projects.

 

It's about the journey, not the destination.

 

Boxes? We don need no stinkin boxes! ( hollywood mexican accent) What's a box?

 

I´ve spent many years trying to get my mixes perfect. Now I spend the most time on arrangement and production, less time on mixing. For me, this is the key to a good sounding end result. It took me a long time to discover that a balanced mix is a boring mix, and what that actually means.