for me its clearly lost the "percussions" and the bass... the voice its too loud dud, but nothing else more

 

I don't understand the purpose of your way of using instruments in the mix. It seems they don't add anything special to the mix. Most likely are there just to fill the empty spaces. This way of using instruments is the ultimate and deliberate insult to them.

 

If you're trying to improve your mixing then I'm sure there will be plenty of raw multitracks out there to practice on.

If you're trying to improve your songwriting then write a song.

Once you can write an original piece, then you need to learn production, what to use and where and when in the mix, to best enhance the overall finished track.

 

Hey bro, a good place to start is to watch this video. It’s been around for a good minute (80’s I think) and still one of the best videos for all people to grasp the principles of mixing. I have it on DVD from way back and I don’t even have a DVD player anymore! Lol.. But luckily, it’s on Youtube! I hope this helps! The Art of Mixing by David Gibson

 

The Track is fine mate; you have some great ideas.. What you're missing is an inspirational collaboration...
what you need is to find a killer female singer that you can collaborate with on the tune. Someone records a vocal and you have something to wrap all those great ideas around or inspire you into a place that gives you more vibe to break through your block. Sample libraries are not inspiring for vocals because its a one-dimensional one size fits all.
Keep it up, man..great work.

 

Some old school advice, take care of your singer. Once you got a decent drum and bass groove, have everything serve the vocals. Your high end instruments are in a pissing match with the singing, and the track loses. Arrangement is fine, so leave that alone.

 

Last edited: Feb 24, 2023

So, let me see if I have this straight, @Glori , you start confused, and then add two speculative, noncommittal statements...

... but are then fine ending it with a bold statement expressing how offended you are by the track?

You don't have to be constructive in your criticisms, but let's at least keep anything you throw into the ring based on certainties.

 

i agree, nothing wrong with the song as a whole. that is more important than the sound. you have the ingredients you just have to combine them well. much better than having a sub-par song that is a technical masterpiece.

just from a purely technical standpoint -- sound-wise, it is a bit bright and harsh. on a simplistic level this is a basic 'bass <--> treble' balance issue.

it sounds like you are trying to 'boost' your way out of a more fundamental problem. to my ears, there is a lot of noise that just does not need to be there, in the mids specifically [it is always the mids]. it is just creating clutter which is necessitating a 'boost' war. in a limited medium like music -- if you try to emphasize everything, you end up emphasizing nothing. it becomes a confusing mess. (which could be interesting, but not in this specific case)

it can be looked at as an organizational problem:

first get some applicable reference that will 'reset' your ears and provide a rough baseline and end goal.

take off all unnecessary processing -- even all processing if that is appropriate.

buss stuff to some to some basic elemental groups -- e.g. percussive, bass, treble, lead (whatever -- you know what your are going for better than i do).

go faders down (or mutes or however you do it).

*do the following very quickly and intuitively. broad brush strokes at a buss level, and keep moving past fine details (make mental notes of these though -- to address at a later stage)*

*i would suggest just making cuts at this stage with a clean eq. cutting lows boosts highs, etc. (you can compensate with level), cutting crud, boxyness and paper creates space for other stuff in the extremely limited spectrum we work with. etc. etc. with these artificial instruments you do not always need the full spectrum of the sound. just take what you need if things are getting crowded and confused. just get elements resonating together and in good phase, they will sound big even if they sound a bit weedy alone.*

set to levels of the main driving elements, i would suggest maybe bring up the percussive elements balance them and set the levels. clean them up.

bring in the bass. set level. trim it up. get them working together.

bring in vocal. set a level. make it fat and upfront, naturalistic or however you want it.

bring in the treble buss. balance the different elements. set a level. get rid of frequencies that are unnecessary or getting in the way of the main elements.

get less necessary stuff out of the way of more important stuff. also the order is not that important, get the things you find important working together and get the other stuff out of the way.

organize the front to back with some time based effects (i.e delay, reverb [just one or two things on auxes to start with) or frequency/level based solutions -- or both. again just on a basic broad strokes, buss level. push stuff back <--> keep stuff forward.

if you do all this stuff very quickly you will begin to organize the song in your mind and 'learn' the song and what is needed, which can then be solved with more detailed processing.

as an added bonus because you have not invested much time (sunken cost) you can just easily pull down faders and keep what is working and get rid of what is not.

just keep listening and remembering some of your favourite sounds and trying to make what you hear sound like that. it is your thing so do not try and please anyone else, you must have some idea what you like to hear in music -- do that.

if all goes well you can now distort and smash the hell out of it on the main buss without bringing up unwanted stuff, and elements that you want in-front remain in-front, giving the listener a well organized hierarchy of what to pay attention to at any given point, and hopefully a more cohesive, smoother sound (natural? well, not overly hyped) -- a more pleasant, user friendly listening experience in general.

i know this is all boring old fart stuff, but building a solid framework based on fundamentals allows for a more robust platform for experimentation down the line. good luck.

-- after all this. you could just get someone else to mix it. that's probably what i would do. at least you would have a good rough that gives a indication of where you want the song to be. it is a big ask to do everything yourself. each stage of production requires a very different mindset. [if you are uncomfortable giving another person that amount of control, you could just snip out a 1 minute excerpt an give it to people who are interested in seeing what could be done with the piece. there are plenty of experienced old farts around with lots of time on their hands. you might find something with a coincident vision that suits the song, that you never thought of or is beyond your current skill level.]

 

@JTSD

When you search for mistakes you always find them.

But absence of mistakes is just... absence of mistakes. That means NOTHING. When you create absence of mistakes you create NOTHING.

Is it your real intention?

The art is always SOMETHING. Something you want to tell, express, demonstrate etc. It's not the absence of mistakes.

Try to search for right things. Start concentrating on them. If you see right things in what you do try to make them stronger or at least keep them. If you don't see them find them in you soul (mind, imagination) and then materialize them.

Your music is always yours. It's only you who know what is right.

P.S. I understand you ask for advices. And you've got bunch of them. But I suspect the "search for mistakes" is a part of your "workflow" (your way of working). Avoid it.

 

Last edited: Feb 24, 2023

sorry for the dupe: best to ignore. Old school advice: take care of your singer. Your mix is in pissing match with the vocals and the track is the loser. Make the low end groove and lose or take down anything that fights or does not support the Vox. This is how 40 does it with Drake and how Al Green and Led Zeppelin did it. Stuff does not change. Arraignment is good, leave it alone.

 

Last edited: Feb 24, 2023

I exactly know what you are talking about, it was a big issue for me as well for a long time. Having many vst's on a track/bus is not the problem itself, many producers having long chains in some cases, may it just be a workflow thing. Two thoughts from me about that issue.

1) You already adressed the problem of "pointless" throwing effects on something. In the creative process it's totally fine to do random things and see what you get. Even in the process of mixing there are scenarios where it is not a bad idea to behave this way. Think of automated fx/delays for example and all the little details that breathe life into your track. Beside that it is absolutely crucial being very intentional while mixing!

2) I know there are different ways and workflows in mixing, but take a minute and think about what is the logical order to mix your track. For example when mixing drums I'm doing steps in the same order most of the time: (1) levels/automation (2) eq'ing (3) compression (4) reverb. It doesnt't mean I would not throw in another comp on the snare any time in the process, if I think it is a good idea. But usually I'll wait until levels/eq's are somewhere near I want to my drums to sound, before a do drum bus compression. Otherwise I'd feel like I just doing volume/eq changes to work AGAINST what I had done with the bus comp. It's totally cool if you work the other way around. I mean there seem to be many people mixing into a limiter on their master chain, which is crazy for me, but may work for others. It is the same as above: be intentional! Learn what could be a logical order for you to get things sorted out.

 

Are you making sure to check the Pre-Fade Metering channel levels on everything? I know with synth plugins or samples, in Logic; I often check this and see very surprising prefade levels. So I toggle back and forth while working.

That example mistake is just one skipped step, and the easy fix is to simply use clip/region gain value to be starting out with a healthy waveform and your faders at/near unity before starting your mix. Whatever it could be, I think it is worth the time to figure it out because fixing things is a never ending thing.

 

+1 for this!
In Reaper it was a simple but effective workflow gamechanger to set up a little volume knob which appears on the audio clips (items called in reaper). Since then one of the first things when I'm going to mix, is to get those level right. Waveform looks better in terms of you see what you hear. All faders can be set to zero. Sometimes it even makes automation or compression unnecessary, when it is possible to quickly cut out regions or hits you can already see are too loud/quiet and quickly adjust those volume runaways.

 

Apart from all the technical advices – and "highpassing everything you can" is not a good one, btw, for many reasins I won't go into detail about (phase shift) – my main concern why I think this song is not working (in my opion) is: the vocals don't fit the music or vice versa. It doesn't sound like the singer is following the harmonic structure of the song while singing. This sounds like the instrumental was build around the vocal - like a remix. A remix, which doesn't really come together.

 

Solid point here, and I'll use it as a springboard to push my belief that even in Pop and similar genres you don't always need compression on everything, period—and if you do need it, don't fall into that trap of feeling like you *have to twist all the knobs to a significant degree; sometimes digging deep with a 1.3:1 or barely touching your signal with an 8:1 ratio is fine. though for the latter, if I feel I have enough character or have the sound where I want it already and the dynamics are the only issue, I'm a huge fan of lite limiters, like EBusLim or the original bx_limiter.
I think it's becoming better known, but I've been preaching on the fact that limiters aren't just mastering tools for *ages now.

 

years ago the terms compressor and limiter were somewhat interchangeable. the distinction was to some extent the speed of the circuit. solid state were usually faster and valve or optic coupled circuits were slower. if you could get your signals on and off tape, and through the desk and whatever else a few times without transients being seriously effected your were lucky.

the first things like the brickwall limiters these days, that i can remember, were either something like the L1 box and clipping the converters a few db going to master (because they were loudness psychos). you can hear that tizzy kind of sound on some of the masters. some of it doesnt necessarily sound bad, it was different.

cd got a bad rep for sounding bad at that time, a lot of the time it was not the fault of the medium. cd certainly sounded different than record or tape, but it was more a question of clarity than anything else. classical recordings were going DDD workflow earlier than other types of music. they sounded fine and you could have a greater dynamic range without disappearing into the noise floor, which was important to some engineers and audiophiles. you could get your impact through dynamics rather than sheer volume and other tricks.

 

I wasn't aware of about half of what's in your post. Nice share.