Duty & Memories - Mix & Master

[et_the_extraterrestrial]

Hey !

I'll be honest cause we're all here to practice and make progress. In my opinion, you should restart from scratch. Your mix is very unbalanced. Drums are so much behind everything else and they sound lofi. Guitars have tons of mids and hide a lot of instruments.

So first things first : try to make a solid static mix with nothing but your volume faders and pan. Loop the last chorus, and spend like 10 to 30 minutes to make a balanced static mix.
Then use some reference track(s) to adjust your static mix. In some cases the drums will be louder, sometimes it's gonna be the guitars. How the vocals are placed ? In front ? Just in front the band ? What about the bass ? Is it above or below the kick ? Etc...

Then you can use the top down technique : add some little EQ in your master bus, trying to match the overall tone of your reference song. Nothing big here, just 1 or 2 dB cut/boost max to make the tone sound better. Then compress a little bit to bring some glue, but same as before, just a little bit, 1-2 dB max.

Now compare with and without your plugins on the master bus. Is it better ? If yes, keep going...

One last thing: use a limiter when mixing, so you will know how your mix will react when mastering is in.

Keep practicing ! And if you use Logic as your DAW, you can contact me if you want me to show you some tricks

Cheers
Florian

Hey, thanks for the feedback. I'll admit I don't do the static mix (although I should). I do however use master bus compression and eq within the parameters you mentioned. But, I found the main culprit of my unbalanced mixes. It was my monitors. The mix and master sounded great. Even on my phone and some other places. As soon as I plugged in the other pair...Bam! I heard it immediately. I probably won't re-do this song, but for future mixes, I will stick with these monitors and start doing static mixes. Thank you for your advice.

P.S. I use Studio One v3 Professional