Long Way Home

[mixolydian]

You mean that there is a problem about balance, compressor or something else?

He's talking about compression. You've compressed everything (i.e. individual tracks and/or the master track) too much aka "squashed" everything.

It's very difficult to hear compression when you're just starting out - it took me years, and I'm still trying to get a handle on it. If you take a listen to his mix, it's much airer, with a greater sense of space than yours, which is much more dense, solid, in-your-face. The latter is fine for certain styles (e.g. rap, punk, metal), but not this. Acoustic music needs to have a lighter touch, a greater sense of space and subtlety, especially this one (listen to the lyrics).

One way to think about compression is to imagine the song playing inside a box. It's playing, you can hear all the instruments, it's balanced nicely. But, if you take one of those industrial garbage compacters and squash the box down, there'll be far less space inside the box for the song to play in, everything's squashed together, all the tracks are bumping up against each other, it's all much denser and crowded. That's what compression sounds like.

Thank you very much for the explanation. I think I'm gonna have to work harder. It seems that it will take some time to get the right result because I do it with ear-stuff.