Hi, welcome to the forum and congrats on your first mix!
From a balance point of view, some elements work really well e.g. guitars in general, bass, kick and vox all seem to compliment each-other. Well done on that as these are crucial elements of mix building.
Elements that seem not quite so balanced are the piano levels being a bit hot, especially in the bridge and the snare tone and level which is very thin, papery and low.
The biggest problem you have are your levels......A master level of -6.5 LUFS and a dynamic range of only 5. That's 5-6 LUFS louder than spotify/apple music streams at so you're leaving 6dB of dynamic range in the tank for no good reason...
my biggest suggestions for you are;
1. Educate yourself on how to gain stage your individual tracks in your DAW so that your peak mix buss levels are around -5dBFS MAX with your RMS levels around -15dBFS. You can then boost your mix buss level after you have finished your mix.
2. How/when and IF to use compression.
3. How to set final master levels including how to use a LIMITER properly. I'd recommend levels of around -12dBFS RMS/-12 LUFS....maybe up to -10 for some genres.
4. Get to grips with the units of measurement e.g. dBFS, dBVU, LUFS, RMS. They are all different and engineers bandy them about alot (like i have
).
All this is readily available online but a range of answers exist (Mike's book "Mixing Secrets" is excellent). Good luck.
Hope this helps
Cheers, Simon
From a balance point of view, some elements work really well e.g. guitars in general, bass, kick and vox all seem to compliment each-other. Well done on that as these are crucial elements of mix building.
Elements that seem not quite so balanced are the piano levels being a bit hot, especially in the bridge and the snare tone and level which is very thin, papery and low.
The biggest problem you have are your levels......A master level of -6.5 LUFS and a dynamic range of only 5. That's 5-6 LUFS louder than spotify/apple music streams at so you're leaving 6dB of dynamic range in the tank for no good reason...
my biggest suggestions for you are;
1. Educate yourself on how to gain stage your individual tracks in your DAW so that your peak mix buss levels are around -5dBFS MAX with your RMS levels around -15dBFS. You can then boost your mix buss level after you have finished your mix.
2. How/when and IF to use compression.
3. How to set final master levels including how to use a LIMITER properly. I'd recommend levels of around -12dBFS RMS/-12 LUFS....maybe up to -10 for some genres.
4. Get to grips with the units of measurement e.g. dBFS, dBVU, LUFS, RMS. They are all different and engineers bandy them about alot (like i have
).All this is readily available online but a range of answers exist (Mike's book "Mixing Secrets" is excellent). Good luck.
Hope this helps
Cheers, Simon
Be fierce in your encouragement, kind in your criticism and try and remember that the art of a good critique is not to make someone else's mix sound like yours...but to help the mixer realize their own vision.
https://soundcloud.com/hbguitar
https://soundcloud.com/hbguitar