Professional mix engineer; wanted to take a crack at one of these "mixing challenges"

[ikura]

The biggest tip for room in a mix is panning and detailed balancing. Mixes nowadays have so much automation.. From faded levels all the way to delay Fx. Sometimes when I really want to detail the song I use a lot of automation. Turn things down and half a second later turn them up etc.
panning is very important because a mono like mix will always give you problems. The instruments for the most part will drown each other out.

So my biggest tip is "don't be afraid to hard pan something. Sometimes I would hard pan a guitar or a vocal just to get it out of the way. If ultimately it doesn't sound right I later place it somewhere else but in the mean time that left me more room and space to identify other stuff in the mix.

As for the glued together mix.. For example in drums.. I run all tracks to a bus and I use a very small ratio of compression. Slow stack and slow release.. A compresor will ALWAYS glue a group of tracks together or at the very least it gives you that impression. I use it all the time on drums and for back vocals for example.

Hope this helps. Saludos!

thank you very much!! I’ll try out what you suggested

[iamdann5]

I can really hear the difference when I hear new mixers and experienced mixers after I listen to your mix. Really good mix! one thing, I would let the vocals shine a bit more, pushing the levels up a bit.

[mattie]

Here's my take on the mix.

Immediately I was blown away by the loudness, in a good way! Everything was nice and fat, the bass was well rounded and everything was just really punchy.

But, as the song progressed I noticed that everything was really pumping (almost ducking); especially the kick and bass. Things just seem over compressed. This may be because of the mastering; but things are just a little too much for this genre IMHO.

The vocals are great, nicely EQ'd