Crownoise - Lights out!

[mikej]

The problem is here is the transients in the drums are smashed to bits .Give yourself more headroom when your mixing and you wont have to try so hard to get a better drum sound .

Takka is bang on the money here.

For me, as I continue to learn and really try to work at the mix balance, I am finding I am leaving a lot more headroom for the mix. It really does make things a lot easier if you give yourself a healthy margin to really be able to turn things up and down in the mix. You can always turn up your monitors a little more while mixing, and use a gain plugin in the first slot of the master bus to turn things up before the bus compressor, etc, if you need to.

These days with the modern mix engines doing this shouldn't affect the audio quality in any way. I feel it took me far too long to start to really understand this, but it's all part of the learning process I guess! You can really use the faders to get the relative balance right, then really dig in with the compression and reverb, etc to get the tone and impact of each element right.

I also struggle with getting guitar and vocal levels, etc right too. One thing that I think helps me is to play the mix all the way through with just drums, bass and lead vocal and try and get them all sitting right, and then to add in guitars, etc whilst listening to the drums - ensuring that not too much power is taken away from the drums by the guitars, but keeping the guitars are still present.

When listening to commercial tracks, I find the actual mix balance might not be quite what you initially perceive it to be as such when you really listen to the volume level difference between elements.

Aside from the balance (I think the guitars are perhaps a bit loud for me in the intro and could come back a touch, to give the vocal some room). The drums are perhaps getting a bit buried there too perhaps?

I do hear some pretty creative ideas going on in there throughout the mix, with the phaser on the guitar, etc. If you pull everything else back a bit, you will be able to get the drums REALLY slamming when they come in at the 55s mark, by contrast.

Hope that makes sense, and maybe helps a little as I struggle with this stuff too.

Should be a really good mix here with a little re-balance work I feel.

Cheers!