Mix & Master of Simple Machine - 'Ingloria' - Impressive Sounds Studio

[Quathamer]

Here is my Mix and Master of the song: Simple Machine - 'Ingloria'

Please be so kind as to leave a review about my work, whether good or bad; I do this for fun mainly, so this helps me to continue improving!

Hey Daniel, 

I can tell you were really aiming for a warm and full mix here. And this is a harder session to mix - that's for sure. Unfortunately, there are a lot of issues that stand out with your mix. I'll make two more noticable observations, and we can keep chatting if you want to go into more ways you can improve the mix (or just mixing in general).

Compression - the attack on the vocal is distractingly slow. What's happening is the compressor is not catching the vocal quickly enough, and you're getting stabs of vocal for the first syllable, and then it pulls back and goes quiet, getting buried by everything else that's going on. There are a lot of videos out there, especially on youtube, to help manage vocal compression so that your vocal is front and centre - I suggest searching on youtube for "vocal chain" and seeing what you like. I will say the tone (balance of the frequencies) you have on the vocal, in general, is pretty balanced. 
Messy mix - I don't know what's going on here. After the guitars come in (around 2 min in) and in the last chorus, everything seems like one big mess. It's like everything is really compressed and is fighting to be heard. As a result, there's no separation between the elements. I would start by releasing some of the compression you have going on, or doing some more critical EQ of your instruments.

I hope this helps mate. I can tell you're putting a lot of time and thought into this mix. Maybe you're overcomplicating it?

Thanks man!  I actually used DynaRide2 on the Vocals instead of compression - I probably need to adjust the attack and release a bit more...  I did have to use a lot of automation on the vocals but can hear what you are talking about.  I don't think I used any compression on the final mix, but since I did leave all the dynamics in there, I had to use a limiter on the output - mastering at 18-LUFS avoids this and sounds a lot more powerful and separated when you turn up the volume knob on your amplifier  So it's probably the limiter doing this.  I'll check everything and render out what I would personally listen to.  I generally mix things until I get the chills but it's that final process to get it to streaming standards that kinda sucks sometimes.

Ah, yeah that's what is doing it. 
As a basic rule, don't let your limiter do your mixing for you (it should only be catching peaks from snare/kick hits). There are no shortcuts to mixing, and the more effort you put into controlling all the different elements in the mix, the better chance you'll have at putting out a great mix.