First time mixing in this style

[pauli]

thanks for listening, dave.

I'm still trying to get together a respectable reference library... as of now it's practically empty. I try to listen to examples in a similar genre via spotify (which of course is self limiting) to tune my ears to my monitoring and sometimes I'll download another's mix of the same track that I liked and do what I can to match. In this case, I looked into mid 90s R&B for inspiration... destiny's child, the fujees and lauryn hill in particular.

the common thread seemed to be a largely bone dry mix with gentle leveling in the vocals and not so gentle leveling elsewhere, so that's what I tried to emulate. to me, the toughest challenge and probably biggest area for improvement is the vocal balance and stereo image.

how about you? where do you see opportunity for improvement? what artists/tracks would you reference for this song?

thanks again for compelling me to think... it's very helpful!

hi dude,

what do you think could be improved here?
what material have you referenced your mix against?

cheers,
bigdave