150th post

[The_Metallurgist]

Another song I mixed. Tell me what you think about it. To me it seems like this band makes good songs but mixing them was a great challenge as they were poorly recorded. The song is Lookout Mountains. It has a nice and relaxed vibe to it.

HbGuitar has given some good advice.

i'd build on Hb's recommendations, having had a listen. this mix has some issues generally regarding it's spectral balance, and it's not only in the bass region? the treble is especially bright with a leaning towards the brittle side - i'm finding it fatiguing. brittleness is generally a result of upper harmonics, say, from the acoustic guitars not being EQ'd appropriately - technically, there isn't much going on with an acoustic beyond 6kHz and i'm certainly hearing a lot higher than this. the fact that the guitars are brittle and the cymbals and hihat are also brighter than they should be, is suggesting problems somewhere between your DAW and your ears.

i suspect it's your monitoring situation, which encompasses the grade/quality of monitoring you're using, the size of the room as well as it's furnishing, where the monitors are positioned relative to your ears and nearby reflective surfaces etc etc etc.

you should try to get yourself to a situation where you hear this mix and recognise how the treble should be fixed. if you can't hear it, you can't fix it. importantly, if you can't hear it now, you won't hear future mixes. i will also add as a side comment, the playback SPL is ---->CRITICAL<---- to effectively balancing bass and treble. if you want to know more, read up on the subject of Fletcher-Munson etc, and the ear's non-linear response. and if you don't wear hearing protection as a musician, it's likely you will have impaired hearing, which can also affect judgement in the treble range. excessive and prolonged exposure to loudness is a disease.

i can't give you all the answers, so you have some research to do. the difficult thing with research is that it's boring....or can be if you're not that way inclined. if you find research difficult, you will find advancing your mixing skills quite impossible.

i've discovered that spending time reading about mixing and acoustics is a faster way of progressing mixing skills than sitting at the DAW or messing around in forums.

oh, if your mixing environment is compromised, it also means that using reference material won't help much. depressing, eh?

DON'T USE MP3 OR OTHER LOSSY FORMAT FOR REFERENCING, so therefore it's not a good idea to use forum mixes either!!!!!! IF YOU LISTEN TO MP3, YOU WILL MIX TO MP3 QUALITY. if you don't know how bad lossy is, check out youtube, there's some good examples which illustrates the artifacts lossy produces.

hope this helps someone out there....