Hammer Down Mix and Faux Master by Doug

[dcp10200]

- the vocal fx right at the beginning of the vocals shouldn't be that loud. it's a fx type of thing, not an actual vocal part. should be more like a whisper
- you should try to make the verse smaller and quieter in comparison with the bridge/chorus. panning the guitars and synths at 75 or even 50 instead of 100% L/R will help. also bring down the volume so the verse feels smaller.
- the mix has too much highs on my headphones in the office (Presonus HD7), mostly coming from the overheads. it gets annoying the longer I was listening to your mix.

the biggest thing for me is the dynamics of your mix. there is way less energy/volume/wideness in the verse of the master compared with the bridge and chorus. the original mix has a build up with each part getting bigger and louder until the chorus comes in. For the verse I used panning to bring stuff closer together and simply made things quieter with volume automation and it worked very well. Right now your mix goes from 0 to 100 and stays there for the rest of the song. fix that and the overheads and you are very close to a perfect 10.

My final advice would be:

- Tame those overheads. I think they are too loud and a lower volume might be enough to get them in the sweet spot. Maybe you also have to make a cut at 2-3khz or 5khz - or use a de-esser
- In terms of balance, eq and compression there is not much to complain. now it's time to really mix this song and breathe some life into it.

Ps: This mix is way better than 3 stars. I don't understand why we need this kind of rating system, because people do updates to their initial mix but the rating can't be changed

Thanks Dirk, I did end up starting my mix over and used the KSE Holy Diver Cover as the basis of the new mix and also tried that trick Nolly uses for mixing snare and kick. The cymbals track had a fair bit of 2.5 kHz in them so I scooped that out and pushed C4 a little bit harder on the cymbals to tame the top end. I also did some automation on the whole mix to bring certain sections down and panned the guitars closer during the verses.

I'm not too worried about ratings, it wasn't only me that had 1 star on my mix when I posted and really it doesn't affect much on the site anyway. It just annoying when someone rates a bunch of mixes but doesn't bother to leave any feedback or a critique, the whole point of this site in the first place

Cheers,
Doug