My Mixdown of Japan Song

[McJohnson]

Hi,

here's my Mixdown of this very nice song. Hope you like it. Comments are welcome!

Best
McJohnson

[FytaKyte]

I see you've gone for a pretty aggressive sound on this one - on some levels it works - gives a good impression of power & punch. A good overall spread of frequencies from top to bottom as well.

I'm finding there is an abrasive edge to the top end of the mix that means it gets a bit fatiguing to listen to in the long term. Particularly the tonality of the guitar in the left channel could be softened a bit, which would improve things IMO.

With the top end of the mix crunching like that, I'm suspecting you may be pushing the master limiter just a tad too hard. I've got nothing against getting a loud mix, but I've found that often you need to use more than one stage of limiting to achieve commercial levels of loudness... It's the old adage of two units working less being superior to one working twice as hard.

There is some muddiness in the overall ambiance of the mix - you could try high passing your reverbs to downplay that & get some more overall clarity.

During the ending section of the song, it all gets a little bit messy & crunched - the kick kind of disappears under the weight of all the other elements - sometimes you need to automate or even mult tracks to change their fundamental sound so that more tracks can fit & retain clarity in the busier sections of the song - that might be the solution here.

Overall, good balances though.