Japan Song Mix - Kr4gon

[Kr4gon]

Hi! My attempt at mixing the song .
Had a lot of fun!

[FytaKyte]

A good balance of the mix elements - the levels are working well together. Dynamically, it seems well controlled.

Overall, the mix sounds a little... well... unexciting ....a little bit like a "faders up" mix without much in the way of polish. Not necessarily a really bad thing - a mastering engineer could probably put some nice polish on the mix. Nevertheless, whilst I can't hear much in the way of any undesirable muddy or boxy frequencies building up in the mix, I think it would really do your mix a service to look into doing some judicious boosting on some elements. Often that means getting some concentration of power into the mids & upper mids, while downplaying the prominence of the muddy & boxy areas in the low mids.

One element of the mix that does need more reductive eq is the guitars - they will appear to brighten up considerably if you high pass them more aggressively.

If the overheads came up in level a tad, it might brighten up the mix somewhat & make it a little more exciting.

A couple of other points: (these may be related)

What happened around 1:52? The drums disappear for a bit - was that deliberate?

During the buildup from 2:45 - 2:48 the light snare drum rolls have missed hits - probably an indication that the gate on the snare drum is excluding the lower level hits - automating the gate threshold during those parts remedy the issue.

Overall, the mix shows real promise - a bit more eq finesse is definitely in order though.

[Kr4gon]

Wow, it's been a long time since I've posted this but thank you for your reply! I definitely agree with the points you've made, very constructive criticism.
One of my problems while mixing is that I can get quite technical and correct all the bad stuff but usually that ends up in an uninteresting and not very exiting mix.
I guess I need to move with the music more, like playing an instrument.