no problem! i'm happy to help when i can.

I think this sounds tight! Has a bit of a drum and bass-y feel with the kick and snare pattern.

It's not what I would call "professionally loud" - you're coming in close to 0 dB but it looks like you paused there. It's normalized but not mastered, if that makes sense.

My biggest feedback would be that the mix itself is fairly quiet - the bass is loud and the arpeggio is loud, but everything else feels like it's sitting underneath them. I also feel like some of the sections don't transition as well as they could, particularly when you enter the first breakdown at about a minute twenty seven, and when you transition to the outro.

Please keep going with this, and get you a fast-talking British rapper to spit some real truth talking flows over this beat! Can't wait to hear the finished product.

Sounds like you're making progress! Love the changes you've started to make to the chords, and the little extra notes add a LOT of character. Build snare sounds crisp, though it's unfortunately louder than your main snare so it still feels a bit too present.

I'm worried that there's a bit too much reverb on the synths in the build, as it feels very washed out. Mixwise, there's really just a bit too much going on. Here's a way to approach your mix that might be useful:

Think of the mixdown like an empty glass cup. The frequencies in your mixdown are the water. The more frequencies you add, either through adding a new sound or through processing a sound you already have, the closer that cup gets to filling up. Once you get to the top, anything extra will just spill over and be lost in the mix - our ears have trouble deciding what to focus on and it ends up sounding bad, or at least not as good as it could be. So you want to try and cut out as many excess and unnecessary frequencies as possible. Sometimes, this is as simple as turning down the gain on a particular sound. Sometimes, it's adding an EQ and removing as much as possible without compromising the integrity of the sound. Sometimes, it's panning the sounds so that you can get more room to fill your cup.

If you have trouble mixing as you add sounds or trying to mix everything against some set point like -6 dB of headroom or whatever, try a total reset mix - save a new version of your project, reset all the pan pots, disable any processing that isn't part of the sound design, and pull all the faders down to -Inf. Bring the most important element of your mix (in dance music, this almost always tends to be the kick) to your reference point of 0 dB or -6 dB or -12 dB or whatever you want it to be, then either work upwards in frequency or work in order of sonic importance and raise the volume faders/move the pan pots until you get as good a mix as possible JUST from the volume and panning.

If you compare that with your current mix, you might find that certain things are nowhere near as loud as they were before, and hopefully your mix will sound much clearer and open, even before processing. Then it's just a matter of EQing and Compressing (but only as necessary) and voila!

Keep going! Can't wait to hear the finished product.

I think melodically, this is a gorgeous song! Your sense of melody and harmony are really developed. I think your lead synth and all the little accent sounds are great. The level balance of your sounds are actually fine, so you don't have to worry about that with your mix - the issue is the quality of your sounds and the number of sounds that are happening.

There are a number of distinct melodic ideas happening at the same time (not even counting the different rhythms in your percussion), and it's hard for my ears to figure out what to pay attention to - I have a feeling that the arpeggio is the focal element, so you should try and simplify everything else to just live around that and save all the other ideas for accents or bridges or other songs!

Certain sounds also just sort of stuck out like a sore thumb - your hi hat and snare really caught my attention. The snare sounds like it's being distorted or bit crushed and doesn't fit in the mix, and there is an extremely sharp and piercing high end to that hi hat that needs to be tamed (take an EQ, boost the volume a single node with a high Q and sweep around until you hear that super painful ringing in the high end - it'll resonate really strongly and you can just pull back on that or cut it alltogether).

I would also suggest taking some time to study the song structures of other artists that you enjoy listening to - pull them into your DAW and use markers to divide up each section, then use empty MIDI clips to try and mark off each sound as it enters and leaves. Try to figure out how the song flows, and how many sounds are playing in each section. See if you can apply that to your own production!


And with loudness/mastering, it's really just a matter of mixing your song well (it doesn't matter if you're leaving .5 dB of headroom or 3 dB or 6 dB or 12 dB - as long as you aren't clipping into your master, you're fine) and then putting a limiter on your master and either decreasing the threshold or increasing the input gain until it sounds as loud as possible without sounding like it's changing the song itself (i.e. distortion). There are certain tricks you can do to nudge it louder and louder each time, but at its core there's no real secret.

As long as you're actively comparing the song you're working on to professional tracks before you finish your song instead of just comparing your finished work with the finished works of others, you'll get there.

Can't wait to hear your next track!

Quote from: Mussar on September 01, 2016, 07:16:18 pm

The argument in favor of mixing as you go is that you save time - you're going to be mixing it anyways, so why not do it now?

The argument in favor of mixing at the end is that you allow yourself hyperfocus - instead of dividing your attention between composing and arranging and mixing and orchestrating, you're isolating the tasks and devoting all your mental energy to perfecting the mix.

I know tons of producers in multiple genres who mix as they go, and I know just as many who divide up their sessions into different projects based on what stage they're at in the songwriting process. All of them write amazing sounding music, and all of them have the same thing in common:

They always go back and change things later. So why stress that much over which is the proper way to mix? You're not going to keep the mix you had during your first go at least 75% of the time if not 99% of the time. Instead, try to figure out the workflow that gets you the best mix possible for your personal production style!


I personally switch between both styles, mostly based on my whim at the moment. Sometimes I just mix as I add elements or as I feel that elements are out of place, and sometimes I'll save a whole new project session, pull all the faders down to -Inf, and try to do a fresh mix. Hell, sometimes I'll save a "Composition Mix" and a "Fresh Mix" just so I can compare and see which I like better! The important thing is that you're constantly trying to do better and you're constantly referencing other songs (and referencing on as many listening devices and in as many environments as possible).

Interesting, I think i'll stick to mixing on the go. it's hard to imagine people not mixing on the go and just laying down the track raw and straight. I mean the reason I do EQ, panning, and volume automation on the go is because otherwise the song sounds like trash midway. Say I have a nice drum loop for 8 bars, then a bassline hops in, that suddenly drowns out the kick. I hear it instantly.

I can't simply ignore it and keep working on my beat because to me that sounds off already. So i'll start doing some volume automation, here and there. EQing to remove muddyness and have clarity with all frequencies to breath. Also gives that headroom for my master (further down the line). By the end of it I have a decently mixed track, and then I assume would be the time to finetune that perhaps, I panned this kick to much at this part of the track, or the volume is too high here. Or I didn't EQ something enough, so I add a bit more.

At least that's the logic I see behind it, I see the reason why for live recording it works fine to separate the two, it's hard to imagine an EDM producer not do it on the fly as you can hear the imperfections and sounds out of balance if you leave all your gains at the same place in the bus and if you never slash any frequencies.

 I understand where you're coming from! However, there are some very real studies that have suggested task-switching reduces our overall focus and impedes our ability to complete work. obviously if the mixing issue is a distraction that's preventing you from completing work you should fix it, but you should try to focus on the task at hand instead of following your whims or tackling whatever is the most attention grabbing element at that moment.

Even if you're not dealing with live recorded audio, the way you approach a collection of sounds is much different than the way you approach a group of individual sounds. You might find that your lead line becomes the focus of your song, when it might otherwise get pushed into the background because of where it came in the production process.

It's helpful to get new perspectives on your music in any way possible - and looking at the song in an entirely new project, bounced down to audio, is a great way to do that! Even my old Ableton instructor, who mixes his songs as he goes, bounces his files down to a stem session for a final mixdown (and often again to a pre master for a dedicated mastering session).

All in all, as long as you like the end result, you do what you think is best. How you get there is irrelevant.

Well, if either of you would like help with learning how to mix in-the-box I would be happy to work with you and see if I can give some direct feedback.

And that's fine! But "Composition comes first" is a distinctly different statement from "Mixing isn't important." We should be encouraging people to focus, not discouraging people from learning.