First Mix Tell me what im doing wrong

[Dubickisbro]

Hey guys I just finished making my first Mix and I'd like to get some feedback on what I am doing right and what I am doing wrong.
the mix was done with a Line 6 tone port UX8 onto acoustica mixcraft 6. the electric guitar was my epiphone les paul and the acoustic guitar was my Guild GAD-50
Mixed with audio technica M-20 studio headphones
here's the final mix



Silent Hill 2 Promise Guitar Cover.mp3



to make this mix I started with a midi drums track made using ezDrummer. I was going for a "roomy" sound but didn't want it to be too roomy so I just increased the room mic a bit. while the dynamics were made to be completely random except for the heavy fills witch were made to be as hard as possible. I also added a decent amount of reverb and some heavy compression with a fast attack and gave is a slight eq curve.


Drums.png



Next track down is the bass, a relatively simple bass track recorded by me creating the sound in pod farm, I tried to make it sound clean but it eventually ended up pretty muddy, I added some compression and an eq curve that pretty much just cuts off the high end.


Bass.png



Then a midi simulated Hammond B3 with no effects added


B3.png



Under that is an acoustic guitar playing simple cords recorded with a sure SM57. The track is made up of 2 guitars panned hard left and hard right with added Eq compression and reverb.


Acoustic.png


next is a cleanish rhythm guitar with a little bit of choirs created in pod farm. with Eq reverb and compression added. the Eq was used to cut off all the unneeded high and low end as well as shape the sound


Rthm.png


then my first lead made in pod farm with Eq, reverb and compression added.


Lead.png


next is the heavy rhythm guitar used for the heavy part of the song. is is made of 2 tracks panned hard left and hard right with added Eq and compression with no added reverb


HeavyRthm.png

next is the group for the three part lead the first to harmonizing parts are panned slightly left and slightly right while the echoing track is centered the 3 tracks have compression while the individual tracks have their own Eq.


Leads.png


and for mastering I used izotope ozone 5, starting with an eq I made a high pass filter to cut off the low end and a high shelf to cut off the high end with a dip arround 430hz pretty much just cause.


Master eq.png

im not gonna describe what I did for compression because im not completely sure what it was but I though it sounded good. so here's some pics


Comp1.png

Comp2.png

Comp3.png

Comp4.png

some reverb, pretty much just a preset with the wet mix set to 9.5%


Reverb.png

Not completely sure how stereo imaging works but I kinda know what it does so I left the bass mono and incurred the mid range a bit.


Imaging.png

and I'm completely clueless on the harmonic exciter so I didn't use that at all, I also decided not to use a post Eq.

as for volume maximizer I just went to the loudest part of the song and turned it up as much as I could before the threshold of 0db was reached
and left all the other settings how they were


Maxamizer.png

[jimmys69]

First thing I noticed, is the inconsistency of the snare volume. That is not a typical thing with EZD. Did you play with a controller?

And holy hell, talk about posting screenshots!

[Dubickisbro]

No the dynamics for the drums were somthing i threw together at the last minute, they were completly random, i realy should go back and fix that

[AscendRecording]

The cymbal hits in the very intro sound a little too strong, I'd bring the velocity of those hits down a little bit

Also around 1 minute into the song, everything starts to get really blurry, try cleaning up the low end a little bit more through EQ. Bring the solo down in volume just a bit.
Make the acoustic guitar's a TINY bit brighter.

Jeff

[Mr Clean]

Now that is a detailed post!

The most popular word in that post is Compression. Do you really need all that Compression? There are 3 times or more effects than there is instruments. Wow!

First thing is forget Ozone. Forget Mastering for now, get the mix right first.

Don't mix with headphones if you have monitors.

[Joshua Bowers]

its all about the mix, you give a solid mix to a master' and his job is almost done.

[AscendRecording]

One thing I recommend is getting in the habit of routing the drums out of EZDrummer into seperate channels into your DAW, that way you can process them individually. Im not sure if Mix craft has the capability for that, I don't use it myself.

I would try to bring the high pass on the guitars up a bit, and it also looks like you compressed them. Distorted guitars are basically already HEAVILY compressed. You won't really get much out of trying to compressing distorted guitars, compressors aren't fast enough for it. Instead try out a limiter, it just reacts much quicker than a compressor does and it'll help control your peaks a little better on those guitars.