Too compressed

I think random Dude and I are thinking the same - you've sort of introduced things a bit too early. Loads of us now pay little attention to levels now as long as they're in the area between noise at the bottom and distortion at the top.
 
punchy and crunchy drums is fine - but just make them sound right - ignore the levels. compressing the kick and snare just makes it robotic and lacking in dynamics - punchy and crunchy become farty and dull instantly.
 
Uploading a new mix of Another Time. Does it sound better? Or just the same? Sounds somewhat the same to me on my phone but it sounds better to me on soundcloud this time. Not great, just better. Sounds like there's levels out of whack for certain parts on soundcloud. Crazy. I'd have thought if a mix sounded ok on a phone it'd sound ok on a laptop. But that doesn't seem to be the case. I should have linked to soundcloud so you could hear just how squashed and weak the 1st version's drums were. The 2nd version kind of survives the soundcloud playback better. Yet they sound similar on the phone.

I started noticing how much mud was in tracks that were supposed to be panned to the sides. Mud on those tracks where they are panned to but in the centre also where kick, bass and vocals etc are supposed to have room. So clearing the mud on side panned stuff might be a good idea.
 

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  • Another Time.mp3
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I listened to the new one, and thought it sounded good.
Then I played the old one again, and thought they were similar.
There doesn't seem to be a bass line in there, to fill the lower end.
 
Slouching Raymond said:
I listened to the new one, and thought it sounded good.
Then I played the old one again, and thought they were similar.
There doesn't seem to be a bass line in there, to fill the lower end.
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Crazy hey...I played it on one of those Bose bluetooth speaker things and the bass was gargantuan. You can't win. 🤠
 
Hey Matt,

Loving Caterpillar Man.

The snare might be a bit bright and I'd like to pull the drum bus down by around -3dB and maybe raise the vocal by +1dB and see how that sounds but I don't think the mix is too far off.

Cool song (y).
 
TalismanRich said:
You can't win all situations. I can play the same thing on 2 different sets of headphones and get a completely different sound. Plus, I don't really trust much of anything by Bose.
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Fair call. I've never had a bluetooth speaker thing so finally got one. The bass on it is, yeah like I said, massive. Apparently people love their bass. I'm a bass fan too...but this thing...insane, ha!
HumanPlanet said:
Hey Matt,

Loving Caterpillar Man.

The snare might be a bit bright and I'd like to pull the drum bus down by around -3dB and maybe raise the vocal by +1dB and see how that sounds but I don't think the mix is too far off.

Cool song (y).
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Hey HP, thanks. Soundcloud really did a number on the songs I put up lately especially on a laptop playback. I thought the mixes went well on my phone and on bluetooth earbud things...but on Soundcloud they just sounded like wimpy, weak, ill-balanced crap. So, back to the drawing board. I'll take on your advice and that of others. Not going to shoot for so much anymore I think in mixing. I'm just going to be a little more humble and appreciate that I'm not mixing studio tracked super session players and that I'm mixing stuff recorded in an 8x9ft spare room home recording situation.
 
So a couple things to address.

First off, arrangement is king. One thing that separates pro mixes from the rest is to have and apply an overall view of how a track should flow. IOW they are hip to the idea that nobody can hear every instrument at the same time so there has to be a plan to automate volumes, etc to feature one or at most two things at time while other things move into the background. It is one of the most effective and sometimes the most time consuming (to me) parts of mixing because the spotlight should be shifting many times to keep listener interest. If the vocal is in front the drums have to be in back, then the bass takes a bow, that kind of thing. Not huge moves necessarily, sometimes only 1/2 a db up or down is all that's needed but certainly a db or two is not excessive.

The other thing I wanted to address is parallel processing and busing. Another highly effective way to add presence and 'up front' feel to a sound is to use parallel compression and/or saturation bused with the original to create fullness and decrease peaks at the same time. This is especially true of drums and almost more important with sampled drums to give some excitement while flattening the peaks. Taking a send from the snare, adding low and high pass filtering, squashing, adding saturation, busing it with the original makes the snare average volume level go up while the peak level goes down and add needed 'excitement'. It really does depend on the genre, the part, the samples/audio and the song itself as to whether this kind of thing is needed of course.
 
TalismanRich said:
Listening to the two tracks, I think the problem is more that the snare level is high relative to the other drums. It really pops out. When I look at the track, all you see are the snare peaks, which seem to be 3-5dB above all the rest of the music. I have the snare in my MTPDK pulled down compared to the toms. Plus, they are very precise, each hit it basically the same dynamic.

View attachment 135407

Can EZD "humanize" like MTPDK? You might try to do that on the snare drum, in addition to pulling the level down some. Drummers will vary things to keep it interesting, otherwise it can sound too much like a metronome.
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Great way to show beginners how they can see the problem!
 
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