I need some feedback on my amateur mixing.

[Woutahh]

Hey guys, im a home studio bedroom recorder and I need some feedback on my mix. Its an old song I wrote with an old band of mine. Since im recording from home ive used bias fx for guitars and bass and ezdrummer 2 for drums. I use cubase artist 9 as my daw. Im still a beginner at mixing and need some good tips.

 

[TripleM]

I thought the clean lead guitars in the quieter sections sounded nice. They played well off of each other.

The louder sections with the distorted guitar got a little cluttered. The distorted rhythm guitar dominated everything else. The lead-ish guitar line got covered up. The distorted guitar was a little bit on the brittle side. It had a digital/amp-sim tone to it. The timing in the pre-chorus seemed off here and there.

Bass sound was OK. A little cold/sterile sounding. Could use some low midrange.

Overall energy was very good on this.

 

[Woutahh]

Hey, thanks for your reply! I quad tracked the rhytm guitars here which I normally dont do and mightve been a mistake but hey thats how you learn. I figured that often I mix the guitars too loud, I think thats a common guitarist problem? but hearing it from someone else that its dominating everything helps. I always have trouble with getting a good bass tone, it often ends up very boomy in the sub and when I try to listen to it on cheap speakers with a subwoofer it blows everything up. What did you think about the drums though? I did some snare and kick eq and parallel compression and reverb.

 

[VomitHatSteve]

You probably need to back of the compressors a bit. The heavy parts are pumping

Plus, I assume you're adding vocals at some point? It's gonna be a lot harder to get vocals to sit coherently in a pre-squashed mix.

 

[Woutahh]

You probably need to back of the compressors a bit. The heavy parts are pumping

Plus, I assume you're adding vocals at some point? It's gonna be a lot harder to get vocals to sit coherently in a pre-squashed mix.

We had some lyrics written for this song but no good vocalist to record it yet so probably not, but ill keep that in mind for the future!

and yeah im still trying to learn how to use compressors, I kinda get the basics of how to set a compressor and how the attack and release works, but im unsure of when and where to use it.

 

[Stompanoogie]

Sing it yourself. My voice was destroyed by throat cancer and I still bash it out. I think the mix sounds great!

 

[VomitHatSteve]

im still trying to learn how to use compressors, I kinda get the basics of how to set a compressor and how the attack and release works, but im unsure of when and where to use it.

Attack and Release aren't going to be your major issues. The biggest factors are threshold and ratio. If the threshold is too low, and the ratio is too high, the volume will get squashed down too much in loud sections. (e.g. when a crash happens, the guitar will get much quieter). Attack and release just affect how quickly the change happens.