Progress Report

I

IHateHomeRecording

Member
Here to report on my progress with home recording. Things have improved slightly. Please find the attached file below. It is a song intro. I have completely written the song, but need to finish recording. The drum parts are what I have been working on, they are not finished yet. Please tell me what you think of the mix. If anyone wants the stems to give a try mixing it yourself and seeing if you can clean it up a bit, please feel free to ask. I would love to see what a better engineer could do with it.

Also, I was wondering why it only seems to sound good on my PC speakers and monitors, but sounds really bad on my cell phone. I would describe it as shrill, harsh, fizzy, low-quality, etc. coming through my phone speakers. Granted, my phone is a cheap dollar store smart phone which I'm temporarily using, but other songs from other artists sound good on it, so it strange why mine doesn't. Please help me here, does that have to do with mastering? Mixing? I have no clue.
 

Attachments

  • _m_(4).mp3
    995.3 KB
Did not have the time to listen to your song yet, but cheap smartphone speakers have a focus on the high frequencies. Could be that these frequencies are not so dominant on your PC speakers during mixing.
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And yes, it is one of the tasks of mastering to make audio sound good on various speaker systems, not only your home studio. Try to identify what is missing/too much when listening to your mix on the phone speakers and try to adjust accordingly.


EDIT:
After listening I have to say it is not bad at all. I'd reduce the snare drum a bit though.
 
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IHateHomeRecording said:
Also the guitars sound bad on the phone. Artificial. They don't sound like this on the PC.

I reiterate my username
Click to expand...
The guitars don't sound bad to me - actually the recording sounds good - if not bass shy (is there any bass on the track?) - anyway the trick to mixing for the iPhone is too pay heavy attention to all of the midrange - keep going between earbuds (The Apple ones included with the iPhone) and your speakers - don't hate it or you will never get the mix you want - eventually you will get to the place where you understand how to mix both - to sound great on both - did I say it's all about the midrange?
 
How are you supposed to do that when your DAW does not let the audio outside of the DAW? It will only play to what is plugged up to the interface, i.e. my monitors

Edit: Yes there is bass. I can hear it. I can turn it up a bit
 
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I think we might be moving towards something here - bass? what bass? we are all hearing (or not hearing to be accurate) problems with the mix, and I bet it's down to your monitoring system. To me in the studio and now back here on my Shure IEMs is that all the power is in the midband guitar range - it's a guitar track, with some drums, and a bass doing something low down somewhere. I just did an A/B vs a similar genre track and the bass and kick are so much more prominent tonally than yours - If you have an app on your phone like decibelX play your track and any commercial track you have of similar style at the same volume and look at the display and compare what is going down at the bottom. The kick and bass should give your guitar support, and they're not doing this. It could be your speakers are just very bass prominent, so you've pulled them back in the mix so we've totally lost them. The guitar, by the way is fine - but of course it's always been fine.
 
Ok so all I did was lower the snare a bit a exported it again. Why all the sudden does the guitar sound different, and the overall track sounds more muffled and distant? See, this is the shit that really infuriates me. Shit just having a mind of its own, and not know what in God's name I did wrong to make it change. I've done nothing to the guitars, but now they sound distant and muffled. Why? oh why?
 
_m_(5) is the before and _m_(10) is the after. The latter sounds more distant and muffled to me. Guitars sound worse, and I did nothing to them.
 

Attachments

  • _m_(5).mp3
    995.3 KB
  • _m_(10).mp3
    995.3 KB
This shit fucking pisses me off. Now I have no idea what settings I had on it when I exported that sample, The stupid thing doesn't remember the history before your shut down the program and turned you computer off for the night so I can't revert back to that setting. Shit!
 
Listen to it at low volumes. When you turn it down low, it doesnt sound right. It sounds very similar to the other recording.

What are you doing different, to try to affect it in a new way, for this recording?
 
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