check out my demo

I love the song, but that goes without saying. I thought the rhythm guitars were a bit lacking in crispness and clarity however when compared to No Reply (which I appreciate has been properly mastered and so on). With the bass sounding louder than before, when the lead comes in and takes over the upper frequencies the rhythm is less able to cut through the mix.
 
I agree that the rhythms are a bit dull and if I was going to remix I might address this more. However I will say that the rhythms on no reply were a little thin and buzz saw imo......of course that was my fault too.
 
I would agree with what the others have said.

Is this mastered? It just seems to be a little dark. Maybe some eq on the entire mix to bring up the mids to high mids?

Other than that dude it sounds great. Drums are killer \m/

I love the song too
 
Great song, really. Reminds a bit of an old finnish band called Sancnity - man they rocked, and so does this. It sounds great, although the guitars need some work - seem a little to skinny for my taste, but they suit the music fine, so what the hell....., but i'm only saying this because it's in my nature to bitch about something :)

The drums sound really good to me
 
I'd say all these comments are quite fair. I've never been too pleased with my mastering abilities so I usually mix stuff and if it's for release then I send it to a mastering engineer. For me personally I feel like the "fresh ears" of a mastering guy are better than what I would do myself. Still, running it through a little EQ and inflator would probably help this mix. This is just the plain mix with some subtle limiting.
 
We can all do some "home mastering", but let's be honest -the things we can do don't really have too much in common with what "real" mastering engineers do. We'll just hit the limiters and compresssors, the volume increases - and hey "Doesn't this already sound sound a lot better...." - hell no, it just sounds a lot louder... Maybe it's just me, but I'm getting so tired of squashed tings (I still squash my own material - i'm too dumb too learn). I'm way off topic here.....
 
Asmus_Thomsen said:
We can all do some "home mastering", but let's be honest -the things we can do don't really have too much in common with what "real" mastering engineers do. We'll just hit the limiters and compresssors, the volume increases - and hey "Doesn't this already sound sound a lot better...." - hell no, it just sounds a lot louder... Maybe it's just me, but I'm getting so tired of squashed tings (I still squash my own material - i'm too dumb too learn). I'm way off topic here.....
Off topic or not I would tend to agree. Truthfully there are few pros (Andy being one) that are confident doing their own mastering so it's silly that a lot of home studio guys assume that they can do it with ease. Anyone who has ever spent a day at a mastering plant watching a guy spend 10 hours on an album knows that there is more to it than "crank 5k and squash the shit out of it" which is mostly what I hear from home studio self masters.....
Please, nobdoy take offense to this as this is just a general observation. Also, I realize that most home mastering is out of necessity. But, I think what we can learn from home mastering is how to improve our shit during the mix stage. E.X. I learned I should have paid more attention to the top end of my mix to keep things from sounding dull. I can cheat it by adding some highs now, but it would probably be better if I went back and added the highs to the instruments I want and in the amounts that I want on each of those instruments. Just a thought.