Help Improve a Beginner's Mix

[Tamarocker88]

Hey everyone,

I've been getting some advice from the production threads on this track lately and now I feel like I can post it on here for some help with improvement.

Please make suggestions for fixing things if you're going to point out problems.

www.soundclick.com/ZacharyCruz

The song is the first track, "Pokemetal(Remixed)"

Thanks!

 

[oroinvictus]

Drums are too loud and dry. Reverb could help. Compress that kick, or use a new sample, it sounds like a tiny slap. The track needs tighter playing in some parts/

 

[Krank]

Lose the intro.

 

[Tamarocker88]

Drums are too loud and dry. Reverb could help. Compress that kick, or use a new sample, it sounds like a tiny slap. The track needs tighter playing in some parts/

I'll try to either push the drums overall to the back a little, or maybe make the guitars sit a little more prominent in the mix so that the drums aren't overbearing.

The bass drum is currently compressed, but I'll take a whack at compressing it further. There is reverb on the snare drum for part of the song. I felt the reverb was too much to have it on the track the entire time, so I automated it for a couple sections in the song.

Yes, tighter playing is a must, but this isn't a final recording by any means. This was a sub-half-assed recording taken with one take for each track just so I could try to get the gist of how to mix things for the future when I do want to take serious recordings of my band.

 

[Tamarocker88]

Lose the intro.

Reasoning?

 

[Moonlight_Seeker]

Me thinks the cymbals are too bright, other than that, not bad. But I can hear weird noises between "guitar sounds" at around 2:30.

 

[Tamarocker88]

Me thinks the cymbals are too bright, other than that, not bad. But I can hear weird noises between "guitar sounds" at around 2:30.

Yeah, potentially the cymbals are too bright. It could always be due to the types of cymbals I use. Like for my hi-hats I'm using 13" Sabian AAX-Fusion. My crashes are a 16" Sabian Pro-Sonix and an 18" Zildjian ZBT. My 2 main chinese cymbals are an 18" Zildjian ZBT and an 18" Sabian AAX Dark Chinese.

As for the guitar noises, could you explain what you mean? When I read your comment, my mind immediately thought about the segment at 1:30 where everything cuts out beside the rhythm guitars, because I boosted their volume levels in that section for them to stand out and didn't yet automate it to lower after the palm mutes to hide the hiss of the single coil pickups.

 

[JakeAC5253]

Bottom end of mix is nonexistent. I'm not hearing a kick at all? Bass guitar? The guitars sound decent enough for being a sim, but the playing could have been tighter at parts. Cymbals are wayyy louder than anything else in the mix. Lose or shorten that intro. It went on for about 5 seconds too long, I almost skipped to the next song.

 

[Tamarocker88]

Bottom end of mix is nonexistent. I'm not hearing a kick at all? Bass guitar? The guitars sound decent enough for being a sim, but the playing could have been tighter at parts. Cymbals are wayyy louder than anything else in the mix. Lose or shorten that intro. It went on for about 5 seconds too long, I almost skipped to the next song.

I think saying the low end is nonexistent is an exaggeration. My mix had way too much low end earlier, so I suppressed the low end and boosted the 1-6kHz range with a wide boost at 3kHz. Even in the spectral analyzer on my master bus, there's more low end than the 1-6kHz range.

Sure I cut the low end of the bass drum a little too much and am going to boost it a bit, but the bass guitar has been boosted in the low range. I'm also in the process of lowering the overheads so that the cymbals are more in the back, though I hate the typical sound of some recordings where the cymbals sound very distant. I have a wide variety of cymbals and want them to be heard.

Also, I've already stated that the playing can obviously be tighter at parts.