Drums are pretty thin...overall low end is shy. A track like this needs to be powerful sonically and to have some weight in the lower spectrum.

There's also a phasey kind of thing going on in the upper freq's, with it being most prevalent on the hi hat and cymbals.

I don't know if this is on your original 2 mix .wav file as well, or is an artifact caused by converting to lower res MP3 and uploading to youtube, or, a bit res or SR conversion that somehow went strange, but it makes it difficult to critique.

Also, please replace this video with just audio, using the "upload file" feature, located at the bottom-right of your post window. We don't need to see the video, especially since it's not your work.
We also want to avoid having people post youtube videos for the sole reason of "upping" their view/listen count. We are here to critique audio, not to promote your youtube account.

Using the upload file feature will also guarantee that you'll get the best reproduction of the original sonics of the file you choose to upload. It will support rates as high as 320kbps, so feel free to upload as high of a resolution as possible.
This will also hep us to help you more, so that we aren't having to listen through a down-sampled lower resolution, and having to deal with the artifacts that are so often common to lower resolution audio files.

I'll give you 24 hours to replace this with just the audio, I'll extend a courtesy to you and leave the youtube vid up until then - but after that, if you haven't removed it and replaced it with an audio file, the video will be deleted.

I look forward to hearing a higher quality version of this. :)

DonnyThompson, post: 429555, member: 46114 wrote: We also want to avoid having people post youtube videos for the sole reason of "upping" their view/listen count. We are here to critique audio, not to promote your youtube account.

That's the reason I didn't listen to it yet. Also, I don't really like when people ask for advice or comments on a final product which is already public and won't be changed. The category is fix this mix after all, is it ?
I just don't understand people doing this. Honnestly, I would keep my product hidden from the world, ask for advice, fix the things I can fix and then present it publicly. The old fart here just see somebody asking acknoledgement and more hits on his youtube account.

I'm tempted to start to write something like this :
' Hey this is great, it's the best I heard all year. I'm giving the link to all my friend to help promote you !!' note that I wouldn't even push play.

I know I have to stop posting that kind of response.

I think I wouldn't have this reaction if the OP said, 'hey I like RO and I'd like to participate more so I want to present myself. Here's a recent project I did so you can have an Idea of how my skills are and help me get better.

I have nothing against you DethoticA, it's just that the last post you did was in 2014 and was also about self-promotion.
http://recording.org/threads/my-first-album-for-cancer-charity.57153/

Ok my pointless bashing ends here, sorry for wasting the time of those who reads it. ;)

Hi Donny,
Many thanks for your review... I recorded that song at home using basic equipment and software + I'm pretty much a beginner in mixing so it's nice to know what areas I need to work on to get a better sound. I just wondered if you know any good resources that I could read to help me with mixing or some good (free?) software I could use to help me get more powerful drum sound without dwarfing other instruments?
P.S. I couldn't upload .wav file, so Mp3 is the best I can do here :)

pcrecord, post: 429558, member: 46460 wrote:

I have nothing against you DethoticA, it's just that the last post you did was in 2014 and was also about self-promotion.
http://recording.org/threads/my-first-album-for-cancer-charity.57153/

Ok my pointless bashing ends here, sorry for wasting the time of those who reads it. ;)

Well, to be honest, I wanted to kill two birds with one stone - Get your opinion on my song as well as promote my music among people who appreciate music. Same applies to my previous post, who knows, maybe the person who donated £50 read my post here and Cancer research got a little help towards their charity work.

DethoticA, post: 429560, member: 42124 wrote: Well, to be honest, I wanted to kill two birds with one stone - Get your opinion on my song as well as promote my music among people who appreciate music. Same applies to my previous post, who knows, maybe the person who donated £50 read my post here and Cancer research got a little help towards their charity work.

That's alright ! I guess I just prefer when people ask advice in the middle of the production when there's still ways to make things better. I like to here the befores and afters ;)

You've got a pretty good ear for balancing the parts - I can hear everything that's going on... the problem is that there's no foundation in the lower frequency range. Everything is very thin sounding.
Have you ever tried loading a similar sounding professional piece of music into your DAW, and used that as a mix reference? It can really help. I've been mixing for over thirty years now, and I still use pro tracks for reference purposes all the time.

It achieves a couple things - the first is that it gets your ears tuned to a certain caliber of production, through your own monitors, and when you start to get familiar with the way pro recordings sound coming through your own system, it helps a lot to get your own stuff sounding similar. The other thing it does, is that it lets you immediately hear the differences between what the pro recording has ( or doesn't have) and what yours lacks (or has too much of).

Are you mixing through monitors or headphones? The reason I'm asking, is because if you are using headphones, most consumer grade models are very hyped in the lower end ( and sometimes in the higher end too)...but in your case, my suspicion is that you were listening through cans, and thought you had plenty of low end already because that's what your headphones were telling you... so, you didn't add the required low end( or you even perhaps cut the low end) because your HP's were lying to you and telling your ears that you already had plenty.

The other possibility is that you are listening through cheap monitors in an untreated room, where you have all kinds of low end standing waves happening, and again, you're being lied to by your room's acoustics, which are skewed. Acoustic treatment can help with this... but you've got a long way to go before we cover that ground.

I ran part of your track through an EQ and made really quick adjustments just to see what you were missing - you really had nothing much there below around 300 Hz or so. I added some sub energy and some lower mid range... again, I have about 25 seconds in this...

[[url=http://[/URL]="http://recording.or…"]quick TEST.mp3[/]="http://recording.or…"]quick TEST.mp3[/]

[MEDIA=audio]http://recording.or…

[MEDIA=audio]https://recording.o…

Attached files quick TEST.mp3 (2.2 MB) 

Thanks for your help Donny. For mixing I do use headphones but they were advertised as "monitor" headphones, so in theory they should not have any music enhancement stuff built-in, however, I didn't spend a small fortune on them so do not know how good they are. I will follow your advise and compare Pro mixing music with mine, as I am a big fan of MetallicA, my ideal mix would sound like their "Black album".

Unless you paid over $500 (or thereabouts) for your headphones, then it's doubtful that you have actual "reference caliber" headphones...most headphones use that term " studio quality" very liberally.

Unless you get into a pair of high dollar reference headphones - Neumann makes a few models, as does Sennheiser - you're probably not going to be able to successfully mix through them, at least not without going through a lot of trial and error to determine where they are hyped, where they are shy, and by how much or how little.

http://www.sweetwater.com/store/detail/HD700

It's okay to listen to your mixes once in a while with headphones, maybe to check for imaging, amount of effects, etc., but I'm pretty sure that your obvious lack of low end is a direct result of the headphones you are using to mix with.
Truthfully, I don't know any professional mixing engineer who uses HP's to mix - other than to occasionally use them as a secondary playback check.

This is a piece of epic conception, however this is compromised by the tinny kick drum and the lack of a thick strong bass guitar - basically the bottom end needs to be beefed up. But a fantastically ambitious composition, a complicated brew of symphonically arranged parts that certainly works, although it comes close to sounding cluttered or bombastic, it just stays the right side of decency. As I said, the main fault is the weak bottom end. But this sort of thing is very difficult to mix, and it's a fine balance getting the bass end right, because too much and especially a crowded mix like this starts to lose clarity and sound cluttered and muddy. On my complicated multipart mixes like this one I tend to err on the bass light side to maintain clarity, but this kind of monumental music demand a sonic richness and full punch,,,,

Thanks for positive comments and suggestions Jathon, I will take the lack of low end (which I totaly agree with) into consideration when mixing my next song... which, by the way, is very like to be a tribute to Cliff Burton/30 Years Of Master Of Puppets - ORION !

Can I ask if you used a real bass on the track, or a virtual one?