Ideas on how to improve my mix/mastering

I would say this to anyone with the same question : to get better at mixing and mastering, you need to get better tracking skills and use the right tools for the job.
Use cleaner samples, and avoid anything that produce noise. Also A/B with commercial song of the same style all the time.

Pro sound starts with pro performances and pro captures. Good players, good mics and mic technique, and good preamps and converters ... and you're well over 90% there.

An excellent mix is easy to master. Don't worry about the master, worry about the mix.

audiokid

After listening to your track further, I'm afraid that I'm gonna have to delete your song, as your lyrical content violates our TOS.

That being said, I'm willing to give you a few hints...

Knowing what you are doing with the tools you have available is very important. It's not enough to just throw an EQ, compressor or a limiter on a mix, push it as loud as you can and then call it "mastered", or for that matter, even mixed.

Truthfully, content issue aside, I couldn't get past listening to the first 30 seconds of your track, because the vocals were so harsh and so painful to listen to. You have serious amounts of sibilance occurring... maybe as the result of a cheap mic and/or preamp, or maybe because you've added frequencies to the vocals that are in the "pain range" ... 3k - 5k. And the reverb(s)? are emphasizing those harsh frequencies, too.

You've also got the mix so swamped with effects that there isn't any definition... no "weight", no "body". You've got reverbs crashing into each other, causing serious phasing issues.

Or, maybe because you really don't know what you are doing.

I would suggest that you do research on EQ and Gain Reduction. Delve into them, make sure you know what they do - and how they do what they do. And make sure you know what a particular function does before you just start turning knobs and pushing buttons.

Read up on HPF - Hi-Pass Filtering. Understand the fundamental frequencies of the instruments you are working with and what their primary frequency ranges are. For example, there's no point in boosting 50 Hz on a guitar track or snare drum, because those instruments don't "live" down that low, and by keeping frequencies in that area - or worse yet, adding frequencies in that area to instruments that don't have those frequencies as part of their sound - won't accomplish anything other than useless energy in those frequency ranges, that can very often get in the way and muddy up your mixes.

Accordingly, do the same with LPF - Lo-Pass Filtering. There's no reason for you to add 12k to a bass guitar - or even a bass synth, because it doesn't reproduce frequencies that high.

Listen to mixes you like. As Marco mentioned above, using commercially recorded songs as a reference can help you to better define what sound you are after, and what you would like the mix to ultimately sound like.

As I've stated previously, great mixes start with great talent and performances, great mics and great preamps - along with a solid working knowledge of gain structure and mic placement.

If you can get those things, than you have gone a long way towards getting a good mix already.

IMO, You've got quite a way to go yet.

d.

DonnyThompson, post: 426520, member: 46114 wrote: As I've stated previously, great mixes start with great talent and performances, great mics and great preamps - along with a solid working knowledge of gain structure and mic placement.

All that with a good monitoring system and ear training ! ;)

This might be of interest to you:

https://www.coursera.org/course/musicproduction

Killer link Donny! I'm watching a class on solar cells right now, on their app. Thanks again!