Am i doing this right, or am I completely butchering it?

Hello there all! Kamelodic here with some serious problems

So lately my mixes have been pretty crappy as of late, meaning they only sound good on speakers and headphones but not cellphones -sobs- I understand acoustic treatment or Room Correction provides a better ambience but I know plenty of others who manage to get it sounding good on allplatforms wwhich frustrates me. So I'm tuning my Instrumentals for my covers to help my vocals sit better and in my final master I'm adding RBass and MaxxBass from WAVEs. Now note im not a professional and just like to cover kpop songs for fun, but I really want people to like what they hear you know?

I feel like I'm just messing everything up if I can get my mix to sound decent enough on cellphones laptop speakers etc. I'he heard REVERB drowns a mix and too much causes problems along with muddiness. I don't have a fancy home studio n can't afford monitors but I do have studio monitor headphones. I use an HP TOUCHSMART for my music and SONAR platinum, but I don't think I'm routing buses correctly or using sends or submix buses correctly.

Does anyone have any helpful tips that could point me in the right direction or help my mixes to sound non ear deafening? My instrumental sounds like it is drowning and my vocals stand out too much!! What can I do to fix this?!!!

Here is a cover I just did, and honestly I'm quite ashamed of it.

https://youtu.be/iyu9HZvkHb0

bitflipper
You've got monitoring issues. The mix is fine, it's just weighted toward the high end of the spectrum and that's what's making it sound thin. That's most likely due to monitoring limitations. You're going to have to reference visual aids to compensate. Get SPAN if you don't already have it. It's free, and it's a must-have if you don't have an ideal monitoring environment. Actually, it's a must-have even if you do.
 
Keep in mind that when mixing for iPhones and such you'll want to roll off the extreme low end when you master. Anything below about 70Hz is just going to make your mix sound weaker because your mastering limiter is responding to frequencies that ear buds can't reproduce.

Oh my gosh thank you so much sir^^ Do you think can tell me how to roll off properly during the mastering process? AND WHAT IS Span exactly? How would I use it to make them to achieve the balanced sound? Sorry I know I'm asking a lot but you just opened a path of hope for me! I almost gave up honestly

OK!! Thank yyou so much!! I'M actually doing that now and I'm seeing quite a chanhe in the spectrum! I wish I would have known this a while ago but hey never too late to get things right : ) I never knew Mp3 cute off the 18khz I always though I was supposed to Lol but thank you so much!! You've been a great help

AhAh I see! Well I use it during mastering and it's just my voice with a two track inst

The BozDigital compressor is good on guitar and drums.

Just to add to what bitflipper's said, the youtube track sounds like the drums and maybe bass are panned off to the right. At least it does to my aging ears. The left hand channel seems to be lacking in energy and content compared to the right.

It's generally a good idea to put the drums, especially kick, and bass straight down the middle of the mix. Several reasons for this.

As frequencies get lower we're increasingly poor at working out where they're coming from. This effect starts somewhere around 400Hz and gets more noticeable as the frequency gets lower and we start to get a bit confised and things sound muddled. Putting the low frequencies down the middle deals with that.

The second reason is that there's a lot of punch and energy in the low end of a mix. Centralising it can add quite a lot of power without necessarily having to adjust the volume of the tracks concerned.

Another reason is something you probably won't spot on headphones. When sound comes out of stereo speakers what's coming out of the left one has an effect on what you hear coming out of the right. And the other way round. It's caused by sounds on different stereo channels being out of phase with each other so the peaks of one sound's waveform coincides with the troughs in anothers. As a result they kind of cancel each other out.

Low frequency sounds, stereo synth pads and strings are really prone to phasing problems, and things like cymbals, which are basically just noise, can cause it as well. If you've ever played on a stage in a venue where it doesn't matter how you adjust things or turn up amplifiers, you can't hear anything well enough because it's lost in the cymbal wash you'll know what I mean.

You won't spot it on headphones because the sound emited by one side doesn't interfere with the sound emited from the other because your head is between the sound sources. Phasing issues like this can only be heard using speakers. If your mix is ever listened to in mono (or almost mono, like laptop or ipad "stereo" speakers) they'll cancel each other out very strongly. One way to check is to listen to the mix on a single speaker. Another is to use a gonomiometer (I think there's one in Span) that will warn you about phase mis-matches between left and right and other things that can upset mono compatability.

If you're recreating the sound of the White Album of course, pan everything hard right or hard left. Stereo was new back then and EMI were **** sure you'd notice their very expensive nice new consoles were using it :-)

Nice vocals and video by the way. And there's no need to be ashamed of the mix at all. It's still a work in progress, and like writing a novel or painting, recording, mixing and mastering a track is one of those things that never really gets finished, you just have to decide at some point that "it will have to do" and move on to doing the next.

I'm a kpop coverist ^^ We use the two track instrumentals from the albums and such.Thanks to Mr. Bitflippers advice I can finally hear the mix better on my cellphone! I simply cut off all frequencies to about 70 and then boosted at around 45 with rbass during the mastering process, and put a low pass filter at 18khz. I added about 1db in the 9k to 12k range just to give it that Polish. There is a mastering template I use in Sonar--Mastering Template Smooth--in which the Sonitus EQ, COMPRESSOR, and phase are already tuned for a smooth master.

I added a waves L3 Multimaximizer and threshold is at 7.0 and output at about 0.3? There's no dithering since I don't fully know what that is yet, something about raising a noisefloor. I used waves Kramer Tape preset Big and Open, SSL comp and I'm doing some light compression on the entire track. I have taken some of the muddiness in the mid with FabFilter Pro-Q at about 3.5k and boosted at about 600k but only 2 decibels with a semi wide boost. I used Waves Lo-Air 5.1 for a more surround sound I believe and that's it. My mix was completely remix with a better reverb approach and less high passing. I only high passed my vocals but not the instrumental.

I simply put a small bassbump at about 121 and then added waves Center Stereo. I pulled down the center and pulled the sides just a bit and focused the bass to the center the highs to the sides and punch to the sides. I felt like the instrumental didn't need much since it was already compressed but needed to be open for my vocals to sit.

I usually overdo it but luckily I found a balance and my CPU wasn'to fighting for its life ^^

...and output at about 0.3

I assume you meant "-0.3". For MP3, I'd actually lower that limit a little, as the filters used in the encoding process tend to create high-frequency peaks that can easily exceed 0dB. Technically, to avoid intersample overs entirely you'd need to set the limit to -3dB, but that's a little too quiet for the genre. Try around -0.5 or -0.6.
 
One problem you may be dealing with is that the two-track mix you're using is already mastered to a high average level, and you're adding a vocal on top of an already-mastered music track. That's going to tend to result in a flat-sounding instrumental, so you need to use as light a hand as possible in order to avoid doing damage.
 
I've never tried what you're doing, but if I did I would "master" the vocal and instrumental components on separate busses and then combine them. That way, I could do anything I want to the vocals, including smashing them flat with a limiter, without hurting the backing track.