First Time Song Post

Sounds good -- vocals and bass could come up a little bit in volume --- My prefrence is the vocals over everything and drums right behind that along with the bass --over all good first post -- I like the tune

Theres some psychoacoustic stuff going on here - probably a stereo widener or something which sounds weird to my ears - a little too heavy- maybe ease off on it a little.

Your master is way hot - even for k-12, but you might've been going for that.

It all sounds pretty "live" though which for the style of track is probably a good thing.

Kind regards

Dave Rich

Man I dig this...has kinda a swishy sound to it but I think its maybe due to the mp3 compression.Levels seem kinda high with evreything in your face and not much depth to the mix.Guitar playing is awesome..I really like your style!!Vocals are cool,but again kinda swishy sounding at times.Nice job bro'!

ORIGINAL: BrotherSugg

Hi Dave, could you explain what you mean by "hot"? Is it too distorted or just "one" dynamic? This song starts out driving, and besides the break for the solo, stays driving. I'm really trying to improve my mastering skills and I tried a brickwall limiter and push the normalized the volume to peaks. I'm hoping it's not distorting. I'll check into the widening, because I was using a stereo enhancer mostly on the mids.

As for the drums at the end, it's going to be a fade-in to the next song on the CD.

Everyone's opinions have been very helpful!!!

I mean the overall level of the song is too loud (limited). It's not stupidly loud, and certainly in todays audio climate there are louder mixes around - but to be more compatible with the K-system (which is a standard we're all trying to follow) you need to lower the overall volume a bit. I'm not at the studio now so can't remember how much over it was.

You'll probably find that just normalising and not limiting will make it more like it as that kind of music is pretty loud anyway. - again I'm not at the studio so can't re-listen (I've a lowly dial-up here at home).

Do a search on bob katz K-system and go to his page at www.digido.com on the subject. It really is invaluable information and a great help.

If you're going for that wide sound then try just doing some good old fashioned panning - or setup two master busses - one with a widener on (and personally I would never ever ever widen anything more than around 130%) and the other without and then setup another master bus and point both master busses to that and adjust between the two. That way you can point the stuff which needs widening to the wide bus, and the vocals/drums/bass and all the other solid stuff to the other. This would help keep your mix cohesive.

You can also just setup a wide bus and send everything through it but using an Aux send and only sending a trickle of the whole signal through it - I personally prefer to separate widened audio and non widened audio completely. Bear in mind that any widening will compromise your mix's compatibiltity. Theres a good chance that on a stereo with a '3d sound' button on that your mix will be missing a large part of it's center sound if you don't master with a mind to keeping the normal unwidened stuff in the mix. Also some surround processing can be confused by the phase tricks wideners use.


Kind regards

Dave Rich