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

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.

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

SPAN is a spectrum analyzer. It shows you visually how the frequencies are distributed, letting you see which ones are over- and under-represented. A satisfying blend generally has more energy in the low frequencies and gradually drops toward the higher frequencies. We don't hear all frequencies equally, so this boosts the ones we don't hear well and attenuates the ones our ears are naturally more sensitive to.
 
The best way to familiarize yourself with SPAN is to import some of your favorite commercial recordings that you'd like to emulate, and see what they look like on SPAN's display. Then apply an equalizer and experiment with different settings so you can hear/see what they do. After a while, you'll get to know what a nice spectral balance looks like on the display and be better able to avoid mixes that sound good on your speakers but not elsewhere.
 
When mastering, it's standard practice to remove the very low frequencies (below about 30 Hz) that most listeners' speakers cannot reproduce anyway or that cannot be heard at all. Those frequencies, even if inaudible, still drive your mastering limiter and affect the overall mix. Removing them will let you get a louder, clearer master.
 
Some people also remove the very high frequencies above 18 KHz, too. If your ultimate target is an MP3, those frequencies will be removed in the encoding process anyway, but perhaps not as transparently as if you'd removed them first.
 
Note that aside from rolling off the extremes, you cannot achieve a pleasant spectral balance by placing an EQ on the master bus. That master equalizer should be making very broad, gentle adjustments to the overall blend. If SPAN tells you there is an imbalance, you have to find which individual tracks are contributing to the frequencies that are missing or over-represented, and correct the problem there. You usually do that with no processing going on at the master bus at all, and then check it again after re-enabling your master EQ and limiter. You do all this with an instance of SPAN on the master bus (the last thing in the chain). You can also place SPAN instances on individual tracks to see what each one is contributing to the mix.
 
There's a whole lot more to this story, but hopefully this will give you something to chew on.

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

To be honest I wouldn't use MaxBass on the final mix, just on the instruments that need it, i.e. bass.

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

sharke
To be honest I wouldn't use MaxBass on the final mix, just on the instruments that need it, i.e. bass.

Too bad there ain't a MaxxGuitar and MaxxDrums, eh?

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.

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

What exactly do you mean by this - do you mean that you've added vocals to a pre-existing instrumental track (meaning you don't have the individual tracks for each instrument), or do you mean that you did all the instrumental tracks yourself and have exported them all to a stereo track plus the vocal track? 
 
The bass sounds like it's panned off to the left a little, while the right track has more content in it like tlw says. This imbalance is going to sound a little disconcerting on headphones. 
 
You definitely want to make sure that all of your bass frequencies below about 300Hz are exactly centered. There is an easy way to do this with a bass centering plugin. There are a few available but I use a free one called TP Basslane. You can get it here: 
 
http://www.toneprojects.com/products/plug-ins/basslane/
 
There is a knob on the left which sets the frequency below which all frequencies will be centered. If you only have access to the instrument parts as a single stereo track, then try putting it on that. I usually leave the cutoff set to 300Hz but you could go a little lower if you prefer. But 300Hz is fine. 
 
If you have access to the individual instrument tracks then put it on any stereo track that has low frequency content. That might be drum loops, synth parts, stereo bass patches etc. The great thing about Basslane is that you can centralize the bass frequencies in stereo sounds so that the low end sounds rock solid and centralized while the higher frequencies can be as stereo as you like. I really like this for modern stereo synth bass parts - there's no reason why bass parts can't have a stereo element in the higher frequencies, but when you ensure that the low end is centered then it makes your mix sound so much more powerful and stable. 
 
Another thing you might want to consider (this applies only if you have access to the individual instruments) is are you high passing everything too much? Everyone hears the same advice when they're learning to mix, i.e. "high pass the crap out of everything but the bass and the kick and you mix will sound cleaner." This is an exciting piece of advice to anyone who's been struggling with low end mud and lack of definition, so off they go high passing everything as high as 150Hz-200Hz with the idea that they're clearing a big space for the bass and kick. This works of course, but it can also leave your mix sounding cold and brittle because you're cutting away too many of the "warm" frequencies. An alternative strategy is to limit your high pass filters to around 80-100Hz (much lower if it's a bass or kick track obviously) and use low shelves to clean the low mids instead. This way you can clean up some of that mud while still retaining warmth in your mix.