Need some help with mixing levels

bass is the most typical problems with home mixing.  mostly due to improper listening environments.  a spare bedroom is not usually the best environment.  room treatment for bass trapping and mid-range traps are very helpful with mixing.  good near field monitors are essential, preferably with 8" woofers and/or a sub.

in the meantime, you have to just learn your room.  burn your song to a CD, take it to various other mediums and environments and make notes.   listen in the car, in the living room stereo, on a boom box, on an iPod, etc and make notes about the differences and make adjustments in the mix, then do it again and again until you have a decent mix that translates to different systems.

Ditto what is said above 100%. It's not something that comes overnight. But what you will strive for is with the right room and monitors you will eventually "know" when it's right every time. ( well ok,, 90% )  I don't know what will happen to me when my NS-M 10's die. I'll have to start from scratch with new monitors and will expect it to take a few months.

Some real gems in this thread: http://www.gearslutz.com/board/mastering-forum/64536-anyone-using-k-14-metering.html

Understanding the relationship between what your meters are showing and the volume in your room is really helpful when aiming for consistent mixes.

Bear in mind that, when uploading to various websites, many do unspeakably horrible things to your audio and will respond differently on a site by site basis so you may want to test with a couple of 'finished' mixes at different levels to see what works best for you.

Transferability (making it sound good on the whole range of outlets) is a harder task and a lot of it is in what CJ says. I would add to that, that as well as a good set of monitors in a well treated room you might want to get yourself a crap pair of monitors to use as 'reference' speakers so you can hear in advance what your sonic masterpiece will sound ilke out of the kitchen radio at the other end of the garden.

If you like a bit of DIY I can wholeheartedly recommend the 'killatone' project, designed by Thomas Barefoot. They're very easy to build and are awesome for getting the midrange and dynamics of a song right (particularly for placing vocals etc).

One other tip for when mixing, keep flicking back to mono to make sure your mix is still working right (this is kind of an extention of the reason for having 'reference' speakers).

Child

Hello all, I'm having this issue to but I'm relatively new and so I'm just getting ramped up and learning. I do notice that when I take the recording (in WAV format) and then turn it into mp3 or m4a there's the sonic quality that's lost. 

So what do you guys do/recommend putting the finished format in? Thanks

johnnycee7


Hello all, I'm having this issue to but I'm relatively new and so I'm just getting ramped up and learning. I do notice that when I take the recording (in WAV format) and then turn it into mp3 or m4a there's the sonic quality that's lost. 

So what do you guys do/recommend putting the finished format in? Thanks

mp3's are compressed - you should notice a degredation going from waves to mp3's. 
 
Bristol Jonsey is right - it depends on what your goals are for your music.  if you intend to sell your music on iTunes then you have to go mp3.  if you intend to create a CD then you MUST use 16bit/44.1kHz - that's the redbook standard.
 
for mp3's the higher the "bitrate" the better the mp3.  128k mp3's are pretty bad when you compare them to the wave files.  320k are not bad at all, and in fact I can't always tell the difference between a 320k mp3 and a wave file.  but of course the bigger the bitrate, the larger the file.
 
some streaming websites only allow 128k (myspace, soundclick...) other streaming sites allow higher (reverbnation) and some even allow wave files (soundcloud).  but also the larger files take up more bandwidth to stream or download.  people with lower bandwidth capabilities won't be able to stream a wave file because it will pause often to try to catch up.