It doesnt sound that bad.. I expected something worse after reading your post LOL..
But you're right, it's definitely not a professional mix yet.
Here are a few tips that I think will help you improve your mix
First of all you need to know HOW you want your mix to sound.. Get a vision in your mind before tweaking any knobs..
Once you got that straightened out for yourself you gotta figur out how u get there and which tools u need..
What I personally would do for this mix are the following things:
1. Compress the bass guitar a bit (maybe with a LA2A or something like that) to get it more "In Your Face"
2. Then EQ the bass guitar (maybe with the EQ of an SSL Channelstrip), boost some of the "sweet spots" to give the bass some more character
3. Then Slightly multiband compress the bass guitar (maybe with a C4) to make sure all the frequency bands stay smooth
4. Now you'll have to make the bass guitar work together with the kick drum. In this case I should filter out everything below around 50hz (play with the cut off freq till it sounds right) on the kick drum and boost a bit around 100hz and somewhere in the lower mid range to give the kick some more attack. Maybe compress the kick a bit before the EQ too also to get some more punch..
5. Balance the kick and bassguitar
Once u got this right I think a big part of your "muddyness" is fixed and you can start building the rest of the instruments around that..
I hope this helps u a bit and gives you a right starting point!
Becoming a good mixer takes a lot of time and hard work tho, so just keep mixing as much as possible to get better.. You can also do a lot of selfstudy on mixing online (Google, Pensado's Place, YouTube tutorials, Audio School Online etc)
Peace
Shroom
ProducedByShroom.com
BeatPlugBlog.com
Glad I could be of any help!This helped a lot with the muddiness. I don't know how you knew exactly what to change but maybe one day I'll be able to do that too. It's good to know my mixes aren't sounding *too* terrible. It's just a lot of learning and practicing I guess. Thanks!
Relative to what do you find this good or bad? What do you want to achieve with this?
The way I perceive this song is that it waits for something until the end. The listener waits and waits. This is what can happen with a song that has no melody. It becomes like a loop that every time it repeats there is a confirmation that the waiting must go on. After enough loops the listener does not want to wait anymore. For you who are making the song, you definitely do not want to wait anymore, so you post it here. I know this is a pretty up front kind of help, but I'm not trying to make any drama about this at all, I'm just explaining it exactly how it comes to me, it's not easy to put words on exactly this music is received, but it is received pretty much like that. What you need to do is to first of all make the listener stop waiting - add a melody. That is a great first step. Then from there you can start to modify the chord progressions to better fit the melody.
Thank you for your honest interpretation. Now, I hope you understand this is an instrumental for pop song. So there's still a vocals to be added which is where I'm going to draw my main melody from - this is only an instrumental. My inspiration of this song comes from the simplicity of modern pop songs (Sorry by Justin Bieber, Roses by Chainsmokers, etc). I tried to follow a simple bassline and then built my song around that, keeping things simple up until the chorus. I see what you mean by waiting, since the same bassline repeats but I feel like once the vocals are in there it won't seem as prominent. I respect your opinion though on this, and many other issues you've helped me with on the forums!
Hey, do you mind taking a look at my new version?
https://soundcloud.com/andycii/proj-3-latest/s-XA5ME
It's weird it plays really great on my monitors and my computer, but then I play it on my phone (via soundcloud) and it sounds completely unbalanced. It could be that maybe soundcloud compresses the file?
I was listening to this and compared it to the other version. I am trying to figure out a way to expand your work from here. I think what you should do is to go: "OK, I was able to record a Casio keyboard style, I did it. Now, what's my next move?" You see what I mean? In this scenario, I think you should just read what I am now going to write.
A music production consists of many dimensions, but to put it in understandable terms, it mainly contains audio and music. You are currently exploring a few dimensions part of the audio dimension. To illustrate my point, you are now here (where the 0's are):
...||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||| [AUDIO] - [MUSIC] ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||...
...||||||000|||||||...
..........||X||...
Each | is a dimension of the music creation.
In the latest post, you basically asked how can you move to X above. The question is now, do you really want to move in that direction or do you rather prefer to expand your creations more broadly? Because my gut feeling is that you want to expand more broadly but think that is done by going in the opposite direction.
To illustrate my point further. To make my point even more clear: Suddenly adding a world class pedal steel player to your latest version would be like a volcanic eruption in terms of its impact on your production.
Very creative metaphors, but I'm having some trouble understanding what you mean LOL. So firstly, what do you mean by 'Casio keyboard style'?
Of course I want to expand more broadly, but what do you mean by me thinking it's done by 'going on the opposite direction'?
Finally, I'm unsure about this entire line "Suddenly adding a world class pedal steel player to your latest version would be like a volcanic eruption in terms of its impact on your production." Are you saying that a different composition would make a good impact on my production? Or a catastrophic impact?
It seems you're critiquing the composition of the mix versus the mix itself, which I do appreciate, but would you mind also critiquing the technical parts of the mix (EQ, Compression, etc)