Can someone tell me what I'm doing wrong with mixing?

K

KidsOfThe90s

New member
I guess my ears just aren't trained or anything, because I keep listening to the pre master version of my song, and I can never notice any distortion, but every time I send it back to my mastering engineer, it always comes back distorted. Take a listen:

Pre-Master

I Dont Need You Mix 3

Post-Master

I Dont Need You MM2



I've already tried taking away frequencies in the powerful kicks & 808's, since that's what I think it is. The beat doesn't have distortion so I think for some reason the vocals don't want to work with the kicks or some other instrument.

I definitely believe this is something I'm doing since when I listened in the studio it kind of did have distortion on the monitors, but I swear I fixed it. I just don't know.

Is it my ears are horrible, and I'm missing something, or could it be the mastering engineer?

Also you can tell me anything else you find wrong with the mix.
 
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KidsOfThe90s said:
I guess my ears just aren't trained or anything, because I keep listening to the pre master version of my song, and I can never notice any distortion, but every time I send it back to my mastering engineer, it always comes back distorted. Take a listen:

Pre-Master

I Dont Need You Mix 3

Post-Master

I Dont Need You MM2



I've already tried taking away frequencies in the powerful kicks & 808's, since that's what I think it is. The beat doesn't have distortion so I think for some reason the vocals don't want to work with the kicks or some other instrument.

I definitely believe this is something I'm doing since when I listened in the studio it kind of did have distortion on the monitors, but I swear I fixed it. I just don't know.

Is it my ears are horrible, and I'm missing something, or could it be the mastering engineer?

Also you can tell me anything else you find wrong with the mix.
Click to expand...

It is clipping distortion present in the final product. You can use the combination of your ears, the meter calibration, the meter readings and looking at the waveform, to determine what, when, where, how, why in regards to clipping.

It can sometimes be difficult to notice the clipping, hence what you can do also (if your monitors/headphones can take it) is to over limit it just to see how close the mix is to clearly produce clipping noise. If you have peak limiters applied anywhere, it can pay off to have it in inter-sample peak limiting mode. It is also good to have the clipping indicator to infinitely remain at that clipping value until you reset it, so that you need to "confirm" the clipping took place every time it did. Then you can start to practice to always look for the source of the clipping and confirm resolution as part of resetting the clipping indicator.
 
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