Improving my mixing

Heya! Can someone please ell me what can I improve in this mix to sound pro-ish ? :)

https://soundcloud.com/the-thrill-music/addiction

From a pro perspective I find you are allowing quite a lot of semi-good sounding qualities into the mix. It is fine in many ways, to make it pro-ish I do find you have to clean it up in several ways, arrangement, effects, mixing, leveling etc. In my view the top end is definitely the weak spot of this mix, it is noisy. What you can do with an ITB effect is to sweep through with a band of various widths, across the whole frequency range. Start with a narrow sweep, then make it broader and broader to understand what is going on at various frequency ranges. A really good sounding mix tends to stay fairly low in noise across the entire frequency range at various band widths, in your case you will find certain areas above say 800 Hz where things start to get pretty noisy.

Overall I think you have gone far with what you have, I think from here you would benefit from being near some better gear and someone that can tell you, hey that synth sound over there, turn it off.

Pro sounding mixes are pro for a lot of reasons, but in general they are natural sounding, which is due to hardware, they are clean sounding which is due to good arrangement, good metering, good noise reduction techniques, they are open and lush because of good monitoring, they inhabit good stereo qualities because of good routing, good leveling, good panning and good use of effects and so on. But to really then take it from here, you have to sort of think like how to move into the luxury segment with your art.

In my view to move into the luxury segment with your music, you have to first of all understand a few basic things, like that you have to have a certain amount of natural vibe in the mix in order for it to breathe life and that this you get from hardware. You also need to be aware of how important it is to have enough headroom in your hardware and how the arrangement needs to be delicate in its content so that you get enough signal on each instrument in the mix.

There are a lot of things to do, also in terms of understanding the gain structure of a mix, like with too little overall compression the mix will sound empty and with too much overall compression the mix will sound numb and dirty.

In your case I think that it is sound design you should now start looking at, becoming more aware of what is a good sound inside of a mix and what is not a good sound inside of a mix. How do you best blend various sound types to create a natural overall sound. Which sounds can you use samples for, which sounds must be hardware. These are the kinds of things you have to start looking more seriously at.

Also listen to really high quality DVD recordings where you have lots of hardware and minimal software in the sound. This trains your ears to hear what is music sounding like when it is natural sounding as oppose to artificial sounding. Because at the end of the day it is about achieving high levels of truth in your sound. So it is not only about the music, the song, the gear and your skills. It is also about you as an engineer. Your state of being and what directs your state of being in the production process.

Pro production is a seeking towards truth, with very very little compromise on that.
 
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Dark Red-- Did you produce the recording/DVD/audio/video or any portion of the Brooks & Dunn video that you linked to?

Edit-- Interesting... It's gone now.
 
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Thank you so so much!!



There's nothing to be thankful for, believe me.
Mentioning over and over again that you need hardware for this and that, hardware is better blah blah blah is the same bs DR is spamming in all of his posts. And btw I bet the answer to rhythmgj's question is no.
 
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