Why does everything sound crap?

L

LindenGarcia18

Guest
My basses and my drums are too thin.


When I add compression and effects, everything starts clipping and sounding equally as bad.


Turning the master and output down makes no difference either, it still clips.




I want that punchy fat sound, and I can't seem to get it.




Any ideas?




Thanks!




- Linden
 
There's a thread here where it's very well explained how to use eq to make your sounds better. You should check that. It's one of the stickies.
 
It's obvious bro... Keep practicing mixing.. Read up on it.. Watch videos about it and apply and experiment with what you learned
 
It's possible that you're just using low quality sounds. You can only EQ and compress so much before you need to upgrade. Or alternatively if you're using live instruments then your recording technique may need some improvements.
 
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It all comes from the sounds... unless you are using EQ and compression as the part of sound design, you should aim to have your sounds in as good quality as you'd imagine, and only after that move to tweaking everything in mix context.
Don't think the way "it will be fixed later", I always find it hard to edit anything if I don't enjoy it from the very beginning.
If your sounds are weak, and you are not meaning acoustic sounds, I recommend layering and then compressing it so it glues together. Kicks are toughest part of this, as their bass thump is one of the most important elements in the low range. Also what could help with drums is tweaking the attack and sustain in a sampler.
Uploading something short could help also, here it is just blind guessing, as I have no idea what genre you produce in and if you mean real or electronic.
 
I layer my drum sounds so they pretty much sound how I want before even being mixed. As far as bass being weak you're probably just using weak sounds. I usually use bass sounds straight off my Yamaha keyboard and never have to do anything to the sound except some slight EQ to place it in the mix better.
 
Good advices here. To start with, before the mastering you should make sure the overall track doesn't peak above -3dB, to keep enough headroom for the mastering. Then compression will help a bit to liven up the sound and to get the sound textures more to the foreground, but they have to be there to begin with. Plus, you should make sure you don't compress your sounds to death. Apply gently, and pay attention to attack and release settings to not kill the kick.

A great trick to get the overall sound more punchy, is the use of parallel compression; You basically mix a heavy compressed version of the very low and very high frequencies gently in the track. Don't forget to add a little compression after that to glue everything together. For this, you definitely need enough headroom.

Also, keep your kick and bass (basically everything below appx. 150 Hz) centered and mono. That helps as well, at least if you place the rest of the mix around the center and not on top of the kick and bass (check panning and stereo width).

In all cases, getting a great full sound starts with the individual sounds, and with NOT pushing (contrary to what you might think). Better apply the same effect gently a couple of times than one time very hard, unless you really mean to do that.
 
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