Mixing and mastering is making me go crazy, honest feedback would save me
Hi everyone, this is the first time I've ever posted on here. I really hope someone can help me out.
A couple of months ago I decided to take music really seriously. I've been producing for around 9 years, but never really dove deep into the art of mixing and mastering. So I made my first song of which I'm proud. Since I wanted to do it right, I followed this 3 hour long mixing and mastering tutorial: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jSFF8fotNhA
Now that the end result is here though, it doesn't feel right to me.
I don't know if it is me going crazy or that there are actual BIG TIME mistakes in there and I need someone to honestly tell me what they think about it and what you'd recommend do differently. My genre is Indie Pop / Bedroom Pop / Indie Rock. I just feel like, maybe it's me, but for this genre it's really hard to find stuff online that goes REALLY indepth about mix and mastering. To give you a bit of an idea how the process went:
- set all levels to zero, gradually mix them in starting with drums (never pushing the total mix above -3db)
- panning (i wanted to get that "chamer of reflections" feel, so panned the drums on left with its reverb on right and vice versa for the bass, some guitars, and synths)
- eq and compression on master bus
- putting eq and compression on instruments (also parallel compression on drums)
- put on more effects if necessary (mostly slight delay and reverb, some soundtoys effects were already on in the beginning)
- make a new project just for mastering
- on master track, use eq, compression and slight tape emulation (MELLO from arturia, fat analog preset). I didn't use mastering assistent from Logic Pro x
- Use two multimeters (one with Remove DC offset On and true peak detection off, and one with those settings reversed)
- Matched the lufs s to my reference song "For The First Time" by Mac Demarco, which came between -9 and -11 db.
I've been listening to it for days, also giving it a break sometimes, it doesn't feel right or as good to me as other songs just "hit" you in the feels or something. Like my bass and drums don't feel right. the vocal sound doesn't match with the rest of the song. I feel like I've tried a lot (probably not everything, just don't know where to go). Especially on airpods it doesn't sound close to reference track...
I know this might be too in depth, sorry for that. I just wanted to try this out, who knows someone is out the who could give me some tips for next steps. If so, my gratitude is eternal.
Really hope someone can help me out.
- Nemara
BTW for the bass I used an old Tame Impala trick to pitch an actual guitar down an octave, tweak it to sound like a bass.