I've been comparing my tracks to professional ones, and I noticed that all good-quality mixes had their primary focus on high-mids. That made the vocals and main instrument feel thick and upfront. I can tell it's a combination of mid-range focus, resonance and transient control, and saturation. But I haven't had any luck getting this sound. Any ideas?
Hi guys, I've been juggling around mixing a personal Hip-Hop EP for months now - I mix in all-stems, but when I got to the final testing stages, I felt something is inherently flawed in my approach.
I mastered all tracks to an average of -8.5 integrated LUFS, but when I applied the DSPs penalty using loudnesspenalty.com to compare them to YouTube and Spotify songs, my tracks felt extremely quiet after normalization. I downloaded mp3s from YT and found that the louder tracks are mastered at -10 to -9.5 LUFS max. I tried pushing my tracks to -7 but they still felt slightly quieter.
I use saturation my drum bus, instrumentals, and vocals. I use clipping always on my kick and sometimes on my drum buses and snares. The drum bus always has a Weiss limiter before going into the master. My vocals aren't that squashed, they use around -12 GR across four compressors. I use upward compression on my mid-range, and try stereoize the instrumentals without turning the correlation meter red.
I've been listening to the same 5 tracks for months, so I'm probably tone deaf by now. But if i was to break down the main things that make my tracks feel quieter, I'd say:
- Forwardness: My tracks feel far away compared to other ones. I use very subtle side-chained spatial effects on vocals, and most of the times I stick to a plate and some slap along with the spot effects. I don't cut off the drum transients completely as well, so I don't know.
- High-End: My tracks lack it. No Maag or Freshair or Eq boosting is doing the trick. I'm even using that Scheps parallel comp technique.
- Instrumentals: The melodies are quiet in relation to the vocals, but turning them up harms the vocal clarity, especially with this vague "Loudness" problem.
Overall, the tracks are more than listenable on their own, but once normalization is applied, the tracks lose their perceived loudness significantly. I mix on HS4 and audio technica headphones using Ableton. I mix into a limiter and turn it off before mastering in a separate session.
What can I do at this point?
Note: I know that mixing is complicated and probably there's no simple "quick fix". I don't mind remixing the entire thing, it's just that I don't know what I should do differently. I appreciate the craft and I don't mind paying a pro eng either, but I also don't want the knowledge I accumulated over the months to go down the drain. I'm mainly looking for ideas and similar experiences.