<-This
It’s all about practice and developing your ear.
Well after the room trearment of course, I just use Sonarworks and referenece tracks helped me out a lot.
Don’t really have funds, or a room, to have a room to treat.
And we move too much. 
Well, if you trust your cans, then time and patience will get you there. I noticed you wrote you move around a lot and don’t have options to treat your room. Work with your headphones, then learn them well, and they’ll tell you the truth. From that truth, you’ll find your way to how you want your stuff to sound.
Don’t aim too hard for finishing long tracks or complex pieces. J Dilla had pieces on his Donut album that weren’t even a minute long. All those pieces became something great. So aim low in quantity, to help you focus on quality.
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I mix more on my cans than on my monitors. I have a partially treated room, but I really know my cans. It works
I am not being judgmental about the music but the sound of those Meat Beat Manifesto tracks sound awful to me. Ok so it’s coming from YouTube but the bass is fluffy as fuck and there is hardly any definition or punch in it apart from the blippy bloppy parts that are competing to lift the overall sound into something more intelligible. That might be the point of it for all I know and if you want to use this kind of music as a reference track because you like it I get it but it’s highly likely you’re going to end up with muddiness because bass frequencies and huge subby fluffy kicks drain all the energy and punch out of a mix let alone what will happen to it by the time you attempt to master it.
It’s polite when folks say that if it sounds good to you then it is good. I used to say it too but that’s clearly not always true and that can be part of the problem.
The first thing you need to do is take time EQ’ing sounds, particularly bass and kicks - and there are some simple tricks to it. It might seem counter to what your aim is because ideally you want to lower or roll off some of the lower frequencies to stop all that bass sucking the life out of your track. Maybe add some tiny peaks for mid punch. It’ll probably sound way thinner than you want and for sure you’ll think it will sound shit on it’s own but try it in a mix you already have that you think sounds ok but you regard as too muddy and you’ll hopefully start to get some of the clarity back in your music without losing too much of what you love.
Also your headphones… those PS 1000’s should be mind blowingly good - I have no idea, I could never afford a pair like that but they are open backed? Open back headphones are lovely to listen to music on but your perception of bass frequencies is very different from a closed back headphone and it’s likely you’ll push the bass more on open backed headphones when using them to mix. At least that’s what I have experienced and then things can get muddy / fluffy when it translates on other listening devices.
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If you feel that they sound good initially, but bad when you listen again later, I think fatigue can be a part of the problem. Like if you mix at a pretty high volume your ears adjusts to that. And when you listen again later your ears is “fresh” again and reveal what really happened when mixing. I do the same alot of the times when making music. I like it loud to get in the groove! hehe.
What i would do is make something new, and just focus on getting it to sound “right”. If it is the Kick and bass that is problematic, just make something minimalistic with three elements and play around with that. See how things affect eachother. See if a little highpass on the bass cleans up the “kick”. Look at what the fundemental frequencies of the bass and kick are. If they are the same, it can get muddy quick.
Im no master at mixing, but i feel i start to get the hang of it. Been doing this since 95. But the listening enviroment is important. My friends tell me that my mixes sounds alot better after i got new monitors, and a new room for making music.
I‘m no mixing pro at all. I don‘t treat my room, I have only basic knowledge of compressors and eqs, but I‘m quite satisfied with my mixes by trusting my ears. So here some basic tips I follow:
- shit in shit out . pick your sounds wisely. add elements only if they have space in this frequency range from the beginning
- don’t overuse compressor and eq just for sake of using them
- remove everything from the lowend which doesn’t belong there
- use mild sidechain compression on stuff, not as effect but to make room for the kick
- clear up the lower mids. They make things sound muddy(or lower them generally a bit)
- parallel compression has changed my drum business forever
- mix at lower volumes
- since I know my monitor and room situation is subpar, most of my mixing is done on beyerdynamic headphones. I trust them much more than my room. I then listen back on different situations: my monitors, other room, iphone headphones, even iphone speakers etc…
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That’s the best check, if you can hear you bass and kick on that you’ve done something right 
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I dont agree 100% on that. I have managed to pull off mixes that sounded very good on iphone and laptop speakers, but which totally fell apart on a fast (excellent transient response) full range system. Those mixes were done on headphones btw… Which is why I personally dont do final mixes on headphones anymore either (maybe my ears are shaped wrong LOL) So while making something sound good on tiny speakers is important, dont rely on them too much.
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for french cats, the Audiofanzine mixing guide is amazing. and it is free!
maybe it is workable using an automatic translation. i dont know
I also followed training courses by Xavier Collet on Elephorm about reverb and compression, absolutely great imho.
Agree. Good or bad mixes can sound ok-ish on phones and crap speakers. But you wanna do your final tests there, not your actual monitoring, no matter how awesome your ears are.
I guess the problem in my case was a combination of “no sub frequencies” and “no microdynamics”, which completely concealed the pitfalls of those specific mixes (bass shy, drum envelopes/microdynamics were all over the place) when listened to on tiny speakers 
Dunno, like I said, maybe its my head shape or my earshape or something, but I still haven’t found a headphone monitoring system I can trust… Even my recent beyer DT1990 Pros fail in the bass department… Its always one or the other:
- Good mid/high freq definition but bass response makes me chase my tail (too bass shy or otherwise fckd up lowend)
- Bass response is usable but then mid/high freq range definition is whack
Still looking for the set of headphones that has both boxes unchecked for my head & ears… Maybe i should try that SubPac? Anyways, I much prefer using monitors for mixing.
I trust my AKGs and reference their work frequently on different monitoring systems (don’t have one of my own), and I can get close enough with them, to tweak out the last parts in a more professional environment when it’s required.
But like you said, you just don’t hear what’s going on in phone speakers and similar and the nasty surprise hits you later, when you play your work on a decent home system, just a different kind of headphone or whatnot. They respond so differently and that’s what a mix does, make your music foolproof against those differences.
There are also levels to the whole thing, unlimited amount of levels I find… Nowadays I can crank out an OK balanced mix that will translate more or less across different systems, but then the struggle becomes about reaching the next level, having stuff sound EXCELLENT on all systems. Maybe that level will take me 25 more years to reach LOL!
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Yeah. That place, I’ll never get to 
whenever people go “Bruce Springsteen made Nebraska on a four track” and “Beatles blah blah” and “Dilla on his SP-303” I go “If Bruce and Beatles and Dilla could then so can I.”
It’s not true, but there is comfort in the lie
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Aside from gear choices and technical tips, the next step would be to listen to the mixes carefully and figure out which individual aspects are causing the problems. Then experiment with another mix to see what differences take place. It’s an iterative and maybe never-ending process of learning.
OR
Enjoy making music in the moment each time you do it and don’t worry about finished mixes.
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Anyways, maybe it’d be good to also talk a bit about practical mixing?
I’m no veteran mixing engineer or anything, so YMMV on these but here are some thoughts I have about practical mixing that have developed over the years:
- mix listening should be done at low to moderate levels
- mixing should be done on the morning
- never consider a mix finished until you listen to it again next morning
- take steady breaks to reset your brain & ears
- if sounds clash bad, always check if changing the arrangement or sounds is a better way to fix than subtractive EQ / keyed compression
- with eq, a little goes a long way (unless trying to fix something)
- first establish a decent static mix balance before getting fancy
- getting a good mix balance is a gradual process which continues throughout the mixing process, from larger fader moves towards ever smaller and smaller corrections
- if you dont know how to compress, dont!
- eq cuts are better than boosts because headroom
- If a project is large, consider having a “mix prep session” before the actual mixing session where you are your own “assistant” - name tracks, set groups, edit out unwanted noises etc
just some from the top of my head
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This is by far the most important mindset to have when mixing in my opinion. A mix is never done in one session, give yourself time.
But the corollary is also to set a deadline for the mixing part, because if not, those tweaks can go on forever. You have to know when it’s good enough because it will never be perfect and you can easily engage in a neverending “corrections” loop if you’re not careful.
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I multitrack my songs when I have all the elements in place, therefore I like to get all the volume levels and frequencies dialed in beforehand. But even when I think I’ve got a solid mix for tracking, I listen afterwards and something’s off. Over time I have improved with this, but it’s very difficult to be perfect. The Multitrack recording is much easier to fix levels afterwards, but with my old mixer I could only record a stereo track and was screwed if something was off. Out of curiosity are you multitrack recording or do you record 1 track out the stereo bus? @phaelam
Also, just the sheer number of projects I’ve tried to finish and mix down has helped my skill level, just keep at it. And as the previous post says, multiple sessions are key. I typically do this
- track everything once ready to record
- adjust volume levels / arrangement adjustments / frequency cuts in daw
- listen to track on car stereo, headphones, etc… and make notes about frequencies, volume levels, arrangement
- back to the project in daw to make adjustments from notes
- listen back on car stereo, headphones, etc… again to spot anything that might need final tweaking, make final set of notes
- make final adjustments in daw and output song at -6 db to .wav
- import .wav into new project to add final touches (light compression, coloring, soft clip, etc…) and output final mix
Long process, but it’s a labor of love
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