I just finished this track. It’s very amateur as I’m still (relatively) new to all this. This is straight off the DT, no post-production of any kind.
And that’s where the problem lies. It sounds good on my Digitakt using my Bayerdynamic DT 990 Pros, but once I take it into my laptop and listen back on my IEMs, it just sounds like a dog’s dinner, so muddy. (Yes I recorded in stereo.)
All of which makes me a little despondent. What is the point of getting everything “just so” on the Digitakt, such that it sounds good on my mixing headphones, if out there in the real world, on my everyday IEMs, it sounds terrible? What am I missing here? (My IEMs are decent; Final Audio E4000s.) Other tracks (i.e. not mine) sound great on the same IEMs, so I almost feel like my expensive mixing headphones are “lying” to me.
Anyway, here it is, for better or worse. Any help/feedback appreciated!
Welcome to the sad world of learning how to mix! I have been there. I would say to you:
Don’t stress much. Sounds pretty dope as it is right now very quirky and creative. A couple of dissonant places but great overall for an amateur like yourself
What are EMIs? Can you use those to mix your song? Or use the Beyerdynamic tío listen to music on the daily so you can learn them and get a better mix on them. Also consider using a daw for the mixing part so you hey access to better tools and sonarworks
Thank you, both (particularly @Philip for the kind words). I wasn’t sure what you meant by “What are EMIs” but if you can clarify I’ll gladly answer. In terms of mixing, I do have a DAW, I have Audacity, but I’m flailing around somewhat in there, trying compressors and EQ presets, without really knowing what to use (I need to gain some general mixing education.) Interesting re: mix on the IEMs; I bought the Bayerdynamics as I thought the idea was to mix on something like those rather than run-of-the-mill, everyday headphones/earphones.
@Tchu thank you also. I will provide filter settings tomorrow for you when I’m back on the DT.
Reference tracks have helped me the most.
Try to compare with reference tracks of your choice and see if you can find some clues in what you dont like in your mix, and what you like in others.
Ah good shout, that makes sense. I suppose on that basis you can mix using any headphones at all, since a reference track will always mean you’re mixing relative to that track.
Get Luna, free and professional daw. Record your multitrack via overbridge and mix there.
I meant IEMs what’s that?
If you get sonarworks headphone edition they have a setting that will make your Beyerdynamic headphones flat so you can better trust them. Also use references when mixing. And absolutely watch a lot of mixing tutorials. There’s a YouTube channel i think with the best mixing content you can find called cat and beats which i can recommend. Watch their mixing with a single brand of plugins series, they mix a bunch of songs in different styles using a single plugin brand each time
I wrote my first post without listening to your Track. I’m not home at the moment so it would have been irrelevant to comment on it but the more infos tou give the better we can help.
Ah, Overbridge. A world I’ve yet to get into! Right now I’m simply recording a flattened stereo mix out of the DT into Audacity and trying to tweak the entire wav, not per-track. I’ll definitely look into Luna, and the YouTube channel you mention. Need all the help I can get!
@Laser I have some monitors but the room I’m working in is ill-suited to mixing, hence I went the headphones route. Yeah I guess it’ll take a while. I just hear all these tracks on DJ mixes and many of them are by bedroom producers, so I wonder how they gained all this mixing knowledge despite still being young, many of them, such that they can produce perfect-sounding tracks!
@Tchu interesting; I find myself mostly low-passing things except for obvious things like hats, snares, so that’s probably an issue right there to work on, thanks/
I don’t think it sounds amateur. I listen to a lot of house music and there is absolutely terrible music out there that make a lot of playlists for one reason or another. You shouldn’t compare yourself toanything out there. Just do what you want to do and see where it goes.
I think your track sounds fine. The obvious missing part is the interest or tension. If you don’t create those, most of the people won’t make it to the end of the track. Becaue it’s just a big long loop. All tracks in this genre are loops (don’t quote me) but what sets apart the good ones from not-so-good ones is that they keep the listener engaged.
For mixing, I checked your track and you have stereo information as low as at 40Hz. And everyone will tell you to keep things mono below X Hz. Depending on who you talk, there is no rule. But if you want it sound better in your car, on people’s phones, in a club you kind of have to follow that rule.
That’s a pretty common newbie myth. Keep it mono in the sub frequencies. Which is more like a rule of thumb for newbies to not fuck it up since newbies don’t know what they’re doing and are going to fuck it up but you should know that you can definitely have stereo information on the sub region and sound proper good. In fact if you analyse professionally mixed records they do have stereo info in the under 100Hz region. Smaller stereo field in the bass is mostly for tunes that will be pressed to vinyl, but i think even vinyl can handle a bit of stereo down there, doesn’t need to be 100% mono and if it needed to be, the mastering engineer in charge of the lacquer would be able to easily fix that.
This isn’t that bad. I listened to it on my laptop speakers first and the bass/kick were completely gone. But I got my interface plugged in, and on my headphones it sounds like what I would expect house to do.
Mixing is something that as others have said, you need to practice. You have to learn how things sound on one set of headphones/speakers and get it working there. Then you need to learn how to make that same thing sound good everywhere. In this case, you really are right in line with the genre, and in a club I think this would work. If you want it to also work on small speakers/earbuds - which is not a given with house music, some artists really just make their tracks for the club and don’t care if the mix sounds good anywhere else or not - but if you want this to play well on small speakers, you just need to get a kick that has a clicky attack and either double the bass an octave up with another instrument or add some saturation. It’s easier said than done, but if you brought this track to me and asked me to mix it, those are the first two things I’d do.
This is the kind of thing a mastering engineer can help with too (full disclosure, I do paid mastering work so consider this a blatant advertisement), if you’re thinking about going that route. They can’t do as much as a mixing engineer, but they will think about how your song is going to play on all systems if that’s important to you, and they have some tricks that will help the song to sound good on as many systems as it can. You don’t want to leave everything to the mastering engineer, but they can help you get the last 5% if you’re struggling to get there yourself.
The mix sounds nice enough to me! Just make more tracks, mixing is an art you won’t master instantly. It takes years of practice. Move on, make another track and try to do your best again!
Sometimes I hear music so good, it makes me want to give up… whilst also making me want to try harder.
This is more philosophical advice than technical then:
Don’t compare yourself to others. Go at your own pace and enjoy the journey!
Also, a lot of those ‘perfect sounding’ tracks are boring as shite. Find your own voice and don’t worry about it being too perfect.
There are a lot of very simple rules (many written in this thread) that will make your mixes sound a LOT better with only a little bit more work. The extra, last, 5-10% of polish, more advanced stuff like sidechain EQing etc, proper mastering and so on.
For me personally, there’s a point beyond which I don’t care enough to spend that long on it. There’s a ton of tracks, old and new, that are rougher in the mix but hit you harder in the emotion-hole. That’s more inspiring for me.
A tiny bit of technical advice: Mixing begins at the very first stages of composing.
Choose your sounds very carefully.
ANY TIME two sounds are playing at once, listen very carefully and ask yourself if you really need both sounds to play at once. Strip away any unnecessary notes. Less is more. Let each part have it’s own space, in the timeline.
The whole process of mixing gets a whole lot easier when the sounds aren’t competing for space in the first place.
Hope it helps, and best of luck!
PS You’ve come to the right place to ask at least, great community on here, very helpful people!
very quirky and creative. A couple of dissonant places but great overall for an amateur like yourself
what’s that?
but you should know that you can definitely have stereo information on the sub region and sound proper good. In fact if you analyse professionally mixed records they do have stereo info in the under 100Hz region. Smaller stereo field in the bass is mostly for tunes that will be pressed to vinyl, but i think even vinyl can handle a bit of stereo down there, doesn’t need to be 100% mono 
and if it needed to be, the mastering engineer in charge of the lacquer would be able to easily fix that.