My Mixes Suck

You guys are cracking me up. Mastering is one of my issues. So far, I plan to use my tracks for publishing demos, but.. it might become a record at some point.So, the conflict is if I'm making a demo, I pump up the volume a bit and do my own faux mastering, so t comes close to levels industry people are used to. I should probably run mixes without compression right after I run the hot demo mix, just in case I get them properly mastered, but hearing it loud and compressed is addictive, even though intellectually I know it's not the way to get the best results in the long run.

jdc, I never thought of turning everything else up, love that. Unfortunately that's not so easy when lots of tracks are automated.

OK, here's the "too much bass" mix. The tracking was done quite a while back, and I can get a much cleaner production now, but for my purposes at this time, I just want to get the best version of what I have, and run with it, for now anyway.

Almost forgot to say it's our Real Gear pal Henge on the kick ass fat bass!

https%3A//soundcloud.com/martin-john-butler/the-kindness-of-strangers-2-anton-ocean-way-off

Hahaha, i just listened to one of my triphop electro mixes in the DAW seconds before, when i started the soundcloud link. LOUD. I mean, your mix. :-)
I see the addictive use of faux mastering, lol. Btw., i mix my stuff thru compression on mixbus as well, pseudo-mastering-wise...and came back to less compression in the long term, because i just can't get it right if i mix thru too much of it. (surprise, surprise...)
I actually do not have the impression the bass is too loud in your mix. A guitar player's thing? And yes - it has the vibe. Nicely played by henge. Really good.

OK, i understand. I am actually not much into mixing to a reference mix. It never worked out *for me* really, particularly not for my own music. Most of the time i am ok with hearing a kind of mix when i listened to the raw tracks and figure out what kind of song i want it to be, i mean, what kind of balance it needs to sound good. Which sometimes is not what i had in mind when recording. Certainly it's another thing if you are after a very defined genre of music with strong competitors products. I totally understand what you are after if you put up these reference mixes. And probably these do work out so well also, because they have a strong bass.
It's hard to mix in direct comparison to a finished and mastered track of a major production that is squeezed *for me*. Most of the time i try to get the mix right with a lower compression level to hear the nuances of the mix volumes balance, which is obviously easier with little compression due to the nature of compression itself, and push it up afterwards if this is really required. Well, it's not, most of the time, but again, i don't have to compete with major label productions in a genre like americana anyway...
I mean, if you have quite a pound of compression in a bus while mixing, it's harder to hear the balance of what is fed into it. You move the fader quite a bit and the mix gets more complex due to the dynamics. Sometimes, if you change compression or even take it away, it could be that the mix does not work out at all. If done the other way round, mixing into a non-compressed bus, getting a fairly well balanced mix and then push it up with some tasty musical compression, i find it much easier to maintain a mix.
Don't know if i could make clear what i mean.
Since you are not completely happy with your mixes right now (aka thread title), with alot of splendid hardware, which you have, good monitoring, good sources, perhaps you are at the point where you might tweak mixing workflow to figure out what works for you to get really there where you want to be with your mixes.
Please(!) take this as a discussion that is meant totally constructive from my side. IMO your mixes do not suck, i get the picture that they are just not, what you want them to sound like and i try to figure out, what you could try to achieve what you want. So i do some loud thinking...

You couldn't be more right lpedrum. I use Superior Drummer, and this is the NY vol I kit. At an earlier stage, cowboycoalminer graciously changed the drums for me, and it was much better, but there were some parts like cymbal crashes that weren't right, and I couldn't ask him to spend any more of his valuable time reprograming it, so I went back to my original drum sound.

For instance, on the second verse, the drums should ease off a bit, not keep hitting hard. I just don't have the patience to program drums with that much finesse, so I have to get better and faster at it, and refuse to accept what my ears say isn't right, and the drums really aren't right here, but will have to do for now. Some of the Slate drums sound pretty good, but i don't have them. I can also switch drums to any of Apples kits, but they weren't a good fit either.

I've been too lazy about learning SD, I'm sure they have ways of humanizing their sounds, but if the snare sample is hit too hard, I've found it difficult to get it to soften up a little..

and I love the bass too bro !!

Appreciate the ideas lpedrum, and I suspect that you're right, it would be much easier to mix this if a drummer was following the dynamics naturally. Hopefully the next set of recordings will be different in that sense.

Maybe I should change the title of the thread to "My Drummer Sucks", which might actually be closer to the truth.

I find the same thing lpedrum. I`m producing 2 bands right now, one with live drums and the other with samples and the live drums a way easier and more pleasurable to work with.