Anyone fancie some Mixdown feedback please :)

i think u should cut some bass from snare in the intro

Nice music. Mix could use some polish.

(caveat: these are *my* methods, but certainly not the *only* methods)

The overall idea here is I’d love to hear more loudness & presence throughout. It’s not especially “dense”, and while you may be able to fix some of it on the master, I would personally go back and add saturation & eq to strategic points to help make some of it come alive.

I’d start with the lowest sub fundamental. Turn that guy up so that it hits 0dbfs at its peak, and make sure it is consistent against 0db. This is where compression comes in, if you need to squash it a bit to pull out some of the dynamics, then makeup gain to bring the leveled signal back up. It’s drum and bass after all, and the sub should be strong and present. It’s left to your artistic sensibilities as to how much of the dynamics you squeeze out, but for presence’s sake I think there is a lot of room to go here.

Now that you have that as your reference, mix in your kick and your snare. Mute everything else while gain staging these, there is time later to re-balance against other elements, but if the sub/kick/snare trinity doesn’t work, the tune just won’t hold. If you need to look at numbers, I generally aim for -3 on kick fundamental and -6 on snare fundamental, but honestly use your ears, as the analyzer is just a guide, and your artistic sense again comes into play here.

Now work in the rest. The third bass harmonic is important to get right, as this is your headphone/phone speaker/fullness frequency. If looking at the analyzer, I kind of aim for a ratio of 1:3:2 between the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd harmonics, so that the sub is full, the next harmonic drops off sharply (to reduce competition of moving that subwoofer cone) and then back up on the third, where midrange speakers will start to pick up.

Now take a good hard listen to your top end. Compare with other tunes. Your snare could use more top end white-noise, and the hats, while smooth, are really clamped down, freq wise. Again, looking at the analyzer, try and make a level yet gentle slope from 1k+. I like to make mine slope to about -33dbfs avg, with a sharp dropoff around 15k or so, as these freqs are really useless, but do consume sonic energy.

I guess this turned into a mini mix lesson, but those are the steps I go through to get a basic sound, then tweak tweak tweak, making sure to do no harm.

Also, if you’ve not watched this video, I would strongly recommend you do so:

Saturation, using judiciously along the way, is the key to real density. To use a dumb sandwich analogy: it doesn’t matter how tall your bread is (peaks), what matters is the meat inside (RMS).

Post revisions when you have them. Keep at it!

Hi,

I’m loving the track Greeno, reminds me a lot of Teebee, the bass-line and the chilled but moody vibes really rock! Love it 😀

Great explanation of the mixdown process too Strike, thanks for the video as well 🙂

The comparison between before and after is amazing dude! love the track, big up 😀