Caustic Song file (optional):
Greetings, everyone. This is the first post I've ever made on any forum, so I hope I'm doing it right. This is the first track I've made but it doesn't sound mixed properly. Would anyone be willing to take a look at the attached track and perhaps give me some pointers on what I most likely am doing wrong? I've watched tutorials on the subject but no matter what, it just doesn't sound right to me. Any help would be appreciated. Thanks!
Downloaded, I'll take a listen later :)
My latest track on show and tell
My Soundcloud page
Thank you, RobFarley! I appreciate your time and look forward to checking out your Soundcloud link.
I've been messing around with music and sound for a few years as a passtime, learning what I can from tutorials and practice, I guess. so keep that in mind before reading the rest lol.
I have been trying to learn to mix a lil better but when it comes to mixing you'll find that the advise and tutorials are very vague but I think there's a reason for that. there's no one template that will work with all music. It depends a lot in the genre, the vibe and even the medium or platform that the track will be played through. however, there seem to bee some basics to mixing which seem to be balancing the frequencies, so try not to overlap them, specially in the lower range.
I took a look at your project and it seems you have a few different bass instrument on top of eachother and that can cause a bit of muddyness, so balancing those freequencies can help. for example I noticed one bass instrument with a lot of low end and then another one next to it playing the same notes (I think) with a lot of low end as well. so in this case you could decrese the low on the more realistic bass and keep the tecture with the mids and highs and use the other bass as the low end, thus balancing the low frequencies better. also the instrument like the guitars had a lot of low freq. so taking some stuff out doesnt affect the sound very much specially when listened to with the rest of the instruments.
You could do the same thing with sidechaining, so sidechaning the bass-heavy kickdrum in your project to the bass instruments can help smooth out the frequencies. also automating the mixer levels can give more flexibility in parts of the song where there are less instuments playing at once.
One thing I like to dopersonally in my projects is using a lot of delay, which basically repeats the exact sound many times over, the delay in the master section of caustic has a damping knob, which can be changed to lowpas or highpass, setting it to highpass decreases the lower freq. in the delayed sound.
Again, all the stuff I've learned has been though videos and tutorial, so, everything I just said could be comepletely wrong lol and if so, I know there are poeple on here who are way more knowledgeable than me and can advise you better, I suggest watching more tutorial and keep practicing
heres a useful youtube video https://youtu.be/cHxMsawJsTc
cheers!
Thanks, HDB. I appreciate your response, greatly. I'll try rebalancing the frequencies by starting with turning off the master equalizer. Automation is another thing I haven't tackled. Sidechaining compression for the bass and kick shall be tried as well. I've never messed with the low and high pass on the delay. That could bear some interesting fruit. Thanks again for your critiques and I'm loving me some Caustic.
As far as the mix is concerned it sounds fine, sure you can tweak it but generally everything pops out fine.
One thing I did do was remove the width settings, frankly just avoid using this as it can cause nasty phasing when you're listening in mono, just use a bit of reverb to give it stereo space.
My latest track on show and tell
My Soundcloud page
Thanks for taking a peak, Mr.Farley. I think you are correct. The widening does detune quite a bit a times. I'll try mixing in mono first, then tweak as needed. I really enjoy this DAW. I've installed it on all my children's Kindles and they've been having a blast too. You make some super music, by the way. We were jamming out to it at supper last week. Thanks again!